caution silence, and with the other hand patted McCann's shoulder
confidentially. "It's the 1601!" he whispered--and jumped for the
door--out into the storm.
"For the love av Mike!" gasped McCann, staggering to his feet as the
lamp flared up and out with the draft. "Now, fwhat the divil--from
this, an' the misfortunate way he picks up forty-foive, mabbe, mabbe I
was wrong, an' mabbe ut's queer after all, he is, an'----" McCann was
still muttering to himself as he stumbled to the door.
There was no sign of Owsley--only a string of boxes and flats, backed
down, and rattling and bumping to a halt on the temporary track a
hundred yards away--then the joggling light of a trainman running
through the murk and, evidently, hopping the engine pilot, for the
light disappeared suddenly and McCann heard the locomotive moving off
again.
McCann couldn't see the main line, or the little station they had
erected there since the work began for the purpose of operating the
construction trains, but he knew well enough what was going on. Off
the main line, in lieu of a turntable and to facilitate matters
generally, they had built a Y into the construction camp; and the work
train, in from the East, had dropped its caboose on the main line
between the arms of the Y, gone ahead, backed the flats and boxes down
the west-end arm of the Y into the camp, left them there in front of
him, and the engine, shooting off on the main line again, via the
east-end arm of the Y, would be heading east, and had only to back up
the main line and couple on the caboose for the return trip to Big
Cloud--there were no empties to go back, he knew.
It was raining in torrents, pitilessly, and, over the gusts of wind,
the thunder went racketing through the mountains like the discharge of
heavy guns. McCann swore with sincerity as he gazed from the doorway,
didn't like the look of it, and was minded to let Owsley go to the
devil; but, instead, after getting into rubber boots, a rubber coat,
and lighting a lantern, he put his head down to butt the storm, goat
fashion, and started out.
"Me conscience 'ud not be clear av anything happened the man," communed
McCann, as he battered and sloshed his way along. "'Tis wan hell av a
night!"
McCann lost some time. He could have made a short cut over to the main
line and the station; but, instead, thinking Owsley might have run up
the track beside the camp toward the front-end of the construction
train and the engine, he kept along past the string of cars. There was
no Owsley; and the only result he obtained from shouting at the top of
his lungs was to have the wind slap his voice back in his teeth.
McCann headed then for the station. He took the west-end arm of the Y,
that being the nearer to his destination. Halfway across, he heard the
engine backing up on the main line, and, a moment later, saw her
headlight and the red tail lights of the caboose as she coupled on.
Of course, it was against the rules--but rules are broken sometimes,
aren't they? It was a wicked night, and the station, diminutive and
makeshift as it was, looked mighty hospitable and inviting by
comparison. The engine crew, Matt Duggan and Greene, his fireman,
thought it sized up better while they were waiting for orders than the
cab of the 1601 did, and they didn't see why the train crew,
MacGonigle, the conductor, and his two brakemen, should have any the
better of it--so they left their engine and crowded into the station,
too.
There wasn't much room left for McCann when he came in like an animated
shower bath. He heard Merle, the young operator--they'd probably been
guying him--snap at MacGonigle:
"I ain't got any orders for you yet, but you'd better get into the
clear on the Y--the Limited, east, is due in four minutes."
"Say!" panted McCann. "Say----" and that was as far as he got. Matt
Duggan, making a wild dash for the door, knocked the rest of his breath
out of him.
And after Duggan, in a mad and concerted rush, sweeping McCann along
with it, the others burst through the door and out on the platform, as,
volleying through the storm, came suddenly the quick, staccato bark of
engine exhaust.
For a moment, huddled there, trying to get the rights of it, no one
spoke--then it came in a yell from Matt Duggan.
"She's _gone_!" he screamed--and gulped for his breath. "She's gone!"
McCann looked, and blinked, and shook the rain out of his face. Two
hundred yards east down the track, and disappearing fast, were the
twinkling red tail lights of the caboose.
"By the tokens av all the saints," stammered McCann.
"Ut's--ut's----" He grabbed at Matt Duggan. "Fwhat engine is ut?"
It was MacGonigle who answered, as they crowded back inside again for
shelter--and answered quick, getting McCann's dropped jaw.
"The 1601. What's wrong with you, McCann?"
"Holy Mither!" stuttered McCann miserably. "That settles ut! Ut's
Owsley! 'Twas the whistle, d'ye moind--the whistle!"
Merle, young and hysterical, was up in the air.
