right kind of an emergency, and when he hears of it Regan will be
displeased. And now what'll I do? 'Twill do no good to return to the
section shanty, for they'll be telegraphing Donovan to fire Sammy
Durgan. That's me--fire Sammy Durgan. 'Tis trouble dogs me and cruel
hard luck--and all I'm asking for is a steady job and a chance."
Sammy Durgan relapsed into mournful silence and contemplation for a
spell--and then his face began to clear. Sammy Durgan's optimism was
like the bobbing cork.
"'Tis another streak of cruel hard luck, of bitter, cruel hard luck
I've had this day, but am I down and out for the likes of that?"
inquired Sammy Durgan defiantly of himself.
"I am not!" replied Sammy Durgan buoyantly to Sammy Durgan. "'Tis not
the first time I've been fired, and did I not read that there's
MacMurtrey begging for men up at The Gap? And him being a new man and
unknown to me, 'tis a job sure. 'Tis only my name might stand in the
way, for 'tis likely 'twill be mentioned in his hearing on account of
the bit of trouble down yonder. But 'tis the job I care for and not
the name. I'll be working for MacMurtrey to-morrow morning--I will
that! And what's more," added Sammy Durgan, beginning to blink fast,
"I'll show 'em yet, Maria, and Regan, and the rest of 'em. Once in
every man's life he gets his chance. Mine ain't come yet. I thought
it had to-day, but I was wrong. But it'll come. You wait! I'll show
'em some day!"
Sammy Durgan lost himself in meditation. After a little, he spoke
again.
"I'm not sure about the law," said Sammy Durgan, "but on account of the
fellow that the bullet hit, apart from MacMurtrey taking note of it,
'twould be as well, anyway, if I changed my name temporarily till the
temper of all concerned is cooled down a bit." Sammy Durgan rose from
the stump. "I'll start West," said Sammy Durgan, "and get a lift on
the first way-freight before the word is out. I'm thinking they'll be
asking for Sammy Durgan down at Big Cloud."
And they were. It was quite true. Down at headquarters they were
earnestly concerned about Sammy Durgan. Sammy Durgan had made no
mistake in that respect.
"Fire Sammy Durgan," wired the roadmaster to the nearest station for
transmission by first train to Pat Donovan, the section boss--and he
got this answer back the next morning:
I. P. SPEARS, Roadmaster, Big Cloud:
Sammy Durgan missing.
P. DONOVAN."
Missing--that was it. Just that, nothing more--as though the earth had
opened and swallowed him up, Sammy Durgan had disappeared. And while
Carleton grew red and apoplectic over the claim sheet for damages
presented by the moving-picture company, and Regan fumed and tugged at
his scraggly brown mustache at thought of the damage to his rolling
stock--Sammy Durgan was just missing, that was all--just missing.
Nobody knew where Sammy Durgan had gone. Nobody had seen him. Station
agents, operators, road bosses, section bosses, construction bosses and
everybody else were instructed to report--and they did. They
reported--nothing. Regan even went so far as to ask Mrs. Durgan.
"Is ut here to taunt me, yez are!" screamed Mrs. Durgan bitterly--and
slammed the door in the little master mechanic's face.
"I guess," observed Regan to himself, as he gazed at the
uncommunicative door panels, "I guess mabbe the neighbors have been
neighborly--h'm? But I guess, too, we're rid of Sammy Durgan at last;
and I dunno but what that comes pretty near squaring accounts for
window glass and about a million other incidentals. Only," added the
little master mechanic, screwing up his eyes, as he walked back to the
station, "only it would have been more to my liking to have got my
hands on him first--and got rid of him after!"
But Regan, and Carleton, and Mrs. Durgan, and the Hill Division
generally were not rid of Sammy Durgan--far from it. For a week he was
missing, and then one afternoon young Hinton, of the division
engineer's staff, strolled into the office, nodded at Carleton, and
grinned at the master mechanic, who was tilted back in a chair with his
feet on the window sill.
"I dropped off this morning to look over the new grading work at The
Gap," said Hinton casually. "And I thought you might be interested to
know that MacMurtrey's got a man working for him up there by the name
of Timmy O'Toole."
"Doesn't interest me," said Regan blandly, chewing steadily on his
blackstrap. "Try and spring it on the super, Hinton. He always bites."
"Who's Timmy O'Toole?" smiled Carleton.
Hinton squinted at the ceiling.
"Sammy Durgan," said Hinton--casually.
