oorang-ootangs! An' yez talk like a cageful av monkeys! Yez look
loike men, but yez are not! Yez are annything that has no brains!
Have I not told yez till me throat's cracked doin' ut thot yez are not
rayquired to lift the whole dombed right av way to put in a single
measly tie? Is ut a hump loike a camel's back yez are try in' to make
in the rail? Here! Dig--_here_!"--the little section boss, with
wrathful precision, indicated the exact spot with the toe of his boot.
He returned to his seat, and regarded Sammy Durgan helplessly.
"'Tis a new lot," said he sadly, "an' the worst, bar none, that iver I
had."
"But an Irishman, and one that can talk your own tongue, you won't hire
when he's out of a job," insinuated Sammy Durgan reproachfully.
The section boss scrubbed reflectively at his chin whiskers.
"An' how's Mrs. Durgan?" he asked, with some cordiality.
"She's bad," said Sammy Durgan, suddenly mournful and shaking his head.
"She's worse than ever she's been, Donovan. I felt bad at leaving her
last night, Donovan--I did that. But what could I do? 'Twas a job I
had to get, Donovan, bad as I felt at leaving her, Donovan."
"Sure now, is thot so?" said the little section boss sympathetically.
"'Tis cruel harrd luck yez have, Durgan. But yez'll moind I've not
much in the way av jobs--'tis a desolate bit av country, an' mostly
track-walkin' at a dollar-tin a day."
"Donovan," said Sammy Durgan from a full heart, "the day'll come,
Donovan, when I'll keep the grass green on your grave for this. I knew
you'd not throw an old friend down."
"'Tis glad I am to do ut," said Donovan, waving his hand royally. "An'
yez can start in at wance."
And Sammy Durgan started. And for a week Sammy Durgan assiduously
tramped his allotted mileage out and back to the section shanty each
day--and for a week Sammy Durgan and trouble were asunder.
Trouble? Where, from what possible source, could there be any trouble?
Not a soul for miles around the section shanty, just mountains and
track and cuts and fills, and nothing on earth for Sammy Durgan to do
but keep a paternal eye generally on the roadbed. Trouble? It even
got monotonous for Sammy Durgan himself.
"'Tis not," confided Sammy Durgan to himself one morning, after a week
of this, that found him plodding along the track some two miles east of
the section shanty, "'tis not precisely the job I'd like, for it's a
chance I'm looking for to show 'em, Maria, and Regan, and the rest of
'em, and there'll be no chance here--but temporarily it'll do. 'Tis
not much of a job, and beneath me at that, but have I not heard that
them as are faithful in little will some day be handed much? There'll
be no one to say"--he glanced carefully around him in all
directions--"that Sammy Durgan was not a good track-walker."
Sammy Durgan sat down on the edge of the embankment, extracted a black
cutty from his pocket, charged it with very black tobacco, lit it,
tamped the top of the bowl with a calloused forefinger, and from
another pocket extracted a newspaper--one of a bundle that the train
crew of No. 7 thoughtfully heaved at the section shanty door each
morning on their way up the line.
It was a warm, bright morning; one of those comfortable summer mornings
with just enough heat to lift a little simmering haze from the rails,
and just enough sun to make a man feel leisurely, so to speak. Sammy
Durgan, the cutty drawing well, wormed a comfortable and inviting
hollow in the gravel of the embankment, propped his back against an
obliging tie, and opened his paper.
"Track-walking," said Sammy Durgan, "is not much of a job, and 'tis not
what I'm looking for, but there are worse jobs."
Somebody had read the paper before Sammy Durgan, hence the sheet that
first presented itself to his view was a page of classified
advertisements. His eye roved down the column of "Situations
Vacant"--and held on one of them.
MEN WANTED for grading work at The Gap. Apply at Engineers' Office,
Big Cloud, or to T. H. MacMurtrey, foreman, at The Gap.
Sammy Durgan pursed his lips.
"There's no telling," said Sammy Durgan thoughtfully, "when I'll be
looking for a new job, so I'll bear it in mind. Not that they'd give
me a job at the office, for they would not; but by the name of him this
T. H. MacMurtrey 'll be a new man and unknown to me, which is quite
another matter--and I'll keep it in mind."
Sammy Durgan turned the sheet absently--and then, forgetful of the
obliging tie that propped his back, he sat bolt upright with a jerk.
"For the love of Mike!" observed Sammy Durgan breathlessly, with his
eyes glued to the paper.
It leaped right out at him in the biggest type the Big Cloud _Daily
Sentinel_ had to offer, which, if it had its limitations, was not to be
despised, since it had acquired a second-hand font or two from a
metropolitan daily east that made no pretense at being modest in such
matters.