"The Limited! The Limited!" he burst out, white-faced. "There ain't
three minutes between them! She's coming now!"
MacGonigle, grizzled old veteran, cool in any emergency, whirled on the
younger man.
"Then stop her!" he drawled. "Don't make a fool of yourself! Show
your red and hold her here until you get Big Cloud on the wire--they're
both running the _same_ way, aren't they, you blamed idiot!
Everything's out of the road far enough east of here on account of the
Limited to give 'em time at headquarters to take care of things. Let
'em have it at Big Cloud."
And Big Cloud got it. Spence, the despatcher, on the early night
trick, got it--and Carleton and Regan, at their homes, got it in a
hurried call from Spence over their private keys, that brought them
running to headquarters.
"I've cleared the line," said Spence. "The Limited is holding at Elk
River till Brook's Cut reports Owsley through--then she's to trail
along."
Carleton nodded, and took a chair beside the despatcher's table.
Regan, as ever with him in times of stress, tugged at his mustache, and
paced up and down the room.
He stepped once in front of Carleton and laughed shortly--and there was
more in his words, a whole lot more, than he realized then.
"The Lord knows where he'll stop now with the bit in his teeth, but
suppose he'd been heading the other way _into_ the Limited--h'm!
Head-on--instead of just tying up all the blamed traffic between here
and the Elk--what? We can thank God for that!"
Carleton didn't answer, except by another nod. He was listening to
Spence at the key, asking Brook's Cut why they didn't report Owsley
through.
The rain rattled at the window panes, and the sashes shook under the
gusts of wind; out in the yards below the switch lights showed blurred
and indistinct. Regan paced the room more and more impatiently.
Carleton's face began to go hard. Spence hung tensely over the table,
his fingers on the key, waiting for the sounder to break, waiting for
the Brook's Cut call.
It was only seven miles from Elk River, where the stalled passengers of
the Limited--will you remember this?--grumbled and complained, pettish
in their discontent at the delay, only seven miles from there to
Brook's Cut, the first station east--only seven miles, but the minutes
passed, and still Brook's Cut answered: "No." And Carleton's face grew
harder still, and Regan swore deep down under his breath from a full
heart, and Spence grew white and rigid in his chair. And so they
waited there, waited with the sense of disaster growing cold upon
them--waited--but Brook's Cut never reported Owsley "in" or "out" that
night.
Owsley? Who knows what was in the poor, warped brain that night? He
had heard her call to him, and they had brought him back the 1601, and
she was standing there, alone, deserted--and she had called to him.
Who knows what was in his mind, as, together, he and the 1601 went
tearing through that black, storm-rent night, when the rivers, and the
creeks, and the sluices were running full, and the Elk River, that
paralleled the right of way for a mile or two to the crossing, was a
raging torrent? Who knows if he ever heard the thundering crash with
which the Elk River bridge went out? Who knows, as he swung the curve
that opened the bridge approach, without time for any man, Owsley or
another, to have stopped, if the headlight playing on the surge of
maddened waters meant anything to him? Who knows? That was where they
found them, beneath the waters, Owsley and the 1601--and Owsley was
smiling, his hand tight-gripped upon the throttle that he loved.
"I dunno," says Regan, when he speaks of Owsley, "if the mountains out
here have anything to do with making a man think harder. I
dunno--sometimes I think they do. You get to figuring that the Grand
Master mabbe goes a long way back, years and years, to work things
out--if it hadn't been for Owsley the Limited would have gone into the
Elk that night with every soul on board. Owsley? That's the way he
wanted to go out, wasn't it?--with the 1601. Mabbe the Grand Master
thought of him, too."
III
THE APOTHEOSIS OF SAMMY DURGAN
The only point the Hill Division, from Carleton, the super, to the last
car tink, would admit it was at all hazy on as far as Sammy Durgan was
concerned, was why in the everlasting name of everything the man stuck
to railroading. When the Hill Division got up against that point it
was floored and took the count.
Sammy Durgan wore the belt. He held a record never equalled before or
since. Tommy Regan, the master mechanic, who had a warped gift for
metaphor, said the man was as migratory on jobs as a flock of crows in
a poor year for corn, only a blamed sight harder to get rid of.
As far back as anybody could remember they remembered Sammy Durgan.
