ghostes. He reckon he gwine be a heap mo' comfortable in he mind sence
he know dey ain't no ghosts, an' he reckon he ain' gwine be skeered of
nuffin' never no more. He ain't gwine min' de dark, an' he ain't gwine
min' de rain-doves whut go, "Ooo-_oo_-o-o-o!" an' he ain' gwine min' de
owls whut go, "Who-_who_-o-o-o!" an' he ain' gwine min' de wind whut go,
"You-_you_-o-o-o!" nor nuffin, nohow. He gwine be brave as a lion, sence
he know fo' sure dey ain' no ghosts. So prisintly he ma say:
"Well, time fo' a li'l black boy whut he name is Mose to be gwine up de
ladder to de loft to bed."
An' li'l black Mose he 'low he gwine wait a bit. He 'low he gwine jes
wait a li'l bit. He 'low he gwine be no trouble _at_ all ef he jes been
let wait twell he ma she gwine up de ladder to de loft to bed, too. So
he ma she say:
"Git erlong wid yo'! Whut you skeered ob whin dey ain't no ghosts?"
An' li'l black Mose he scrooge, an' he twist, an' he pucker up he mouf,
an' he rub he eyes, an' prisintly he say right low:
"I ain't skeered ob ghosts whut am, 'ca'se dey ain't no ghosts."
"Den what am yo' skeered ob?" ask he ma.
"Nuffin'," say de li'l black boy whut he name is Mose; "but I jes feel
kinder oneasy 'bout de ghosts whut ain't."
Jes lak white folks! Jes lak white folks!
FOOTNOTE:
[9] Copyright, 1913, by the Century Company. Reprinted by special
permission of the author.
[Illustration]
X.--The Night Operator[10]
_By Frank L. Packard_
TODDLES, in the beginning, wasn't exactly a railroad man--for several
reasons. First he wasn't a man at all; second, he wasn't, strictly
speaking, on the company's pay roll; third, which is apparently
irrelevant, everybody said he was a bad one; and fourth--because Hawkeye
nicknamed him Toddles.
Toddles had another name--Christopher Hyslop Hoogan--but Big Cloud never
lay awake at nights losing any sleep over that. On the first run that
Christopher Hyslop Hoogan ever made, Hawkeye looked him over for a
minute, said, "Toddles," shortlike--and, shortlike, that settled the
matter so far as the Hill Division was concerned. His name was Toddles.
Piecemeal, Toddles wouldn't convey anything to you to speak of. You'd
have to see Toddles coming down the aisle of a car to get him at
all--and then the chances are you'd turn around after he'd gone by and
stare at him, and it would be even money that you'd call him back and
fish for a dime to buy something by way of excuse. Toddles got a good
deal of business that way. Toddles had a uniform and a regular run all
right, but he wasn't what he passionately longed to be--a legitimate,
dyed-in-the-wool railroader. His pay check, plus commissions, came from
the News Company down East that had the railroad concession. Toddles was
a newsboy. In his blue uniform and silver buttons, Toddles used to stack
up about the height of the back of the car seats as he hawked his wares
along the aisles; and the only thing that was big about him was his
head, which looked as though it had got a whopping big lead on his
body--and didn't intend to let the body cut the lead down any. This
meant a big cap, and, as Toddles used to tilt the vizor forward, the tip
of his nose, bar his mouth which was generous, was about all one got of
his face. Cap, buttons, magazines and peanuts, that was Toddles--all
except his voice. Toddles had a voice that would make you jump if you
were nervous the minute he opened the car door, and if you weren't
nervous you would be before he had reached the other end of the
aisle--it began low down somewhere on high G and went through you shrill
as an east wind, and ended like the shriek of a brake-shoe with
everything the Westinghouse equipment had to offer cutting loose on a
quick stop.
Hawkeye? That was what Toddles called his beady-eyed conductor in
retaliation. Hawkeye used to nag Toddles every chance he got, and, being
Toddles' conductor, Hawkeye got a good many chances. In a word, Hawkeye,
carrying the punch on the local passenger, that happened to be the run
Toddles was given when the News Company sent him out from the East, used
to think he got a good deal of fun out of Toddles--only his idea of fun
and Toddles' idea of fun were as divergent as the poles, that was all.
Toddles, however, wasn't anybody's fool, not by several degrees--not
even Hawkeye's. Toddles hated Hawkeye like poison; and his hate, apart
from daily annoyances, was deep-seated. It was Hawkeye who had dubbed
him "Toddles." And Toddles repudiated the name with his heart, his
soul--and his fists.