Sammy Durgan's eyes began to pop, and his leathery face to screw up.
GHASTLY RAILROAD TRAGEDY
UNKNOWN MAN MURDERED IN STATEROOM
OF EASTBOUND FLYER
_No Clue to Assassin_
Sammy Durgan's eyes bored into the fine print of the "story." If the
style was a trifle provincial and harrowing, Sammy Durgan was not
fastidious enough to be disturbed thereby--it was intensely vivid.
Sammy Durgan's mouth was half open, as he read.
One of the most atrocious, daring and bloody murders in the annals of
the country's crime was perpetrated last night in a compartment of the
sleeping car on No. 12, the eastbound through express. It is a
baffling mystery, though suspicion is directed against a passenger who
gave his name as Samuel Starke of New York. The details, gathered by
the _Sentinel_ staff from Conductor Hurley, and Clements, the porter,
on the arrival of the train at Big Cloud, are as follows:
The car was a new-type compartment car, with the compartment doors
opening off the corridor that runs along one side of the length of the
car. As the train was passing Dam River, Clements, the porter, at the
forward end of the car, thought he heard two revolver shots from
somewhere in the rear. Clements says he thought at first he had been
mistaken, for the train was travelling fast and making a great uproar,
and he did not at once make any effort to investigate. Then he heard a
compartment door open, and he started down the corridor. Starke was
standing in the doorway of B compartment where the murdered man was,
and Starke yelled at Clements. "Here, porter, quick!" is what Clements
says Starke said to him: "There's a man been shot in here! My
compartment's next to this, you know, and I heard two shots and rushed
in."
It was a horrible and unnerving sight that greeted the porter's eyes.
Mr. Clements was still visibly affected by it as he talked to the
_Sentinel_ reporter in Big Cloud. The unknown murdered man lay
pitifully huddled on the floor, lifeless and dead, a great bullet wound
in one temple and another along the side of his neck that must have
severed the jugular vein. It was as though blood had rained upon the
victim. He was literally covered with it. He was already past aid,
being quite dead. Conductor Hurley was quickly summoned. But
investigation only deepened the mystery. Suicide was out of the
question because there was no weapon to be found. Mr. Starke, at his
own request, was searched, but had no revolver. Mr. Starke, however,
has been held by the police.
The _Sentinel_, without wishing to infringe upon the sphere of the
authorities or cast aspersions upon their acumen, but in the simple
furtherance of justice, offers the suggestion that, as the compartment
window was open, the assassin, whoever he was, hurled the revolver out
of the window after committing his dastardly and unspeakable crime; and
the _Sentinel_ hereby offers _Twenty-five Dollars Reward_ for the
recovery of the revolver. Lawlessness and crime, we had fondly
believed, was stamped out of the West, and we raise our voice in
protest against the return of desperadoes, bandits, and train robbers,
and we solemnly warn all those of that caliber that they will not be
tolerated in the new West, and we call upon all public-spirited
citizens in whose veins red blood flows to rise up and put them down
with an iron and merciless----
There were still three columns. Sammy Durgan read them voraciously.
At the end, he sucked hard on the black cutty. The black cutty was out.
"To think of the likes of that!" muttered Sammy Durgan heavily, as he
dug for a match. "The fellow that wrote the piece--'twill be that
little squint-eyed runt Labatt--is not the fool I thought him. It's
right, he is; what with murders and desperadoes no man's life's
safe--it is not! And to think of it right on this same railroad! And
who knows"--Sammy Durgan rose with sudden haste--"but 'twas right on
this same spot where I am this blessed minute, for the paper says it
was close to Dam River, that the poor devil was shot dead and foully
killed! And--" The match flamed over the bowl of the cutty, but Sammy
Durgan's attention was not on it.
Sammy Durgan, in a sort of strained way, descended the embankment. The
match burned his fingers, and Sammy Durgan dropped it. Sammy Durgan
rubbed his eyes--yes, it was still glistening away there in the
sunlight. He stooped, and from the grass, trembling a little with
excitement, picked up a heavy-calibered, nickel-trimmed revolver.
"Holy Christmas!" whispered Sammy Durgan, blinking fast. "'Tis the
same! There's no doubt of it--'tis the same that done the bloody deed!
And 'tis the first bit of luck I've had since I was born! Twenty-five
dollars reward!" He said it over very softly again: "Twenty-five
dollars reward!"