Somewhere on the division you were bound to bump up against him--but
rarely twice in the same place. There wasn't any one in authority,
even so mild an authority as a section boss, who hadn't fired Sammy
Durgan so often that it had grown on them like a habit. Not that it
made much difference, however; for, ejected from the roundhouse, Sammy
Durgan's name would be found decorating the pay roll next month in the
capacity of baggage master, possibly, at some obscure spot up the line;
and here, for example, a slight mix-up of checks in the baggage of a
tourist family, that divided the family against itself and its baggage
as far as the East is from the West--and Sammy Durgan moved on again.
What the Hill Division said about him would have been complimentary if
it hadn't been for the grin; they said he was an _all-round_ railroad
man. Shops, roundhouse, train crews, station work and construction
gangs, Sammy Durgan knew them all; and they knew Sammy Durgan.
Eternally and everlastingly in trouble--that was Sammy Durgan.
Nothing much else the matter with him--just trouble. Brains all right;
only, as far as the Hill Division could make out, the last thing Sammy
Durgan ever thought of doing was to give his brains a little exercise
to keep them in condition. But, if appalling in his irresponsibility,
Sammy Durgan nevertheless had a saving grace--no cork ever bobbed more
buoyantly on troubled waters than Sammy Durgan did on his sea of
adversity. Sammy Durgan always came up smiling. He had a perennial
sort of cheerfulness on his leathery face that infected his guileless
blue eyes, while a mop of fiery red hair like a flaming halo kind of
guaranteed the effect to be genuine. One half of you felt like kicking
the man violently, and the other half was obsessed with an insane
desire to hobnob with him just as violently. Sammy Durgan, to say the
least of it, was a contradictory proposition. He had an ambition--he
wanted a steady job.
He mentioned the matter to Regan one day immediately following that
period in his career when, doing odd jobs over at the station, he had,
in filling up the fire buckets upstairs, inadvertently left the tap
running. The sink being small and the flooring none too good, a
cherished collection of Regan's blue-prints in the room below were
reduced to a woebegone mass of sticky pulp. Sammy Durgan mentioned his
ambition as a sort of corollary, as it were, to the bitter and concise
remarks in which the fat little master mechanic had just couched Sammy
Durgan's ubiquitous discharge.
Regan didn't stop breathing--he had dealt with Sammy Durgan before.
Regan smiled as though it hurt him.
"A _steady_ job, is it?" said Regan softly. "I've been thinking so
hard daytimes trying to place you in a railroad job and still keep
railroading safe out in this part of the world that I've got to
dreaming about it at nights. Last night I dreamt I was in a foundry
and there was an enormous vat of red, bubbling, liquid iron they'd just
drawn off the furnace, and you came down from the ceiling on a spider
web and hung over it. And then I woke up, and I was covered with cold
sweat--for fear the web wouldn't break."
"Regan," said Sammy Durgan, blinking fast, "you don't know a man when
you see one. You're where you are because you've had the chance to get
there. Mind that! I've never had a chance. But it'll come, Regan.
And the day'll come, Regan, when you'll be down on your knees begging
me to take what I'm asking for now, a steady job on your blessed
railroad."
"Mabbe," said Regan, chewing absently on his blackstrap; and then, as a
sort of afterthought: "What kind of a job?"
"A steady one," said Sammy Durgan doggedly. "I dunno just what,
but----"
"H'm!" said Regan solicitously. "Well, don't make up your mind in a
hurry, Durgan--I don't want to press you. When you've had a chance to
look around a little more, mabbe you'll be able to decide better--what?
Get out!"
Sammy Durgan backed to the door. There he paused, blinking fast again:
"Some day I'll show you, Regan, you and all the rest of 'em, and----"
"Get out!" said the little master mechanic peremptorily.
And Sammy Durgan got out. He was always getting out. That was his
forte. When he got in, it was only to get out.
"Some day," said Sammy Durgan--and the Hill Division stuck its tongue
in its cheek. But Sammy Durgan had his answer to the blunt refusal
that invariably greeted his modest request for a fresh job.
"Listen here," said Sammy Durgan, with a firm hold on the overalls'
strap of, it might be, the bridge foreman he was trying to wheedle a
time check out of. "'Twas Regan fired me first, but he was in a bad
humor at the time; 'twas the steam hose I was washing out boiler tubes
with in the roundhouse got away from me, and it was accidental, though
mabbe for the moment it was painful for him. It just shows that if you
get fired once it sticks to you. And as for them baggage checks out to
Moose Peak, they weren't no family, they was a tribe, about eighteen
kids besides the pa and ma, and fourteen baggage cars full of trunks.