Toddles wasn't anybody's fool, whatever the division thought, and he was
right down to the basic root of things from the start. Coupled with the
stunted growth that nature in a miserly mood had doled out to him, none
knew better than himself that the name of "Toddles," keeping that nature
stuff patently before everybody's eyes, damned him in his aspirations
for a bona fide railroad career. Other boys got a job and got their feet
on the ladder as call-boys, or in the roundhouse; Toddles got--a grin.
Toddles pestered everybody for a job. He pestered Carleton, the super.
He pestered Tommy Regan, the master mechanic. Every time that he saw
anybody in authority Toddles spoke up for a job, he was in deadly
earnest--and got a grin. Toddles with a basket of unripe fruit and stale
chocolates and his "best-seller" voice was one thing; but Toddles as
anything else was just--Toddles.
Toddles repudiated the name, and did it forcefully. Not that he couldn't
take his share of a bit of guying, but because he felt that he was face
to face with a vital factor in the career he longed for--so he fought.
And if nature had been niggardly in one respect, she had been generous
in others; Toddles, for all his size, possessed the heart of a lion and
the strength of a young ox, and he used both, with black and bloody
effect, on the eyes and noses of the call-boys and younger element who
called him Toddles. He fought it all along the line--at the drop of the
hat--at a whisper of "Toddles." There wasn't a day went by that Toddles
wasn't in a row; and the women, the mothers of the defeated warriors
whose eyes were puffed and whose noses trickled crimson, denounced him
in virulent language over their washtubs and the back fences of Big
Cloud. You see, they didn't understand him, so they called him a "bad
one," and, being from the East and not one of themselves, "a New York
gutter snipe."
But, for all that, the name stuck. Up and down through the Rockies it
was--Toddles. Toddles, with the idea of getting a lay-over on a siding,
even went to the extent of signing himself in full--Christopher Hyslop
Hoogan--every time his signature was in order; but the official
documents in which he was concerned, being of a private nature between
himself and the News Company, did not, in the very nature of things,
have much effect on the Hill Division. Certainly the big fellows never
knew he had any name but Toddles--and cared less. But they knew him as
Toddles, all right! All of them did, every last one of them! Toddles was
everlastingly and eternally bothering them for a job. Any kind of a job,
no matter what, just so it was real railroading, and so a fellow could
line up with everybody else when the pay car came along, and look
forward to being something some day.
Toddles, with time, of course, grew older, up to about seventeen or so,
but he didn't grow any bigger--not enough to make it noticeable! Even
Toddles' voice wouldn't break--it was his young heart that did all the
breaking there was done. Not that he ever showed it. No one ever saw a
tear in the boy's eyes. It was clenched fists for Toddles, clenched
fists and passionate attack. And therein, while Toddles had grasped the
basic truth that his nickname militated against his ambitions, he erred
in another direction that was equally fundamental, if not more so.
And here, it was Bob Donkin, the night dispatcher, as white a man as his
record after years of train-handling was white, a railroad man from the
ground up if there ever was one, and one of the best, who set
Toddles--but we'll come to that presently. We've got our "clearance"
now, and we're off with "rights" through.
No. 83, Hawkeye's train--and Toddles'--scheduled Big Cloud on the
eastbound run at 9.05; and, on the night the story opens, they were
about an hour away from the little mountain town that was the divisional
point, as Toddles, his basket of edibles in the crook of his arm, halted
in the forward end of the second-class smoker to examine again the
fistful of change that he dug out of his pants pocket with his free
hand.
Toddles was in an unusually bad humor, and he scowled. With exceeding
deftness he separated one of the coins from the others, using his
fingers like the teeth of a rake, and dropped the rest back jingling
into his pocket. The coin that remained he put into his mouth, and bit
on it--hard. His scowl deepened. Somebody had presented Toddles with a
lead quarter.
It wasn't so much the quarter, though Toddles' salary wasn't so big as
some people's who would have felt worse over it, it was his _amour
propre_ that was touched--deeply. It wasn't often that any one could put
so bald a thing as lead money across on Toddles. Toddles' mind harked
back along the aisles of the cars behind him. He had only made two sales
that round, and he had changed a quarter each time--for the pretty girl
with the big picture hat, who had giggled at him when she bought a
package of chewing gum; and the man with the three-carat diamond tie-pin
in the parlor car, a little more than on the edge of inebriety, who had
got on at the last stop, and who had bought a cigar from him.
Toddles thought it over for a bit; decided he wouldn't have a fuss with
a girl anyway, balked at a parlor car fracas with a drunk, dropped the
coin back into his pocket, and went on into the combination baggage and
express car. Here, just inside the door, was Toddles', or, rather, the
News Company's chest. Toddles lifted the lid; and then his eyes shifted
slowly and traveled up the car. Things were certainly going badly with
Toddles that night.
