coach--the doctors of Big Cloud to the last one of them. Dorsay came
running from the station, a bit of tissue, his orders, fluttering in
his hand, and sprang for the cab. 1014's exhaust burst suddenly into
quick, deafening explosions, the sparks shot volleying heavenward from
her short stack, the big, whirling drivers were beginning to bite--and
then, through the gangway, after the engineer, into the cab swung
Flannagan--Flannagan, the wrecking boss.
Spider Cut is the Eastern gateway of the Rockies, and it lies, as the
crows fly, sixteen miles west of Big Cloud; but the right of way, as it
twists and turns, circling and dodging the buttes that grow from mounds
to foothills, makes it on the blue-prints twenty-one decimal seven.
The running time of the fast fliers on this stretch is--but what of
that? Dorsay that night smashed all records, and the medical men in
the rear coach tell to this day how they clung for life and limb to
their seats and to each other, and most of them will admit--which is
admitting much--that they were frightened, white-lipped men with broken
nerves.
As the wreck special, with a clash and clatter, shattered over the
switches in the upper yard and nosed the main line, Stan Willard, who
had the shovel end of it, with a snatch at the chain swung open the
furnace door and a red glow lighted up the heavens. Dorsay turned in
his seat and looked at the giant form of the wrecking boss behind
him--they had told him the story in the office.
The eyes of the two men met. Flannagan's lips moved dumbly; and, with
a curious, pleading motion, he gestured toward the throttle.
Dorsay opened another notch. He laughed a grim, hard laugh.
"I _know_," he shouted over the roar. "I know. Leave it to me,
Flannagan."
The bark of the exhaust came quicker and quicker, swelled and rose into
the full, deep-toned thunder of a single note. Notch by notch, Dorsay
opened out the 1014, notch by notch, and the big mountain racer,
answering like a mettlesome steed to the touch of the whip, leapt
forward, ever faster, into the night.
Now the headlight played on shining steel ahead; now suddenly threw a
path of light across the short, yellow stubble of a rising butte, and
Dorsay checked grudgingly for an instant as they swung the curve--just
for an instant--then into the straight again, with wide-flung throttle.
It was mad work, and in that reeling, dizzy cab no man spoke. The
sweep of the singing wind, the wild tattoo of beating trucks, the
sullen whir of flying drivers was in their ears; while behind, the
derrick crane, the tool car and the coaches writhed and wriggled,
swayed and lurched, tearing at their couplings, bouncing on their
trucks, jerking viciously as each slue took up the axle play, rolling,
pitching crazily like cockleshells tossed on an angry sea.
Now they tore through a cut, and the walls took up the deafening roar
and echoed and reechoed it back in volume a thousandfold; now into the
open, and the sudden contrast was like the gasping breath of an
imprisoned thing escaped; now over culverts, trestles, spans, hollow,
reverberating--the speed was terrific.
Over his levers, bounding on his seat, Dorsay, tense and strained,
leaned far forward following the leaping headlight's glare; while
staggering like a drunken man to keep his balance, the sweat standing
out in glistening beads upon his grimy face, Stan Willard watched the
flickering needle on the gauge, and his shovel clanged and swung; and
in the corner, back of Dorsay, bent low to brace himself, thrown
backward and forward with every lurch, in the fantastic, dancing light
like some tigerish, outraged animal crouched to spring, Flannagan, with
head drawn into his shoulders, jaws outthrust, stared over the
engineer's back, stared with never a look to right or left, stared
through the cab glass to the right of way ahead--stared toward Spider
Cut.
Again and again, with sickening, giddy shock, wheel-base lifted from
the swing, the 1014 struck the tangents, hung a breathless space, and,
with a screech of crunching flanges, found the rails once more.
Again and again--but the story of that ride is the doctors' story--they
tell it best. Dorsay made the run that night from Big Cloud to Spider
Cut, twenty-one point seven miles, in _nineteen_ minutes.
There have been bad spills on the Hill Division, bad spills--but there
have never been worse than on that Friday night when the 505 jumped the
rails at the foot of the curve coming down the grade just east of
Spider Cut, shot over the embankment and piled the Coast Express,
mahogany sleepers and all, into splintered wreckage forty feet below
the right of way.
As Dorsay checked and with screaming brake-shoes the 1014 slowed,
Flannagan, with a wild cry, leaped from the cab and dashed up the track
ahead of the still-moving pilot. It was light enough--the cars of the
wreck nearest him, the mail and baggage cars, had caught, and, fanned
by the wind into yellow flames, were blazing like a huge bonfire.