_He_ was a little bow-legged fellow with a scared look, and he whispers
where he wants the checks for about three minutes before train time,
then _she_ comes in, bigger'n two elephants, scorches him through a
pair of glasses she carries on a handle, and orders 'em checked
somewhere else. Say, was I to blame if some of them checks in the
hurry didn't get the first name I'd written on 'em scratched out? And
over there to the station the time Regan's office got flooded 'twasn't
my fault. If you get fired once, you keep on getting fired no matter
what you do. I turned the tap off. It was one of them little devils
of call boys turned it on again. But do you think any one would
believe that? They would not--or I'd have mentioned it at the time.
If there's any trouble anywhere and I'm around it's put onto me. And
there's Mrs. Durgan back there to Big Cloud. She ain't very well.
Cough's troubling her more'n usual lately, and worrying about the rent
not being paid ain't helping her any. Say, you'll give me a job, won't
you?"
Sammy Durgan got the job.
Now, as may be inferred, Sammy Durgan did not always adhere strictly to
the truth--not that he swerved from it with vicious intent, but that,
like some other things, trouble for instance, the swerving had grown,
as it were, to be a habit. Mrs. Durgan did not have a cough, neither
was she worrying about the unpaid rent. Mrs. Durgan, speaking strictly
in a physical sense, was mightiest among women in Big Cloud, and on the
night the story proper opens--a very black night for Sammy
Durgan--Sammy Durgan was sitting on Mrs. Durgan's front door step, and
the door was locked upon him. Sammy Durgan, paradoxical as it may
sound, though temporarily out of a job again and with no job to be
fired from, was being fired at that moment harder than he had ever been
fired before in his life--and the firing was being done by Mrs. Durgan.
It had been threatening for quite a while, quite a long while, two or
three years, but it none the less came to Sammy Durgan with something
of a shock, and he gasped.
Mrs. Durgan was intensely Irish, from purer stock than Sammy Durgan,
and through the window Mrs. Durgan spoke barbed words:
"'Tis shame yez should take to yersilf, Sammy Durgan, if yez had the
sinse to take annything--the loikes av yez, a big strong man! 'Tis
years I've put up wid yez, whin another woman would not, but I'll put
up wid yez no more! 'Tis the ind this night, Sammy Durgan, an' the
Holy Mither be praised there's no children to blush fer the disgrace
yez are!"
"Maria," said Sammy Durgan craftily, for this had worked before, "do I
drink?"
Mrs. Durgan choked in her rage.
"I do not," said Sammy Durgan soothingly. "And who but me lays the pay
envelopes on your lap without so much as tearing 'em to count the
insides of 'em? Listen here, Maria, listen----"
"Is ut mocking me, yez are!" shrieked Mrs. Durgan. "'Tis little good
the opening av 'em would do! Listen, is ut, to the smooth tongue av
yez! I've listened till me fingers are bare to the bone wid the
washtubs to kape a roof over me head. I'll listen no more, Sammy
Durgan, moind thot!"
"Maria," said Sammy Durgan, with a softness that was meant to turn away
wrath, "Maria, open the door."
"I will not," said Mrs. Durgan, with a truculent gasp. "Niver! Not
while yez live, Sammy Durgan--fer yez funeral mabbe, but fer no less
than thot, an' thin only fer the joy av bein' a widdy!"
It sounded inevitable. There was a sort of cold uncompromise even in
the fire of Mrs. Durgan's voice. Sammy Durgan rose heavily from the
doorstep.
"Some day," said Sammy Durgan sadly, "some day, Maria, you'll be sorry
for this. You'll break your heart for it, Maria! You wait! 'Tis no
fault of mine, the trouble. Everybody's against me--and now my wife.
But you wait. Once in the life of every man he gets his chance. Mine
ain't come yet. But you wait! It's the man who rises to an emergency
that counts, and----"
There was a gurgling sound from Mrs. Durgan's throat. Then the window
slammed down--hard.
Sammy Durgan stared, stared a little blankly as the lamp retreated from
the window and the front of the house grew black.
"I guess," said Sammy Durgan a little wistfully to himself, "I guess
I'm fired all around for fair." He turned and walked slowly out to the
street and headed downtown toward the railroad yards. And as he walked
he communed with himself somewhat bitterly: "Any blamed little thing
that comes up, that, if 'twere anybody else, nobody'd pay any attention
to it, and everybody yells 'fire Sammy Durgan.' That's me----'fire
Sammy Durgan.' And why? Because I never get a chance--that's why!"