Sammy Durgan returned to the track, and resumed his way along it;
though, as far as his services to the road were concerned, he might
just as well have remained where he was. Sammy Durgan's thoughts were
not of loosened spikes and erring fishplates, and neither were his eyes
intent on their discovery--his mind, thanks to Labatt, of the Big Cloud
_Daily Sentinel_, teemed with scenes of violence vividly portrayed,
midnight murders, corpses in grotesque attitudes on gore-bespattered
compartment floors, desperadoes of all descriptions, train bandits and
train robbers in masks holding up trains.
"'Tis true," said Sammy Durgan to himself. "'Tis a lawless country,
these same Rockies. I mind 'twas only a year ago that Black Dempsey
and his gang tried to wreck Number Two in the Cut near Coyote Bend--I
mind it well."
Sammy Durgan walked on down the track. At intervals he took the
revolver from his pocket and put it back again, as though to assure
himself beyond peradventure of doubt that it was in his possession.
"Twenty-five dollars reward!" communed Sammy Durgan, grown arrogant
with wealth. "'Tis near a month's pay at a dollar-ten--and all for the
picking of it up. I called it luck--but it is not luck. An ordinary
track-walker would have walked it by and not seen it. 'Tis what you
get for keeping your eyes about you, and besides the twenty-five 'tis
promotion, too, mabbe I'll get. 'Twill show 'em that there's
track-walkers _and_ track-walkers. I'll say to Regan: 'Regan,' I'll
say, 'you've said hard words to me, Regan, but I ask you, Regan, how
many track-walkers would have brought a bloody murderer to justice by
keeping their eyes about them in the faithful performance of their
duty, Regan? 'Tis but the chance I ask. 'Tis the man in an emergency
that counts, and if ever I get a chance at an emergency I'll show you.'
And Regan'll say: 'Sammy,' he'll say, 'you----'"
Sammy Durgan paused in his engrossing soliloquy as the roar of an
approaching train fell on his ears, and he scrambled quickly down from
the right of way to the bottom of the embankment. Just ahead of him
was a short, narrow, high-walled rock cut, and at the farther end the
track swerved sharply to the right, side-stepping, as it were, the
twist of the Dam River that swung in, steep-banked, to the right of way.
"I'll wait here," said Sammy Durgan, "'till she's through the cut."
Sammy Durgan waited. The train came nearer and nearer--and then Sammy
Durgan cocked his head in a puzzled way and stared through the cut. He
couldn't see anything, of course, for the curve, but from the sound she
had stopped just beyond the cut.
"Now, what the devil is she stopping there for?" inquired Sammy Durgan
of the universe in an injured tone.
He started along through the cut. And then Sammy Durgan stopped
himself--as though he were rooted to the earth--and a sort of grayish
white began to creep over his face. Came echoing through the cut a
shout, a yell, another, a chorus of them--then a shot, another shot, a
fusilade of them--and then a din mingling the oaths, the yells, and the
shots into a hideous babel that rang terror in Sammy Durgan's ears.
Sammy Durgan promptly sidled in and hugged up against the rock wall
that towered above him. Here he hesitated an instant, then he crept
cautiously forward. Where he could not see, it was axiomatic that he
could not be seen; and where he could not be seen, it was equally
logical that he would be safe.
Sammy Durgan's face, quite white now, was puckered as it had never been
puckered before, and his lips moved in a kind of twitching, jerky way
as he crept along. Then suddenly, a voice, that seemed nearer than the
others, but which from the acoustic properties of the cut he could not
quite locate, bawled out fiercely over the confusion, prefaced with an
oath:
"Get that express car door open, and be damned quick about it! Go on,
shoot along the side of the train every time you see a head in a
window!"
Sammy Durgan's mouth went dry, and his heart lost a beat, then went to
pounding like a trip-hammer. Labatt and the Big Cloud _Daily Sentinel_
hadn't drawn any exaggerated picture. A hold-up--in broad daylight!
"Holy Mither!" whispered Sammy Durgan.
He crept farther forward, very cautiously--still farther--and then he
lay full length, crouched against the rock wall at the end of the cut.
He could see now, and the red hair of Sammy Durgan kind of straggled
down damp over his forehead, and his little black eyes lost their
pupils.
It was a passenger train; one side of it quite hidden by the sharp
curve of the track, the other side presented almost full on to Sammy
Durgan's view--the whole length of it. And Sammy Durgan, gasping,
stared. Not ten yards away from the mouth of the cut a huge pile of
ties were laid across the rails, with the pilot of the stalled engine
almost nosing them. Down the embankment, a very steep embankment where
the Dam River swirled along, marched there evidently at the revolver's
point, the engine crew stood with their hands up in the air--at the
revolver's point with a masked man behind it. Along the length of the
train, two or three more masked men were shooting past the windows in
curt intimation to the passengers that the safest thing they could do
was to stay where they were; and farther down, by the rear coach, the
conductor and two brakemen, like their mates of the engine crew, held
their hands steadfastly above their heads as another bandit covered
them with his weapon. And through the open door of the express car
Sammy Durgan could see bobbing heads and straining backs, and the
express company's safe being worked across the floor preparatory to
heaving it out on the ground.
