super's telegrams began to rattle a call on his key like the tattoo of
a snare drum.
P. Walton, in possession of the information he sought--that Extra No.
34 was on time--descended the stairs to the platform, and started
uptown.
"I think," he mused, as he went along, "that about as good a place as
any for me when this thing breaks will be sitting with Nulty."
P. Walton noticed the light burning in Nulty's bedroom window as he
reached the house; and, it being a warm night, found the front door
wide open. He stepped into the hall, and from there into the bedroom.
Mrs. Nulty was sitting in a rocking-chair beside the lamp, mending away
busily at a pair of Nulty's overalls--but there wasn't anybody else in
the room.
"Hello!" said P. Walton cheerily. "Where's the sick man?"
"Why, didn't you know?" said Mrs. Nulty a little anxiously, as she laid
aside her work and rose from her chair. "The express company sent word
this morning that if he was able they particularly wanted to have him
make the run through the mountains to-night on Extra Number
Thirty-four--I think there was some special shipment of money. He
wasn't at all fit to go, and I tried to keep him home, but he wouldn't
listen to me. He went up to Elk River this morning to meet Thirty-four
and come back on it. I've been worrying all day about him."
P. Walton's eyes rested on the anxious face of the little woman before
him, dropped to the red, hard-working hands that played nervously with
the corner of her apron then travelled to Nulty's alarm clock that
ticked raucously upon the table--it was 8.17. P. Walton smiled.
"Now, don't you worry, Mrs. Nulty," he said reassuringly. "A touch of
mountain fever isn't anything one way or the other--don't you worry,
it'll be all right. I didn't know he was out, and I was going to sit
with him for a little while, but what I really came for was to get him
to lend me a revolver--there's a coyote haunting my end of the town
that's kept me awake for the last two nights, and I'd like to even up
the score. If Nulty hasn't taken the whole of his armament with him,
perhaps you'll let me have one.
"Why, yes, of course," said Mrs. Nulty readily. "There's two there in
the top bureau drawer. Take whichever one you want."
"Thanks," said P. Walton--and stepped to the bureau. He took out a
revolver, slipped it into his pocket, and turned toward the door.
"Now, don't you worry, Mrs. Nulty," he said encouragingly, "because
there's nothing to worry about. Tell him I dropped in, will you?--and
thank you again for the revolver. Good-night, Mrs. Nulty."'
P. Walton's eyes strayed to the clock as he left the room--it was 8.19.
On the sidewalk he broke into a run, dashed around the corner and sped,
with instantly protesting lungs, down Main Street, making for the
railroad yards. And as he ran P. Walton did a sum in mental
arithmetic, while his breath came in gasps.
If you remember Flannagan, you will remember that the distance from
Spider Cut to Big Cloud was twenty-one decimal seven miles. P. Walton
figured it roughly twenty-two. No. 34, on time, had already left
Spider Cut at 8.17--and the wires were cut. Her running time for the
twenty-two miles was twenty-nine minutes--she made Big Cloud at 8.46.
Counting Larry's estimate of seven miles to be accurate, No. 34 had
fifteen miles to go from Spider Cut before they piled her in the ditch,
and it would take her a little over nineteen minutes to do it. With
two minutes already elapsed--_three_ now--and allowing, by shaving it
close, another five before he started, P. Walton found that he was left
with eleven minutes in which to cover seven miles.
It took P. Walton four of his five-minute allowance to reach the
station platform; and here, for just an instant, he paused while his
eyes swept the twinkling switch lights in the yards. Then he raced
along the length of the platform, jumped from the upper end to the
ground, and lurching a little, up the main line track to where
fore-shortened, unclassed little switching engine--the 229--was
grunting heavily, and stealing a momentary rest after having sent a
string of flats flying down a spur under the tender guidance of a
brakeman or two. And as P. Walton ran, he reached into his pocket and
drew out Nulty's revolver.
There wasn't much light inside the cab--there was only the lamp over
the gauges--but it was light enough to show P. Walton's glittering
eyes, fever bright, the deadly white of his face, the deadly smile on
his lips, and the deadly weapon in his hand, as he sprang through the
gangway.