Sammy Durgan grew earnest in his soliloquy. "Some day," said he, as he
reached the station platform, "I'll show 'em--I'll show Maria! It'll
come, every man gets his chance. Give me the chance to rise to an
emergency, that's all I ask--just give me that and I'll show 'em!"
Sammy Durgan walked up the deserted platform with no very definite
destination in view, and stopped abruptly in front of the freight shed
as he suddenly remembered that it was very late. He sat down on the
edge of the platform, and kicked at the main-line rail with the toe of
his boot. Sammy Durgan was bedless, penniless, wifeless and jobless.
It was a very black night indeed for Sammy Durgan.
Sammy Durgan's mind catalogued those in authority in Big Cloud in whose
gift a job was, and he went over the list--but it did not take him
long, as he had need to hesitate over no single name. Big Cloud and a
job for Sammy Durgan were separated by a great gulf. Sammy Durgan,
however, his perennial optimism gaining the ascendancy again, found
solace even in that fact. In view of his present marital difficulties
a job in Big Cloud would be an awkward thing anyhow. In fact, for the
first time in his life, he would have refused a job in Big Cloud.
Sammy Durgan had a certain pride about him. Given the opportunity, the
roundhouse, the shops, the yards, and the train crews, once they
discovered the little impasse that had arisen in the Durgan family,
might be safely trusted to make capital out of it--at his expense.
Sammy Durgan's mind in search of a job went further afield. This was
quite a different proposition, for the mileage of the Hill Division was
big. For an hour Sammy Durgan sat there, scratching at his red hair,
puckering his leathery face, and kicking at the rail to the detriment
of the toe-cap of his boot. He knew the division well, very well--too
well. At the moment, he could not place any spot upon it that he did
not know, or, perhaps what was more to the point, that was not
intimately acquainted with him. Road work, bridge work, yard work,
station work passed in review before him, but always and with each one
arose a certain well-remembered face whose expression, Biblically
speaking, was not like unto a father's on the prodigal's return.
And then at last Sammy Durgan sighed in relief. There was Pat Donovan!
True, he and Pat Donovan had had a little misunderstanding incident to
the premature explosion of a keg of blasting powder that had wrecked
the construction shanty, but that was two years ago and under quite
different conditions. Pat Donovan now was a section boss on a desolate
stretch of track about five stations up the line, and his only
companions were a few Polacks who spoke English like parrots--voluble
enough as far as it went, but not entirely soul-filling to an Irishman
of the sociable tendencies of Pat Donovan. He could certainly get a
job out of Pat Donovan.
The matter ultimately settled, Sammy Durgan stood up. Across the yards
they were making up the early morning freight. That solved the
transportation question. A railroad man, whether he was out of a job
or not, could always get a lift in any caboose that carried the markers
or the tail lights of old Bill Wallis' train. Sammy Durgan got a lift
that morning up to Dam River; and there, a little further along the
line, he ran Pat Donovan and his Polacks to earth where they were
putting in some new ties.
Donovan, a squat, wizened, red eye-lidded little man, with a short,
bristling crop of sandy whiskers circling his jaws like an ill-trimmed
hedge, hurriedly drew back the hand he had extended as he caught the
tail end of Sammy Durgan's greeting.
"Oh, a job is ut?" he inquired without enthusiasm, from his seat on a
pile of ties beside the track.
"Listen, here, Pat," said Sammy Durgan brightly. "Listen to----"
"Yez have yer nerve wid yez!" observed the section boss caustically.
"Yez put me in moind av a felley I had workin' fer me wance, for yez
are the dead spit av him, Sammy Durgan, that blew the roof off av the
construction shanty, an'----"
"That was two years ago, Donovan," interposed Sammy Durgan hurriedly,
"and you've no blasting powder on this job, and it was no fault of
mine. I would have explained it at the time, but you were a bit hot
under the collar, Pat, and you would not listen. I was but testing the
detonator box, and 'twas yourself told me the connections were not
made."
"Did I?"--the section boss was watching his chattering gang of
foreigners with gradually narrowing eyes.
"You did," asserted Sammy Durgan earnestly, "and----"
Sammy Durgan stopped. Donovan had leaped from his seat, and was
gesticulating fiercely at his gold-earringed, greasy-haired laboring
crew.