There were four men in the car: Bob Donkin, coming back from a holiday
trip somewhere up the line; MacNicoll, the baggage-master; Nulty, the
express messenger--and Hawkeye. Toddles' inventory of the contents of
the chest had been hurried--but intimate. A small bunch of six bananas
was gone, and Hawkeye was munching them unconcernedly. It wasn't the
first time the big, hulking, six-foot conductor had pilfered the boy's
chest, not by many--and never paid for the pilfering. That was Hawkeye's
idea of a joke.
Hawkeye was talking to Nulty, elaborately simulating ignorance of
Toddles' presence--and he was talking about Toddles.
"Sure," said Hawkeye, his mouth full of banana, "he'll be a great
railroad man some day! He's the stuff they're made of! You can see it
sticking out all over him! He's only selling peanuts now till he grows
up and----"
Toddles put down his basket and planted himself before the conductor.
"You pay for those bananas," said Toddles in a low voice--which was
high.
"When'll he grow up?" continued Hawkeye, peeling more fruit. "I don't
know--you've got me. The first time I saw him two years ago, I'm hanged
if he wasn't bigger than he is now--guess he grows backwards. Have a
banana?" He offered one to Nulty, who refused it.
"You pay for those bananas, you big stiff!" squealed Toddles
belligerently.
Hawkeye turned his head slowly and turned his little beady, black eyes
on Toddles, then he turned with a wink to the others, and for the first
time in two years offered payment. He fished into his pocket and handed
Toddles a twenty-dollar bill--there always was a mean streak in Hawkeye,
more or less of a bully, none too well liked, and whose name on the pay
roll, by the way, was Reynolds.
"Take fifteen cents out of that," he said, with no idea that the boy
could change the bill.
For a moment Toddles glared at the yellow-back, then a thrill of unholy
glee came to Toddles. He could just about make it, business all around
had been pretty good that day, particularly on the run west in the
morning.
Hawkeye went on with the exposition of his idea of humor at Toddles'
expense; and Toddles went back to his chest and his reserve funds.
Toddles counted out eighteen dollars in bills, made a neat pile of four
quarters--the lead one on the bottom--another neat pile of the odd
change, and returned to Hawkeye. The lead quarter wouldn't go very far
toward liquidating Hawkeye's long-standing indebtedness--but it would
help some.
Queer, isn't it--the way things happen? Think of a man's whole life,
aspirations, hopes, ambitions, everything, pivoting on--a lead quarter!
But then they say that opportunity knocks once at the door of every man;
and, if that be true, let it be remarked in passing that Toddles wasn't
deaf!
Hawkeye, making Toddles a target for a parting gibe, took up his lantern
and started through the train to pick up the fates from the last stop.
In due course he halted before the inebriated one with the glittering
tie-pin in the smoking compartment of the parlor car.
"Ticket, please," said Hawkeye.
"Too busy to buysh ticket," the man informed him, with heavy confidence.
"Whash fare Loon Dam to Big Cloud?"
"One-fifty," said Hawkeye curtly.
The man produced a roll of bills, and from the roll extracted a
two-dollar note.
Hawkeye handed him back two quarters, and started to punch a cash-fare
slip. He looked up to find the man holding out one of the quarters
insistently, if somewhat unsteadily.
"What's the matter?" demanded Hawkeye brusquely.
"Bad," said the man.
A drummer grinned; and an elderly gentleman, from his magazine, looked
up inquiringly over his spectacles.
"Bad!" Hawkeye brought his elbow sharply around to focus his lamp on the
coin; then he leaned over and rang it on the window sill--only it
wouldn't ring. It was indubitably bad. Hawkeye, however, was dealing
with a drunk--and Hawkeye always did have a mean streak in him.
"It's perfectly good," he asserted gruffly.
The man rolled an eye at the conductor that mingled a sudden shrewdness
and anger, and appealed to his fellow travelers. The verdict was against
Hawkeye, and Hawkeye ungraciously pocketed the lead piece and handed
over another quarter.
"Shay," observed the inebriated one insolently, "shay, conductor, I
don't like you. You thought I was--hic!--s'drunk I wouldn't know--eh?
Thash where you fooled yerself!"
"What do you mean?" Hawkeye bridled virtuously for the benefit of the
drummer and the old gentleman with the spectacles.
And then the other began to laugh immoderately.