"Get out!" panted P. Walton coldly.
Neither Dalheen, the fireman, nor Mulligan, fat as a porpoise, on the
right-hand side, stood upon the order of their going. Dalheen ducked,
and took a flying leap through the left-hand gangway; and Mulligan,
with a sort of anxious gasp that seemed as though he wished to convey
to P. Walton the fact that he was hurrying all he could, squeezed
himself through the right-hand gangway and sat down on the ground.
P. Walton pulled the throttle open with an unscientific jerk.
With a kind of startled scream from the hissing steam, the sparks
flying from madly racing drivers as the wheel tires bit into the rails,
the old 229, like a frightened thoroughbred at the vicious lash of a
yokel driver, reared and plunged wildly forward. The sudden, violent
start from inertia pitched P. Walton off his feet across the driver's
seat, and smashed his head against the reversing lever that stood
notched forward in the segment. He gained his feet again, and, his
head swimming a little from the blow, looked behind him.
Yells were coming from half a dozen different directions; forms, racing
along with lanterns bobbing up and down, were tearing madly for the
upper end of the yard toward him; there was a blur of switch lights,
red, white, purple and green--then with a wicked lurch around a curve
darkness hid them, and the sweep of the wind, the roar of the pounding
drivers deadened all other sounds.
P. Walton smiled--a strange, curious, wistful smile--and sat down in
Mulligan's seat. His qualifications for a Brotherhood card had been
exhausted when he had pulled the throttle--engine driving was not in P.
Walton's line. P. Walton smiled at the air latch, the water glass, the
gauges and injectors, whose inner workings were mysteries to him--and
clung to the window sill of the cab to keep his seat. He understood
the throttle--in a measure--he had ridden up and down the yards in the
switchers once or twice during the month that was past--that was all.
Quicker came the bark of the exhaust; quicker the speed. P. Walton's
eyes were fixed through the cab glass ahead, following the headlight's
glare, that silvered now the rails, and now flung its beams athwart the
stubble of a butte as the 229 swung a curve. Around him, about him,
was dizzy, lurching chaos, as, like some mad thing, the little switcher
reeled drunkenly through the night--now losing her wheel-base with a
sickening slew on the circling track, now finding it again with a
staggering quiver as she struck the tangent once more.
It was not scientific running--P. Walton never eased her, never helped
her--P. Walton was not an engineer. He only knew that he must go fast
to make the seven miles in eleven minutes--and he was going fast. And,
mocking every formula of dynamics, the little switcher, with no single
trailing coach to steady it, swinging, swaying, rocking, held the rails.
P. Walton's lips were still half parted in their strange, curious
smile. A deafening roar was in his ears--the pound of beating trucks
on the fish-plates; the creak and groan of axle play; the screech of
crunching flanges; the whistling wind; the full-toned thunder now of
the exhaust--and reverberating back and forth, flinging it from butte
to butte, for miles around in the foothills the still night woke into a
thousand answering echoes.
Meanwhile, back in Big Cloud, things were happening in the super's
office. Spence, the despatcher, interrupting Carleton and Regan at
their nightly pedro, came hastily into the room.
"Something's wrong," he said tersely. "I can't get anything west of
here, and----" He stopped suddenly, as Mulligan, flabby white, came
tumbling into the room.
"He's gone off his chump!" screamed Mulligan. "Gone delirious, or mad,
or----"
"What's the matter?" Carleton was on his feet, his words cold as ice.
"Here!" gasped the engineer. "Look!" He dragged Carleton to the side
window, and pointed up the track--the 229, sparks volleying skyward
from her stack, was just disappearing around the first bend.
"That's--that's the two-twenty-nine!" he panted. "P. Walton's in
her--drove me and Dalheen out of the cab with a revolver."
For an instant, no more than a breathing space, no one spoke; then
Spence's voice, with a queer sag in it, broke the silence:
"Extra Thirty-four left Spider Cut eight minutes ago."