It takes long to tell it--Sammy Durgan got it all as a second flies.
And something, a bitter something, seemed to be gnawing at Sammy
Durgan's vitals.
"Holy Mither!" he mumbled miserably. "'Tis an emergency, all
right--but 'tis not the right kind of an emergency. What could any one
man do against a lot of bloodthirsty, desperate devils like that,
that'd sooner cut your throat than look at you!"
Sammy Durgan's hand inadvertently rubbed against his right-hand coat
pocket--and his revolver. He drew it out mechanically, and it seemed
to put new life into Sammy Durgan, for, as he stared again at the scene
before him, Sammy Durgan quivered with a sudden, fierce elation.
"I was wrong," said Sammy Durgan grimly. "'Tis the right kind of an
emergency, after all--and 'tis the man that uses his head and rises to
one that counts. I'll show 'em, Maria, and Regan, and the rest of 'em!
Begorra, it can be done! 'Tis no one 'll notice me while I'm getting
to the engine and climbing in on the other side, and, by glory, if I
back her out quick enough them thieving hellions in the express car can
either jump for it or ride back to the arms of authority at the next
station--but the safe 'll be there, and 'twill be Sammy Durgan that
kept it there!"
But Sammy Durgan still lay on the ground and stared--while the safe was
being pushed to the express car door, and one edge of it already
protruded out from the car.
"Go on, Sammy Durgan!" urged Sammy Durgan anxiously to himself. "Don't
you be skeered, Sammy, you got a revolver. 'Tis yourself, and not
Maria, that'll do the locking of the doors hereafter, and 'tis Regan
you can pass with fine contempt. Think of that, Sammy Durgan! And all
for a bit of a run that'll not take the time of a batting of an
eyelash, and with no one to notice you doing it. 'Tis a clever plan
you've devised, Sammy Durgan--it is that. Go on, Sammy; go on!"
Sammy Durgan wriggled a little on the ground, cocked his revolver--and
wriggled a little more.
"I will!" said Sammy Durgan with a sudden pinnacling of
determination--and he sprang to his feet.
Some loosened shale rattled down behind him. Sammy Durgan dashed
through the mouth of the cut--and then for a moment all was a sort of
chaos to Sammy Durgan. From the narrow edge of the embankment, just
clear of the cut, a man stepped suddenly out. Sammy Durgan collided
with him, his cocked revolver went off, and, jerked from his grasp by
the shock, sailed riverwards through the air, while, echoing its report
from the express car door, a man screamed wildly and grabbed at a
bullet-shattered wrist; and the man with whom Sammy Durgan had
collided, having but precarious footing at best, reeled back from the
impact, smashed into another man behind him, and with a crash both
rolled down the almost perpendicular embankment. Followed a splash and
a spout of water as they struck the river--and from every side a
tornado of yells and curses.
"'Tis my finish!" moaned Sammy Durgan--but his feet were flying.
"I--I've done it now! If I ran back up the cut they'd chase me and
finish me--'tis my finish, anyway, but the engine 'll be the only
chance I got."
Sammy Durgan streaked across the track, hurdled, tumbled, fell, and
sprawled over the pile of ties, recovered himself, regained his feet,
and made a frantic spring through the gangway and into the cab.
With a sweep Sammy Durgan shot the reversing lever over into the back
notch, and with a single yank he wrenched the throttle wide. There was
nothing of the craftsman in engine-handling about Sammy Durgan at that
instant--only hurry. The engine, from a passive, indolent and
inanimate thing, seemed to rise straight up in the air like an aroused
and infuriated beast that had been stung. With one mad plunge it
backed crashing into the buffer plates of the express car behind it,
backed again, and once again, and the tinkle of breaking glass sort of
ricochetted along the train as one car after another added its quota of
shattered window panes, while the drivers, slipping on the rails,
roared around like gigantic and insensate pinwheels.
Sammy Durgan snatched at the cab frame for support--and then with a
yell he snatched at a shovel. A masked face showed in the gangway.
Sammy Durgan brought the flat of the shovel down on the top of the
man's head.
The gangway was clear again. There was life for it yet! The train was
backing quickly now under the urgent, prodding bucks of the engine.