"Same ol' quarter," said he. "Same--hic!--ol' quarter back again. Great
system--peanut boy--conductor--hic! Pass it off on one--other passes it
off on some one else. Just passed it off on--hic!--peanut boy for a
joke. Goin' to give him a dollar when he comes back."
"Oh, you did, did you!" snapped Hawkeye ominously. "And you mean to
insinuate that I deliberately tried to----"
"Sure!" declared the man heartily.
"You're a liar!" announced Hawkeye, spluttering mad. "And what's more,
since it came from you, you'll take it back!" He dug into his pocket for
the ubiquitous lead piece.
"Not--hic!--on your life!" said the man earnestly. "You hang on to it,
old top. I didn't pass it off on _you_."
"Haw!" exploded the drummer suddenly. "Haw--haw, haw!"
And the elderly gentleman smiled.
Hawkeye's face went red, and then purple.
"Go 'way!" said the man petulantly. "I don't like you. Go 'way! Go an'
tell peanuts I--hic!--got a dollar for him."
And Hawkeye went--but Toddles never got the dollar. Hawkeye went out of
the smoking compartment of the parlor car with the lead quarter in his
pocket--because he couldn't do anything else--which didn't soothe his
feelings any--and he went out mad enough to bite himself. The drummer's
guffaw followed him, and he thought he even caught a chuckle from the
elderly party with the magazine and spectacles.
Hawkeye was mad; and he was quite well aware, painfully well aware that
he had looked like a fool, which is about one of the meanest feelings
there is to feel; and, as he made his way forward through the train, he
grew madder still. That change was the change from his twenty-dollar
bill. He had not needed to be told that the lead quarter had come from
Toddles. The only question at all in doubt was whether or not Toddles
had put the counterfeit coin over on him knowingly and with malice
aforethought. Hawkeye, however, had an intuition deep down inside of him
that there wasn't any doubt even about that, and as he opened the door
of the baggage car his intuition was vindicated. There was a grin on the
faces of Nulty, MacNicoll and Bob Donkin that disappeared with
suspicious celerity at sight of him as he came through the door.
There was no hesitation then on Hawkeye's part. Toddles, equipped for
another excursion through the train with a stack of magazines and books
that almost hid him, received a sudden and vicious clout on the side of
the ear.
"You'd try your tricks on me, would you?" Hawkeye snarled. "Lead
quarters--eh?" Another clout. "I'll teach you, you blasted little runt!"
And with the clouts, the stack of carefully balanced periodicals went
flying over the floor; and with the clouts, the nagging, and the
hectoring, and the bullying, that had rankled for close on two years in
Toddles' turbulent soul, rose in a sudden all-possessing sweep of fury.
Toddles was a fighter--with the heart of a fighter. And Toddles' cause
was just. He couldn't reach the conductor's face--so he went for
Hawkeye's legs. And the screams of rage from his high-pitched voice, as
he shot himself forward, sounded like a cageful of Australian cockatoos
on the rampage.
Toddles was small, pitifully small for his age; but he wasn't an infant
in arms--not for a minute. And in action Toddles was as near to a wild
cat as anything else that comes handy by way of illustration. Two legs
and one arm he twined and twisted around Hawkeye's legs; and the other
arm, with a hard and knotty fist on the end of it, caught the conductor
a wicked jab in the region of the bottom button of the vest. The brass
button peeled the skin off Toddles' knuckles, but the jab doubled the
conductor forward, and coincident with Hawkeye's winded grunt, the
lantern in his hand sailed ceilingwards, crashed into the center lamps
in the roof of the car, and down in a shower of tinkling glass, dripping
oil and burning wicks, came the wreckage to the floor.
There was a yell from Nulty; but Toddles hung on like grim death.
Hawkeye was bawling fluent profanity and seeing red. Toddles heard one
and sensed the other--and he clung grimly on. He was all doubled up
around Hawkeye's knees, and in that position Hawkeye couldn't get at him
very well; and, besides, Toddles had his own plan of battle. He was
waiting for an extra heavy lurch of the car.
It came. Toddles' muscles strained legs and arms and back in concert,
and for an instant across the car they tottered, Hawkeye staggering in a
desperate attempt to maintain his equilibrium--and then down--speaking
generally, on a heterogeneous pile of express parcels; concretely, with
an eloquent squnch, on a crate of eggs, thirty dozen of them, at forty
cents a dozen.
Toddles, over his rage, experienced a sickening sense of disaster, but
still he clung; he didn't dare let go. Hawkeye's fists, both in an
effort to recover himself and in an endeavor to reach Toddles, were
going like a windmill; and Hawkeye's threats were something terrifying
to listen to. And now they rolled over, and Toddles was underneath; and
then they rolled over again; and then a hand locked on Toddles' collar,
and he was yanked, terrier-fashion, to his feet.