Shouts arose from below; cries, anguished, piercing, from those
imprisoned in the wreck; figures, those of the crew and passengers who
had made their escape, were moving hither and thither, working as best
they might, pulling others through shattered windows and up-canted
doors, laying those who were past all knowing beside the long row of
silent forms already tenderly stretched upon the edge of the embankment.
A man, with face cut and bleeding, came running toward Flannagan. It
was Kingsley, conductor of Number Eighty. Flannagan jumped for him,
grasped him by the shoulders and stared without a word into his face.
But Kingsley shook his head.
"I don't know, Flannagan," he choked. "She was in the first-class just
ahead of the Pullmans. There's--there's no one come out of that car
yet"--he turned away his head--"we couldn't get to it."
"Couldn't get to it"--Flannagan's lips repeated the phrase
mechanically. Then he looked--and understood the grim significance of
the words. He laughed suddenly, jarring hoarse, as it is not good to
hear men laugh--and with that laugh Flannagan went into the fight.
The details of that night no one man knows. There in the shadow of the
gray-walled Rockies, men, flint-hearted, calloused, rough and ready
though they were, sobbed as they toiled; and while the derrick tackles
creaked and moaned, axe and pick and bar swung and crashed and tore
through splintering glass and ripping timber.
What men could do they did--and through the hours Flannagan led them.
Tough, grizzled men, more than one dropped from sheer weariness; but
ever Flannagan's great arms rose and fell, ever his mighty shoulders
heaved, ever he led them on. What men could do they did--but it was
graying dawn before they opened a way to the heart of the wreck--the
first-class coach that once ahead of the Pullmans was _under_ them now.
Flannagan, gaunt, burned and bleeding, a madman with reeling brain,
staggered toward the jagged hole that they had torn in the flooring of
the car. They tried to hold him back, the man who had spurred them
through the night alternately with lashing curse and piteous prayer,
the man who had worked with demon strength as no three men among them
had worked, the man who was tottering now at the end in mind and body,
they tried to hold him back--_for mercy's sake_. But Flannagan shook
them off and went--went laughing again the same fearful laugh with
which he had begun the fight.
He found her there--found her with a little bundle lying in the crook
of her outstretched arm. She moaned and held it toward him--but
Flannagan had gone his limit, his work was done, the tension broke.
And when they worked their way to the far end of the car after him,
those hard, grim-visaged followers of Flannagan, they found a man
squatted on an up-ended seat, a woman beside him, death and desolation
and huddled shapes around him, dandling a tiny infant in his arms,
crooning a lullaby through cracked lips, crooning a lullaby--to a
little one long hushed already in its last sleep.
Opinions differ. But Big Cloud to-day sides about solid with Regan.
"Flannagan?" says the master mechanic. "Flannagan's a pretty good
wrecking boss, pretty good, I don't know of any better--since the
Almighty had him on the carpet. He's got a plot up on the butte behind
the town, he and Daisy, with a little mound on it. They go up there
together every Sunday--never've known 'em to miss. A man ain't likely
to fall off the right of way again as long as he does that, is he?
Well, then, forget it, he's been doing that for a year now--what?"
V
THE MAN WHO SQUEALED
Back in the early days the payroll of the Hill Division was full of J.
Smiths, T. Browns and H. Something-or-others--just as it is to-day.
But to-day there is a difference. The years have brought a certain
amount of inevitable pedigree, as it were--a certain amount of gossip,
so to speak, over the back fences of Big Cloud. It's natural enough.
There's a possibility, as a precedent, that one or two of the
passengers on the _Mayflower_ didn't have as much blue blood when they
started on the voyage as their descendants have got now--it's possible.
The old hooker, from all accounts, had a pretty full passenger list,
and there may have been some who secured accommodations with few
questions asked, and a subsequent coat of glorified whitewash that they
couldn't have got if they'd stayed at home where they were intimately
known--that is, they couldn't have got the coat of glorified whitewash.