Sammy Durgan mopped at his face, his eyes warily on the gangways.
Another man made a running jump for it--again Sammy Durgan's shovel
swung--and again the gangway was clear.
Shovel poised, lurching with the lurch of the cab, red hair flaming,
half terrified and half defiant, eyes shooting first to one gangway and
then the other, Sammy Durgan held the cab. A minute passed with no
renewal of attack. Sammy Durgan stole a quick glance over his shoulder
through the cab glass up the track--and, with a triumphant shout, he
flung the shovel clanging to the iron floor-plates, and, leaning far
out of the gangway, shook his fist. Strewn out along the right of way
masked men yelled and shouted and cursed, but Sammy Durgan was beyond
their reach--and so was the express company's safe.
"Yah!" screamed Sammy Durgan, wildly derisive and also belligerent in
the knowledge of his own safety. "Yah! Yah! Yah! 'Twas me, ye
bloody hellions, that turned the trick on ye! 'Twas me, Sammy Durgan,
and I'll have you know it! 'Twas----"
Sammy Durgan turned, as the express car opened, and Macy, the
conductor, hatless and wild-eyed, appeared on the platform.
"'S'all right, Macy!" Sammy Durgan screeched reassuringly. "'S'all
right--it's me, Sammy Durgan."
Macy jumped from the platform to the tender, jumped over the water
tank, and came down into the cab with an avalanche of coal. His mouth
was twitching and jerking, but for a moment he could not speak--and
then the words came like an explosion, and he shook his fist under
Sammy Durgan's nose.
"You--you damned fathead!" he roared. "What in the double-blanked,
blankety-blanked son of blazes are you doing!"
"Fathead, yourself!" retorted Sammy Durgan promptly--and there was
spice in the way Sammy Durgan said it. "I'm doing what you hadn't the
nerve or the head to do, Macy--unless mabbe you're in the gang
yourself! I'm saving that safe back there in the express car, that's
what I'm doing."
"Saving nothing!" bellowed Macy crazily, as he slammed the throttle
shut. "There! Look there!" He reached for Sammy Durgan's head, and
with both hands twisted it around, and fairly flattened Sammy Durgan's
nose against the cab glass.
"What--what is it?" faltered Sammy Durgan, a little less assertively.
Macy was excitable. He danced upon the cab floor as though it were a
hornets' nest.
"What is it!" he echoed in a scream. "What is it! It's moving
pictures, you tangle-brained, rusty-headed idiot! That's what it is!"
A sort of dull gray film seemed to spread itself over Sammy Durgan's
face. Sammy Durgan stared through the cab glass. The track ahead was
just disappearing from view as the engine backed around a curve, but
what Sammy Durgan saw was enough--two dripping figures were salvaging a
wrecked and bedragged photographic outfit on the river bank, close to
the entrance of the cut where he had been in collision with them; an
excited group of train bandits, without any masks now, were
gesticulating around the marooned engineer and fireman; and in the
middle distance, squatting on a rail, a man, coatless, his shirt sleeve
rolled up, was making horrible grimaces as a companion bandaged his
wrist.
Macy's laugh rang hollow--it wasn't exactly a laugh.
"I don't know how much it costs," stuttered the conductor demoniacally,
"but there's about four million dollars' worth of film they're fishing
out of the river there, and they paid a thousand dollars for the train
and thirty-five minutes between stations to clear Number Forty, and
there's about eight thousand car windows gone, and one vestibule and
two platforms in splinters, and a man shot through the wrist, and if
that crowd up there ever get their hands on you they'll----"
"I think," said Sammy Durgan hurriedly, "that I'll get off."
He edged back to the gangway and peered out. The friendly bend of the
road hid the "outlaws." The train was almost at a standstill--and
Sammy Durgan jumped. Not on the river side--on the other side. Sammy
Durgan's destination was somewhere deep in the wooded growth that
clothed the towering mountain before him.
There is an official record for cross-country mileage registered in the
name of some one whose name is not Sammy Durgan--but it is not
accurate. Sammy Durgan holds it. And it was far up on the mountain
side that he finally crossed the tape and collapsed, breathless and
gasping, on a tree stump. He sat there for quite a while, jabbing at
his streaming face with the sleeve of his jumper; and there was trouble
in Sammy Durgan's eyes, and plaint in his voice when at last he spoke.
"Twenty-five dollars reward," said Sammy Durgan wistfully. "And 'twas
as good as in my pocket, and now 'tis gone. 'Tis hard luck, cruel hard
luck. It is that!"
Sammy Durgan's eyes roved around the woods about him and grew
thoughtful.