There wasn't a word spoken for a minute. Regan lifted his feet from
the window sill and lowered his chair legs softly down to the floor as
though he were afraid of making a noise, and the smile on Carleton's
face sort of faded away as though a blight had withered it.
"What was the name?" said Carleton presently, in a velvet voice.
"Timmy O'Toole," said Hinton.
Carleton's hand reached out, kind of as though of its own initiative,
kind of as though it were just habit, for a telegraph blank--but Regan
stopped him. It wasn't often that the fat, good-natured little master
mechanic was vindictive, but there were times when even Regan's soul
was overburdened.
"Wait!" said Regan, with ferocious grimness. "Wait! I'll make a
better job of it than that, Carleton. I'm going up the line myself
to-morrow morning on Number Three--and _I'll_ drop off at The Gap.
Timmy O'Toole now, is it? I'll make him sick!" Regan clenched his
pudgy fist. "When I'm through with him he'll never have to be fired
again--not on this division. Still looking for an emergency to rise
to, eh? Well, I'll accommodate him! He'll run up against the hottest
emergency to-morrow morning he ever heard of!"
And Regan was right--that was exactly what Sammy Durgan did. Only it
wasn't quite the sort of emergency that Regan----But just a moment till
the line's clear, there go the cautionaries against us.
If it had been any other kind of a switch it would never have
happened--let that be understood from the start. And how it ever came
to be left on the main line when modern equipment was installed is a
mystery, except perhaps that as it was never used it was therefore
never remembered by anybody. Nevertheless, there it stood, an old
weather-beaten, two-throw, stub switch of the vintage of the ark.
Two-throw, mind you, when a one-throw switch, even in the days of its
usefulness, would have answered the purpose just as well, better for
that matter. No modern drop-handle, interlocking safety device about
it. Not at all! A handle sticking straight out like a sore thumb that
could creak around on a semi-circular guide, with a rusty pin dangling
from a rusty chain to lock it--if some itinerant section hand didn't
forget to jab the pin back into the hole it had the habit of worming
its way out of! It stood about a quarter of the way down the grade of
The Gap, which is to say about half a mile from the summit, a deserted
sentinel on guard over a deserted spur that, in the old construction
days, had been built in a few hundred yards through a soft spot in the
mountain side for camp and material stores.
As for The Gap itself, it was not exactly what might be called a nice
piece of track. Officially, the grade is an average of 4.2;
practically, it is likened to a balloon descension by means of a
parachute. It begins at the east end and climbs up in a wriggling,
twisting way, hugging gray rock walls on one side, and opening a canyon
on the other that, as you near the summit, would make you catch your
breath even to look at over the edge--it is a sheer drop. And also the
right of way is narrow, very narrow; just clearance on one side against
the rock walls, and a whole canyon full of nothingness at the edge of
the other rail, and----But there's our "clearance" now.
MacMurtrey's camp was at the summit; and MacMurtrey's work, once the
camp was fairly established and stores in, was to shave the pate of the
summit, looking to an amelioration in The Gap's grade average--that is,
its official grade average. But on the morning that Regan left Big
Cloud on No. 3, the work was not very far along--only the preliminaries
accomplished, so to speak, which were a siding at the top of the grade,
with storehouse and camp shanties flanking it.
And on the siding, that morning, just opposite the storehouse which, it
might be remarked in passing, had already received its first
requisition of blasting materials for the barbering of the grade that
was to come, a hybrid collection of Polacks, Swedes, and Hungarians
were emptying an oil-tank car and discharging supplies from some flats
and box cars; while on the main line track a red-haired man, with
leathery face, was loading some grade stakes on a handcar.
MacMurtrey, tall, lanky and irascible, shouted at the red-haired man
from a little distance up the line.
"Hey, O'Toole!"
The red-haired man paid no attention.
"_O'Toole!_" It came in a bellow from the road boss. "You, there,
O'Toole, you wooden-headed mud-picker, are you deaf!"
Sammy Durgan looked up to get a line on the disturbance--and caught his
breath.
"By glory!" whispered Sammy Durgan to himself. "I was near
forgetting--'tis me he's yelling at."
"O'Too----"
"Yes, sir!" shouted Sammy Durgan hurriedly.
"Oh, you woke up, have you?" shrilled MacMurtrey. "Well, when you've
got those stakes loaded, take 'em down the grade and leave 'em by the
old spur. And take it easy on the grade, and mind your brakes going
down--understand?"
"Yes, sir," said Sammy Durgan.