Carleton, master always of himself, and master always of the situation,
spoke before the words were hardly out of the despatcher's mouth:
"Order the wrecker out, Spence--jump! Mulligan, go down and help get
the crew together." And then, as Spence and Mulligan hurried from the
room, Carleton looked at the master mechanic. "Well, Tommy, what do
you make of this?" he demanded grimly.
Regan, with thinned lips, was pulling viciously at his mustache.
"What do I make of it!" he growled. "A mail train in the ditch, and
nothing worth speaking of left of the two-twenty-nine--that's what I
make of it!"
Carleton shook his head.
"Doesn't it strike you as a rather remarkable coincidence that our
wires should go out, and P. Walton should go off his head with delirium
at the same moment?"
"Eh!" snapped Regan sharply. "Eh!--what do you mean?"
"I don't mean anything," Carleton answered, clipping off his words.
"It's strange, that's all--I think we'll go up with the wrecker, Tommy."
"Yes," said Regan slowly, puzzled; then, with a scowl and a tug at his
mustache: "It does look queer, queerer every minute--blamed queer! I
wonder who P. Walton is, and where he came from anyhow?"
"You asked me that once before," Carleton threw back over his shoulder,
moving toward the door. "P. Walton never said."
And while Regan, still tugging at his mustache, followed Carleton down
the stairs to the platform, and ill-omened call boys flew about the
town for the wrecking crew, and the 1018, big and capable, snorting
from a full head of steam, backed the tool car, a flat, and the
rumbling derrick from a spur to the main line, P. Walton still sat,
smiling strangely, clinging to the window sill of the laboring 229,
staring out into the night through the cab glass ahead.
"You see," said P. Walton to himself, as though summing up an argument
dispassionately, "ditching a train travelling pretty near a mile a
minute is apt to result in a few casualties, and Nulty might get hurt,
and if he didn't, the first thing they'd do would be to pass him out
for keeps, anyway, on Spud's account. They're not a very gentle lot--I
remember the night back at Joliet that Larry and the Butcher walked out
with the guards' clothes on, after cracking the guards' skulls.
They're not a very gentle lot, and I guess they've been to some little
trouble fixing up for to-night--enough so's they won't feel pleasant at
having it spoiled. I guess"--P. Walton coughed--"I won't need that
ticket for the _heat_ of Northern Queensland. I guess"--he ended
gravely--"I guess I'm going to hell."
P. Walton put his head out through the window and listened--and nodded
his head.
"Sound carries a long way out here in the foothills," he observed.
"They ought to hear it on the mail train as soon as we get close--and I
guess we're close enough now to start it."
P. Walton got down, and, clutching at the cab-frame for support, lifted
up the cover of the engineer's seat--there was sure to be something
there among the tools that would do. P. Walton's hand came out with a
heavy piece of cord. He turned then, pulled the whistle lever down,
tied it down--and, screaming now like a lost soul, the 229 reeled on
through the night.
The minutes passed--and then the pace began to slacken. Dalheen was
always rated a good fireman, and a wizard with the shovel, but even
Dalheen had his limitations--and P. Walton hadn't helped him out any.
The steam was dropping pretty fast as the 229 started to climb a grade.
P. Walton stared anxiously about him. It must be eleven minutes now
since he had started from the Big Cloud yards, but how far had he come?
Was he going to stop too soon after all? What was the matter? P.
Walton's eyes on the track ahead dilated suddenly, and, as suddenly, he
reached for the throttle and slammed it shut--he was not going to stop
too soon--perhaps not soon enough.
Larry, the Butcher, Big Tom, and Dago Pete had chosen their position
well. A hundred yards ahead, the headlight played on a dismantled
roadbed and torn-up rails, then shot off into nothingness over the
embankment as the right of way swerved sharply to the right they had
left no single loophole for Extra No. 34, not even a fighting
chance--the mail train would swing the curve and be into the muck
before the men in her cab would be able to touch a lever.
Screaming hoarsely, the 229 slowed, bumped her pony truck on the ties
where there were no longer any rails jarred, bounced, and thumped along
another half dozen yards--and brought up with a shock that sent P.
Walton reeling back on the coal in the tender.
A dark form, springing forward, bulked in the left-hand gangway--and P.
Walton recognized the Butcher.