His face white and determined, his fists doubled, Toddles waited for
Hawkeye to get up--the word "run" wasn't in Toddles' vocabulary. He
hadn't long to wait.
Hawkeye lunged up, draped in the broken crate--a sight. The road always
prided itself on the natty uniforms of its train crews, but Hawkeye
wasn't dressed in uniform then--mostly egg yolks. He made a dash for
Toddles, but he never reached the boy. Bob Donkin was between them.
"Cut it out!" said Donkin coldly, as he pushed Toddles behind him. "You
asked for it, Reynolds, and you got it. Now cut it out!"
And Hawkeye "cut it out." It was pretty generally understood that Bob
Donkin never talked much for show, and Bob Donkin was bigger than
Toddles, a whole lot bigger, as big as Hawkeye himself. Hawkeye "cut it
out."
Funny, the egg part of it? Well, perhaps. But the fire wasn't. True,
they got it out with the help of the hand extinguishers before it did
any serious damage, for Nulty had gone at it on the jump; but while it
lasted the burning oil on the car floor looked dangerous. Anyway, it was
bad enough so that they couldn't hide it when they got into Big
Cloud--and Hawkeye and Toddles went on the carpet for it the next
morning in the super's office.
Carleton, "Royal" Carleton, reached for a match, and, to keep his lips
straight, clamped them firmly on the amber mouthpiece of his brier, and
stumpy, big-paunched Tommy Regan, the master mechanic, who was sitting
in a chair by the window, reached hurriedly into his back pocket for his
chewing and looked out of the window to hide a grin, as the two came in
and ranged themselves in front of the super's desk--Hawkeye, six feet
and a hundred and ninety pounds, with Toddles trailing him, mostly cap
and buttons and no weight at all.
Carleton didn't ask many questions--he'd asked them before--of Bob
Donkin--and the dispatcher hadn't gone out of his way to invest the
conductor with any glorified halo. Carleton, always a strict
disciplinarian, said what he had to say and said it quietly; but he
meant to let the conductor have the worst of it, and he did--in a way
that was all Carleton's own. Two years' picking on a youngster didn't
appeal to Carleton, no matter who the youngster was. Before he was half
through he had the big conductor squirming. Hawkeye was looking for
something else--besides a galling and matter-of-fact impartiality that
accepted himself and Toddles as being on exactly the same plane and
level.
"There's a case of eggs," said Carleton at the end. "You can divide up
the damage between you. And I'm going to change your runs, unless you've
got some good reason to give me why I shouldn't?"
He waited for an answer.
Hawkeye, towering, sullen, his eyes resting bitterly on Regan, having
caught the master mechanic's grin, said nothing; Toddles, whose head
barely showed over the top of Carleton's desk, and the whole of him
sizing up about big enough to go into the conductor's pocket, was
equally silent--Toddles was thinking of something else.
"Very good," said Carleton suavely, as he surveyed the ridiculous
incongruity before him. "I'll change your runs, then. I can't have you
two _men_ brawling and prize-fighting every trip."
There was a sudden sound from the window, as though Regan had got some
of his blackstrap juice down the wrong way.
Hawkeye's face went black as thunder.
Carleton's face was like a sphinx.
"That'll do, then," he said. "You can go, both of you."
Hawkeye stamped out of the room and down the stairs. But Toddles stayed.
"Please, Mr. Carleton, won't you give me a job on----" Toddles stopped.
So had Regan's chuckle. Toddles, the irrepressible, was at it again--and
Toddles after a job, any kind of a job, was something that Regan's
experience had taught him to fly from without standing on the order of
his flight. Regan hurried from the room.
Toddles watched him go--kind of speculatively, kind of reproachfully.
Then he turned to Carleton.
"Please give me a job, Mr. Carleton," he pleaded. "Give me a job, won't
you?"
It was only yesterday on the platform that Toddles had waylaid the super
with the same demand--and about every day before that as far back as
Carleton could remember. It was hopelessly chronic. Anything convincing
or appealing about it had gone long ago--Toddles said it parrot-fashion
now. Carleton took refuge in severity.
"See here, young man," he said grimly, "you were brought into this
office for a reprimand and not to apply for a job! You can thank your
stars and Bob Donkin you haven't lost the one you've got. Now, get out!"
"I'd make good if you gave me one," said Toddles earnestly. "Honest, I
would, Mr. Carleton."
"Get out!" said the super, not altogether unkindly. "I'm busy."