It's true that there's a few years between the landing of the
_Mayflower_ and the inception of Big Cloud, but the interval doesn't
count--the principle is the same. Out in the mountains on the Hill
Division, "Who's Who" begins with the founding of Big Cloud--it is
verbose, unprofitable and extremely bad taste to go back any farther
than that--even if it were possible. There's quite a bit known about
the J. Smiths, the T. Browns and the H. Something-or-others now, with
the enlightenment of years upon them--but there wasn't then. There
were a good many men who immigrated West to help build the road through
the Rockies, and run it afterwards--for reasons of their own. There
weren't any questions asked. Plain J. Smith, T. Brown or H.
Something-or-other went--that was all there was to it.
He said his name was Walton--P. Walton. He was tall, hollow-cheeked,
with skin of an unhealthy, colorless white, and black eyes under thin,
black brows that were unnaturally bright. He dropped off at Big Cloud
one afternoon--in the early days--from No. 1, the Limited from the
East, climbed upstairs in the station to the super's room, and coughed
out a request to Carleton for a job.
Carleton, "Royal" Carleton, the squarest man that ever held down a
divisional swivel chair, looked P. Walton over for a moment before he
spoke. P. Walton didn't size up much like a day's work anyway you
looked at him.
"What can you do?" inquired Carleton.
"Anything," said P. Walton--and coughed.
Carleton reached for his pipe and struck a match.
"If you could," said he, sucking at the amber mouthpiece between words,
"there wouldn't be any trouble about it. For instance, the
construction gangs want men to----"
"I'll go--I'll do anything," cut in P. Walton eagerly. "Just give me a
chance."
"Nope!" said Carleton with a grin. "I'm not hankering to break the
Sixth Commandment--know what that is?"
P. Walton licked dry lips with the tip of his tongue.
"Murder," said he. "But you might as well let it come that way as any
other. I'm pretty bad here"--he jerked his thumb toward his
lungs--"and I'm broke here"--he turned an empty trouser's pocket inside
out.
"H'm!" observed Carleton reflectively. There was something in the
other that touched his sympathy, and something apart from that that
appealed to him--a sort of grim, philosophical grit in the man with the
infected lungs.
"I came out," said P. Walton, looking through the window, and kind of
talking to himself, "because I thought it would be healthier for me out
here than back East."
"I dare say," said Carleton kindly; "but not if you start in by
swinging a pick. Maybe we can find something else for you to do. Ever
done any railroading?"
Walton shook his head.
"No," he answered. "I've always worked on books. I'm called pretty
good at figures, if you've got anything in that line."
"Clerk, eh? Well, I don't know," said Carleton slowly. "I guess,
perhaps, we can give you a chance. My own clerk's doing double shift
just at present; you might help him out temporarily. And if you're
what you say you are, we'll find something better for you before the
summer's over. Thirty dollars a month--it's not much of a stake--what
do you say?"
"It's a pretty big stake for me," said P. Walton, and his face lighted
up as he turned it upon Carleton.
"All right," said Carleton. "You'd better spend the rest of the
afternoon then in hunting up some place to stay. And here"--he dug
into his pocket and handed P. Walton two five-dollar gold pieces--"this
may come in handy till you're on your feet."
"Say," said P. Walton huskily, "I----" he stopped suddenly, as the door
opened and Regan, the master mechanic, came in.
"Never mind," smiled Carleton. "Report to Halstead in the next room
to-morrow morning at seven o'clock."
P. Walton hesitated, as though to complete his interrupted sentence,
and then, with an uncertain look at Regan, turned and walked quietly
from the room.
Regan wheeled around and stared after the retreating figure. When the
door had closed he looked inquiringly at Carleton.
"Touched you for a loan, eh?" he volunteered quizzically.
"No," said Carleton, still smiling; "a job. I gave him the money as an
advance."
"More fool you!" said the blunt little master mechanic. "Your
security's bad--he'll never live long enough to earn it. What sort of
a job?"
"Helping Halstead out to begin with," replied Carleton.
"H'm!" remarked Regan. "Poor devil."
"Yes, Tommy," said Carleton. "Quite so--poor devil."
Regan, big-hearted, good-natured for all his bluntness, walked to the
front window and watched P. Walton's figure disappear slowly, and a
little haltingly, down the platform. The fat little master mechanic's
face puckered.
"We get some queer cards out here," he said. "He looks as though he'd
had a pretty hard time of it--kind of a discard in the game, I guess.
Out here to die--pleasant, what? I wonder where he came from?"
"He didn't say," said Carleton dryly.
"No," said Regan; "I dare say he didn't--none of 'em do. I wonder,
though, where he came from?"