Sammy Durgan finished loading his handcar, and, hopping aboard, started
to pump it along. At the brow of the grade he passed the oil-tank car,
and nodded sympathetically at a round-faced, tow-headed Swede who was
snatching a surreptitious drag at his pipe in the lee of the car.
Like one other memorable morning in Sammy Durgan's career, it was
sultry and warm with that same leisurely feeling in the air. Sammy
Durgan and his handcar slid down the grade--for about an eighth of a
mile--rounded a curve that hid Sammy Durgan and the construction camp
one from the other, continued on for another hundred yards--and came to
a stop.
Sammy Durgan got off. On the canyon side there was perhaps room for an
agile mountain goat to stretch its legs without falling off; but on the
other side, if a man squeezed in tight enough and curled his legs Turk
fashion, the rock wall made a fairly comfortable backrest.
"'Twas easy, he said, to take it on the grade," said Sammy Durgan
reminiscently. "And why not?"
Sammy Durgan composed himself against the rock wall, and produced his
black cutty.
"'Tis a better job than track-walking," said Sammy Durgan judicially,
"though more arduous."
Sammy Durgan smoked on.
"But some day," said Sammy Durgan momentously, "I'll have a better one.
I will that! It's a long time in coming mabbe, but it'll come. Once
in every man's life a chance comes to him. 'Tis patience that counts,
that and rising to the emergency that proves the kind of a man you are,
as some day I'll prove to Maria, and Regan, and the rest of 'em."
Sammy Durgan smoked on. It was a warm summer morning, sultry even, as
has been said, but it was cool and shady against the rock ledge. Peace
fell upon Sammy Durgan--drowsily. Also, presently, the black cutty
fell, or, rather, slipped down into Sammy Durgan's lap--without
disturbing Sammy Durgan.
A half hour, three-quarters of an hour passed--and MacMurtrey, far up
at the extreme end of the construction camp, let a sudden yell out of
him and started on a mad run toward the tank-car and the summit of the
grade, as a series of screeches in seven different varieties of
language smote his ears, and a great burst of black smoke rolling
skyward met his startled gaze. But fast as he ran, the Polacks, Swedes
and Hungarians were faster--pipe smoking under discharging oil-tank
cars and in the shadow of a dynamite storage shed they were accustomed
to, but to the result, a blazing oil-tank car shooting a flame against
the walls of the dynamite shed, they were not--they were only aroused
to action with their lives in peril, and they acted promptly and
earnestly--too earnestly. Some one threw the main line open, and the
others crowbarred the blazing car like mad along the few feet of siding
to get it away from the storage shed, bumped it on the main line, and
then their bars began to lose their purchase under the wheels--the
grade accommodatingly took a hand.
MacMurtrey, tearing along toward the scene, yelled like a crazy man:
"Block her! Block the wheels! You--you----" His voice died in a
gasp. "D'ye hear!" he screamed, as he got his breath again. "Block
the wheels!"
And the Polacks, the Swedes, the Hungarians and the What-Nots, scared
stiff, screeched and jabbered, as they watched the tank-car, gaining
speed with every foot it travelled, sail down the grade. And
MacMurtrey, too late to do anything, stopped dead in his tracks--his
face ashen. He pulled his watch, licked dry lips, and kind of
whispered to himself.
"Number Three 'll be on the foot of the grade now," whispered
MacMurtrey, and licked his lips again. "Oh, my God!"
Meanwhile, down the grade around the bend, Sammy Durgan yawned, sat up,
and cocked his ear summitwards.
"Now what the devil are them crazy foreigners yelling about!"
complained Sammy Durgan unhappily. "'Tis always the way with them,
like a cageful of screeching cockatoos, they are--but being foreigners
mabbe they can't help it, 'tis their nature to yell without provocation
and----"
Sammy Durgan's ear caught a very strange sound, that mingled the clack
of fast-revolving wheels as they pounded the fish-plates with a roar
that hissed most curiously--and then Sammy Durgan's knees went loose at
the joints and wobbled under him.
Trailing a dense black canopy of smoke, wrapped in a sheet of flame
that spurted even from the trucks, the oil-tank car lurched around the
bend and plunged for him--and for once, Sammy Durgan thought very fast.
There was no room to let it pass--on one side was just nothing, barring
a precipice; and on the rock side, no matter how hard he squeezed back
from the right of way, there wasn't any room to escape that spurting
flame that even in its passing would burn him to a crisp. And with one
wild squeak of terror Sammy Durgan flung himself at his handcar, and,
pushing first like a maniac to start it, sprang aboard. Then he began
to pump.