"Keep out, Butch!" he coughed over the scream of the whistle--and the
Butcher in his surprise sort of sagged mechanically back to the ground.
"It's de Dook!" he yelled, with a gasp; and then, as other forms joined
him, he burst into a torrent of oaths. "What de blazes are you doin'!"
he bawled. "De train 'll be along in a minute, if you ain't queered it
already--cut out that cursed whistle! Cut it out, d'ye hear, or we'll
come in there an' do it for you in a way you won't like--have you gone
nutty?"
"Try it," invited P. Walton--and coughed again. "You won't have far to
come, but I'll drop you if you do. I've changed my mind--there isn't
going to be any wreck to-night. You'd better use what time is left in
making your getaway."
"So that's it, is it!" roared another voice. "You dirty pup, you'd
squeal on your pals, would you, you white-livered snitch, you! Well,
take that!"
There was a flash, a lane of light cut streaming through the darkness,
and a bullet lodged with an angry spat on the coal behind P. Walton's
head. Another and another followed. P. Walton smiled, and flattened
himself down on the coal. A form leaped for the gangway--and P. Walton
fired. There was a yell of pain and the man dropped back. Then P.
Walton heard some of them running around behind the tender, and they
came at him from both sides, firing at an angle through both gangways.
Yells, oaths, revolver shots and the screech of the whistle filled the
air--and again P. Walton smiled--he was hit now, quite badly, somewhere
in his side.
His brain grew sick and giddy. He fired once, twice more
unsteadily--then the revolver slipped from his fingers. From somewhere
came another whistle--they weren't firing at him any more, they were
running away, and--P. Walton tried to rise--and pitched back
unconscious.
Nulty, the first man out from the mail train, found him there, and,
wondering, his face set and grim, carried P. Walton to the express car.
They made a mattress for him out of chair cushions, and laid him on the
floor--and there, a few minutes later, Regan and Carleton, from the
wrecker, after a look at the 229 and the wrecked track that spoke
eloquently for itself, joined the group.
Carleton knelt and looked at P. Walton--then looked into Nulty's face.
Nulty, bending over P. Walton on the other side, shook his head.
"He's past all hope," he said gruffly.
P. Walton stirred, and his lips moved--he was talking to himself.
"If I were you, Nulty," he murmured, and they stooped to catch the
words, "I'd look out for--for--that----"
The words trailed off into incoherency.
Regan, tugging at his mustache, swallowed a lump in his throat, and
turned away his head.
"It's queer!" he muttered. "How'd he know--what? I wonder where he
came from, and who he was?"
But P. Walton never said. P. Walton was dead.
VI
THE AGE LIMIT
As its scarred and battle-torn colors are the glory of a regiment,
brave testimony of hard-fought fields where men were men, so to the
Hill Division is its tradition. And there are names there, too, on the
honor roll--not famous, not world-wide, not on every tongue, but names
that in railroading will never die. The years have gone since men
fought and conquered the sullen gray-walled Rockies and shackled them
with steel and iron, and laid their lives on the altar of one of the
mightiest engineering triumphs the world has ever known; but the years
have dimmed no memory, have only brought achievement into clearer
focus, and honor to its fullness where honor is due. They tell the
stories of those days yet, as they always will tell them--at night in
the round-house over the soft pur of steam, with the yellow flicker of
the oil lamps on the group clustered around the pilot of a 1600-class
mountain greyhound--and the telling is as though men stood erect,
bareheaded, at "salute" to the passing of the Old Guard.
Heroes? They never called themselves that--never thought of themselves
in that way, those old fellows who have left their stories. Their
uniform was a suit of overalls, their "decorations" the grime that came
with the day's work--just railroad men, hard-tongued, hard-fisted,
hard-faced, rough, without much polish, perhaps, as some rank polish,
with hearts that were right and big as a woman's--that was all.
MacCaffery, Dan MacCaffery, was one of these. This is old Dan
MacCaffery's story.
MacCaffery? Dan was an engineer, one of the old-timers, blue-eyed,
thin--but you'd never get old Dan that way, he wouldn't look natural!