And in this the division generally were in accord with Regan. They
didn't ask--which was outside the ethics; and P. Walton didn't
say--which was quite within his rights. But for all that, the
division, with Regan, wondered. Ordinarily, they wouldn't have paid
much attention to a new man one way or the other, but P. Walton was a
little more than just a new man--he was a man they couldn't size up.
That was the trouble. It didn't matter who any one was, or where he
came from, if they could form an opinion of him--which wasn't hard to
form in most instances--that would at all satisfactorily fill the bill.
But P. Walton didn't bear the earmarks of a hard case "wanted" East, or
show any tendency toward deep theological thought; therefore opinions
were conflicting--which wasn't satisfying.
Not that P. Walton refused to mix, or held himself aloof, or anything
of that kind; on the contrary, all hands came to know him pretty
well--as P. Walton. As a matter of cold fact, they had more chances of
knowing him than they had of knowing most new-comers; and that bothered
them a little, because, somehow, they didn't seem to make anything out
of their opportunities. As assistant clerk to the super, P. Walton was
soon a familiar enough figure in the yards, the roundhouse and the
shops, and genial enough, and pleasant enough, too; but they never got
past the pure, soft-spoken, perfect English, and the kind of firm,
determined swing to the jaw that no amount of emaciation could
eliminate. They agreed only on one thing--on the question of
therapeutics--they were unanimous on that point with Regan--P. Walton,
whatever else he was, or wasn't, was out there to die. And it kind of
looked to them as though P. Walton had through rights to the Terminal,
and not much of any limit to speak of on his permit.
Regan put the matter up to Carleton one day in the super's office,
about a month after P. Walton's advent to Big Cloud.
"I said he was a queer card the first minute I clapped eyes on him,"
observed the master mechanic. "And I think so now--only more so. What
in blazes does a white man want to go and live in a two-room pigsty,
with a family of Polacks and about eighteen kids, for?"
Carleton tamped down the dottle in his pipe with his forefinger
musingly.
"How much a week, Tommy," he inquired, "is thirty dollars a month, with
about a third of the time out for sick spells?"
"I'm not a mathematician," growled the little master mechanic. "About
five dollars, I guess."
"It's a good guess," said Carleton quietly. "He bought new clothes you
remember with the ten I gave him--and he needed them badly enough."
Carleton reached into a drawer of his desk, and handed Regan an
envelope that was torn open across the end. "I found this here this
afternoon after the paycar left," he said.
Regan peered into the envelope, then extracted two five-dollar gold
pieces and a note. He unfolded the note, and read the two lines
written in a hand that looked like steel-plate engraving.
With thanks and grateful appreciation.
P. WALTON.
Regan blinked, handed the money, note, and envelope back to Carleton,
and fumbled a little awkwardly with his watch chain.
"He's the best hand with figures and his pen it's ever been my luck to
meet," said Carleton, kind of speculatively. "Better than Halstead; a
whole lot better. Halstead's going back East in a couple of weeks into
the general office--got the offer, and I couldn't stand in his way. I
was thinking of giving P. Walton the job, and breaking some young
fellow in to relay him when he's sick. What do you think about it,
Tommy?"
"I think," said Regan softly, "he's been getting blamed few eggs and
less fresh air than he ought to have had, trying to make good on that
loan. And I think he's a better man than I thought he was. A fellow
that would do that is white enough not to fall very far off the right
of way. I guess you won't make any mistake as far as trusting him
goes."
"No," said Carleton, "I don't think I will."
And therein Carleton and Regan were both right and wrong. P. Walton
wasn't--but just a minute, we're over-running our holding orders--P.
Walton is in the block ahead.
The month hadn't helped P. Walton much physically, even if it had
helped him more than he, perhaps, realized in Carleton's estimation.
And the afternoon following Regan's and Carleton's conversation, alone
in the room, for Halstead was out, he was hanging over his desk a
pretty sick man, though his pen moved steadily with the work before
him, when the connecting door from the super's office opened, and Bob
Donkin, the despatcher, came hurriedly in.
"Where's the super?" he asked quickly.
"I don't know," said P. Walton. "He went out in the yards with Regan
half an hour ago. I guess he'll be back shortly."
"Well, you'd better try and find him, and give him this. Forty-two'll
be along in twenty minutes." Donkin slapped a tissue on the desk, and
hurried back to his key in the despatchers' room.
P. Walton picked up the tissue and read it. It was from the first
station west on the line.