There were a hundred yards between the bend and the scene of Sammy
Durgan's siesta--only the tank-car had momentum, a whole lot of it, and
Sammy Durgan had not. By the time Sammy Durgan had the handcar started
the hundred yards was twenty-five, and the monster of flame and smoke
behind him was travelling two feet to his one.
Sammy Durgan pumped--for his life. He got up a little better
speed--but the tank-car still gained on him. Down the grade he went,
the handcar rocking, swaying, lurching, and up and down on the handle,
madly, frantically, desperately, wildly went Sammy Durgan's arms,
shoulders and head--his hat blew off, and his red hair sort of stood
straight up in the wind, and his face was like chalk.
Down he went, faster and faster, and the handcar, reeling like a
drunken thing, took a curve with a vicious slew, and the off wheels
hung in air for an instant while Sammy Durgan bellowed in panic, then
found their base again and shot along the straight. And faster and
faster behind him, on wings of fire it seemed, spitting flame tongues,
vomiting its black clouds of smoke like an inferno, roaring like a
mighty furnace in blast, came the tank-car. It was initial momentum
and mass against Sammy Durgan's muscles on a handcar pump handle--and
the race was not to Sammy Durgan.
He cast a wild glance behind, and squeaked again, and his teeth began
to go like castanets, as the hot breath of the thing fanned his back.
"'Tis my finish," wheezed and stuttered Sammy Durgan through bursting
lungs and chattering teeth. "'Tis a dead man, I am--oh, Holy
Mither--'tis a dead man I am!"
Ahead and to either side swept Sammy Durgan's eyes like a hunted
rat's--and they held, fascinated, on where the old spur track led off
from the main line. But it was not the spur track that interested
Sammy Durgan--it was that the rock wall, diverging away from his elbow,
as it were, presented a wide and open space.
"It's killed I am, anyway," moaned Sammy Durgan. "But 'tis a chance.
If--if mabbe I could jump far enough there where there's room to let it
pass, I dunno--but 'tis killed, I'll be, anyway--oh, Holy Mither--but
'tis a chance--oh, Holy Mither!"
Hissing in its wind-swept flames, belching its cataract of smoke that
lay behind it up the grade like a pall of death, roaring like some
insensate demon, the tank-car leaped at him five yards away. And,
screaming now in a paroxysm of terror that had his soul in clutch,
crazed with it, blind with it, Sammy Durgan jumped--_blindly_--just
before he reached the spur.
Like a stone from a catapult, Sammy Durgan went through the air, and
with a sickening thud his body crashed full into the old stub
switch-stand and into the switch handle, whirled around, and he
ricochetted, a senseless, bleeding, shattered Sammy Durgan, three yards
away.
It threw the switch. The handcar, already over it, sailed on down the
main line and around the next bend, climbed up the front end of the 508
that was hauling No. 3 up the grade, smashed the headlight into
battered ruin, unshipped the stack, and took final lodgment on the
running board, its wheels clinging like tentacles to the 508's bell and
sand-box; but the tank-car, with a screech of wrenching axles, a
frightened, quivering stagger, took the spur, rushed like a Berserker
amuck along its length, plowed up sand and gravel and dirt and rock
where there were no longer any rails, and toppled over, a spent and
buckled thing, on its side.
It was a flying switch that they talk of yet on the Hill Division. No.
3, suspicious of the handcar, sniffed her way cautiously around the
curve, and there, passengers, train crew, engine crew and Tommy Regan,
made an excited exodus from the train--just as MacMurtrey, near mad
with fear, Swedes, Hungarians and Polacks stringing out along the right
of way behind him, also arrived on the scene.
Who disclaims circumstantial evidence! Regan stared at the burning
oil-tank up the spur, stared at the bleeding, senseless form of Sammy
Durgan--and then he yelled for a doctor.
But a medical man amongst the passengers was already jumping for Sammy
Durgan; and MacMurtrey was clawing at the master mechanic's arm,
stuttering out the tale of what had happened.
"And--and if it hadn't been for Timmy O'Toole there," stuttered
MacMurtrey, flirting away the sweat that stood out in great nervous
beads on his face, "I--it makes me sick to think what would have
happened when the tank struck Number Three. Something would have gone
into the canyon sure. Timmy O'Toole's a----"
"His name's Sammy Durgan," said Regan, kind of absently.
"I don't give a blamed hoot what his name is!" declared MacMurtrey
earnestly. "He's a man with grit from the soles up, and a head on him
to use it with. It was three-quarters of an hour ago that I sent him
down, so he must have been near the top on his way back when he saw the
tank-car coming--and he took the one chance there was--to try and beat
it to the spur here to save Number Three; and it was so close on him,
for it's a cinch he hadn't time to stop, that he had to jump for the
switch with about one chance in ten for his own life--see?"
"A blind man could see it," said Regan heavily, "but--Sammy Durgan!"
He reached uncertainly toward his hip pocket for his chewing--and then,
with sudden emotion, the big-hearted, fat, little master mechanic bent
over Sammy Durgan.
"God bless the man!" blurted out Regan. And then, to the doctor: "Will
he live?"
"Oh, yes; I think so," the doctor answered. "He's pretty badly smashed
up, though."
Sammy Durgan's lips were moving. Regan leaned close to catch the words.
"A steady job," murmured Sammy Durgan. "Never get a chance. But some
day it'll come. I'll show 'em, Maria, and Regan, and the rest of 'em!"
"You have, Sammy," said Regan, in a low, anxious voice. "It's all
right, Sammy. It's all right, old boy. Just pull around and you can
have any blamed thing you want on the Hill Division."
The doctor smiled sympathetically at Regan.
"He's delirious, you know," he explained kindly. "What he says doesn't
mean anything."
Regan looked up with a kind of a grim smile.
"Don't it?" inquired Regan softly. Then he cleared his throat, and
tugged at his scraggly brown mustache--both ends of it. "That's what I
used to think myself," said the fat little master mechanic, sort of as
though he were apostrophizing the distant peaks across the canyon, and
not as though he were talking to the doctor at all. "But I guess--I
guess I know Sammy Durgan better than I did. H'm?"
IV
THE WRECKING BOSS
Opinions, right or wrong, on any subject are a matter of
individuality--there have been different opinions about Flannagan on
the Hill Division. But the story is straight enough--from car-tink to
superintendent, there has never been any difference of opinion about
that.
Flannagan was the wrecking boss.
Tommy Regan said the job fitted Flannagan, for it took a hard man for
the job, and Flannagan, bar none, was the hardest man on the payroll;
hardest at crooking elbows in MacGuire's Blazing Star Saloon, hardest
with his fists, and hardest of all when it came to getting at the heart
of some scalding, mangled horror of death and ruin that a man wouldn't
be called a coward to turn from--sick.
Flannagan looked it. He stood six feet one in his stockings, and his
chest and shoulders were like the front-end view you'd get looking at a
sturdy, well-grown ox. He wasn't pretty. His face was scarred with
cuts and burns enough to stall any German duelling student on a siding
till the rails rusted, and the beard he grew to hide these
multitudinous disfigurements just naturally came out in tussocks; he
had black eyes that could go _coal_ black and lose their pupils, and a
shock of black hair that fell into them half the time; also, he had a
tongue that wasn't elegant. That was Flannagan--Flannagan, the
wrecking boss.
There's no accounting for the way some things come about--and it's
pretty hard to call the turn of the card when Dame Fortune deals the
bank. It's a trite enough saying that it is the unexpected that
happens in life, but the reason it's trite is because it's immeasurably
true. Flannagan growled and swore and cursed one night, coming back
from a bit of a spill up the line, because they stalled him and his
wrecking outfit for an hour about half a mile west of Big Cloud--the
reason being that, like the straw that broke the camel's back, a circus
train in from the East, billed for a three days' lay-off at Big Cloud,
had, seeking siding, temporarily choked the yards, already glutted with
traffic, until the mix-up Gleeson, the yardmaster, had to wrestle with
would have put a problem in differential calculus into the kindergarten
class.
Flannagan was very dirty, and withal very tired, and when, finally,
they gave him the "clear" and his flat and caboose and his staggering
derrick rumbled sullenly down toward the roundhouse and shops, the
sight of gilded cages, gaudily decorated cars, and converted Pullmans
that were second-class-tourist equipment painted white, did not assuage
his feelings; neither was there enchantment for him in the roars of
multifarious beasts, nor in the hybrid smells that assailed his
nostrils from the general direction of the menagerie. Flannagan, for
an hour's loss of sleep, with heartiness and abandon, consigned that
particular circus, also all others and everything thereunto pertaining,
from fangless serpents to steam calliopes, to regions that are
popularly credited with being somewhat warmer than the torrid zone on
the hottest day in mid-summer. But then--Flannagan did not know.