Gopher Butte, 3.16 P. M.
J. H. CARLETON, Supt. Hill Division:
No. 42 held up by two train robbers three miles west of here Express
messenger Nulty in game fight killed one and captured the other in the
express car. Arrange for removal of body, and have sheriff on hand to
take prisoner into custody on arrival in Big Cloud. Everything O.K.
McCURDY, Conductor.
P. Walton, with the telegram in his hand, rose from his chair and made
for the hall through the super's room, reading it a second time as he
went along. There had been some pretty valuable express stuff on the
train, as he knew from the correspondence that had passed through his
hands--and he smiled a little grimly.
"Well, they certainly missed a good one," he muttered to himself. "I
think I'd rather be the dead one than the other. It'll go hard with
him. Twenty years, I guess."
He stepped out into the hall to the head of the stairs--and met
Carleton coming up.
Carleton, quick as a steel trap, getting the gist of the message in a
glance, brushed by P. Walton, hurried along the hall to the
despatchers' room--and the next moment a wide-eyed call boy was
streaking uptown for the sheriff, and breathlessly imparting the tale
of the hold-up, embellished with gory imagination, to every one he met.
By the time Forty-two's whistle sounded down the gorge, there was a
crowd on the platform bigger than a political convention, and P.
Walton, by virtue of his official position, rather than from physical
qualifications, together with his chief, Regan, the ticket agent, the
baggage master and Carruthers, the sheriff, were having a hard time of
it to keep themselves from being shoved off on the tracks, let alone
trying to keep a modest breadth of the platform clear. And when the
train came to a stop with screeching brake-shoes, and the side door of
the express car was shot back with a dramatic bang by some one inside,
the crowd seemed to get altogether beyond P. Walton's control, and
surged past him. As they handed out a hard-visaged, bullet-headed
customer, whose arms were tightly lashed behind him, P. Walton was
pretty well back by the ticket-office window with the crowd between him
and the center of attraction--and P. Walton was holding his
handkerchief to his lips, flecking the handkerchief with a spot or two
of red, and coughing rather badly. Carleton found him there when the
crowd, trailing Carruthers and his prisoner uptown, thinned out--and
Carleton sent him home.
P. Walton, however, did not go home, though he started in that
direction. He followed in the rear of the crowd up to Carruthers'
place, saw steel bracelets replace the cords around the captive's
wrists, saw the captive's legs securely bound together, and the captive
chucked into Carruthers' back shed--this was in the early days, and Big
Cloud hadn't yet risen to the dignity of a jail--with about as much
formality as would be used in handling a sack of meal. After that,
Carruthers barred the door by slamming the long, two-inch-thick piece
of timber, that worked on a pivot in the center, home into its iron
rests with a flourish of finality, as though to indicate that the show
was over--and the crowd dispersed--the men heading for the swinging
doors of the Blazing Star; and the women for their own back fences.
P. Walton, with a kind of grim smile on his lips, retraced his steps to
the station, climbed the stairs, and started through the super's room
to reach his own desk.
Carleton removed his pipe from his mouth, and stared angrily as the
other came in.
"You blamed idiot!" he exploded. "I thought I told you to go home!"
"I'm feeling better," said P. Walton. "I haven't got those night
orders out yet for the roundhouse. There's three specials from the
East to-night."
"Well, Halstead can attend to them," said Carleton, a kindliness
creeping into the tones that he tried to make gruff. "What are you
trying to do--commit suicide?"
"No," said P. Walton, with a steady smile, "just my work. It was a
little too violent exercise trying to hold the crowd, that was all.
But I'm all right now."
"You blamed idiot!" grunted Carleton again. "Why didn't you say so? I
never thought of it, or I wouldn't have let----"
"It doesn't matter," said P. Walton brightly. "I'm all right now"--and
he passed on into his own room.
When he left his desk again it was ten minutes of six, and Carleton had
already gone. P. Walton, with his neatly written order sheets, walked
across the tracks to the roundhouse, handed them over to Clarihue, the
night turner, who had just come in, and then hung around, toying in an
apparently aimless fashion with the various tools on the workbenches
till the whistle blew, while the fitters, wipers and day gang generally
washed up. After that he plodded across the fields to the Polack
quarters on the other side of the tracks from the town proper, stumbled
into the filthy, garlic smelling interior of one of the shacks, and
flung himself down on the bunk that was his bedroom.