You've got to put him in the cab of the 304, leaning out of the window,
way out, thin as a bent toothpick, and pounding down the gorge and
around into the straight making for the Big Cloud yards, with a string
of buff-colored coaches jouncing after him, and himself bouncing up and
down in his seat like an animated piece of rubber. Nobody ever saw old
Dan inside the cab, that is, all in--he always had his head out of the
window--said he could see better, though the wind used to send the
water trickling down from the old blue eyes, and generally there were
two little white streaks on his cheeks where no grime or coal dust ever
got a chance at a strangle hold on the skin crevices. For the rest,
what you could see sticking out of the cab over the whirling rod as he
came down the straight, was just a black, greasy peaked cap surmounting
a scanty fringe of gray hair, and a wizened face, with a round little
knob in the center of it for a nose.
But that isn't altogether old Dan MacCaffery, either--there was Mrs.
MacCaffery. Everybody liked Dan, with his smile, and the cheery way he
had of puckering up his lips sympathetically and pushing back his cap
and scratching near his ear where the hair was, as he listened maybe to
a hard-luck story; everybody liked Dan--but they swore by Mrs.
MacCaffery. Leaving out the railroaders who worshipped her anyway,
even the worst characters in Big Cloud, and there were some pretty bad
ones in those early days, hangers-on and touts for the gambling hells
and dives, used to speak of the little old lady in the lace cap with a
sort of veneration.
Lace cap? Yes. Sounds queer, doesn't it? An engineer's wife, keeping
his shanty in a rough and ready, half baked bit of an uncivilized town
in the shadow of the Rockies, and a lace cap don't go together very
often, that's a fact. But it is equally a fact that Mrs. MacCaffery
wore a lace cap--and somehow none of the other women ever had a word to
say about her being "stuck up" either. There was something patrician
about Mrs. MacCaffery--not the cold, stand-offish effect that's only
make-believe, but the real thing. The Lord knows, she had to work hard
enough, but you never saw her rinsing the washtub suds from her hands
and coming to the door with her sleeves rolled up--not at all. The
last thing you'd ever think there was in the house was a washtub.
Little lace cap over smoothly-parted gray hair, little black dress with
a little white frill around the throat, and just a glad look on her
face whether she'd ever seen you before or not--that was Mrs.
MacCaffery.
As far back as any one could remember she had always looked like that,
always a little old lady--never a young woman, although she and Dan had
come there years before, even before the operating department had got
the steel shaken down into anything that might with justice be called a
permanent right of way. Perhaps it was the gray hair--Mrs.
MacCaffery's hair had been gray then, when it ought to have been the
glossy, luxuriant brown that the old-fashioned daguerreotype, hanging
in the shanty's combination dining and silting room, proclaimed that it
once was.
Big Cloud, of course, didn't call her patrician--because they didn't
talk that way out there. They said there was "some class" to Mrs.
MacCaffery--and if their expression was inelegant, what they meant by
it wasn't. Not that they ranked her any finer than Dan, for the last
one of them ranked Dan as one of God's own noblemen, and there's
nothing finer than that, only they figured, at least the women did,
that back in the Old Country she'd been brought up to things that Dan
MacCaffery hadn't.
Maybe that accounted for their sending young Dan East, and pinching
themselves pretty near down to bed rock to give the boy an education
and a start. Not that Mrs. MacCaffery had any notions that railroading
and overalls and dirt was plebeian and beneath her--far from it! She
was proud of old Dan, proud of his work, proud of his record; she'd
talk about Dan's engine to you by the hour just as though it were
alive, just as Dan would, and she would have hung chintz curtains on
the cab windows and put flower pots on the running boards if they had
let her. It wasn't that--Mrs. MacCaffery wasn't that kind. Only there
were limitations to a cab, and she didn't want the boy, he was the only
one they had, to start out with limitations of any kind that would put
a slow order on his reaching the goal her mother's heart dreamed of.
What goal? Who knows? Mothers always dream of their boy's future in
that gentle, loving, all-conquering, up-in-the-clouds kind of a way,
don't they? She wanted young Dan to do something, make a name for
himself some day.
And young Dan did. He handed a jolt to the theory of heredity that
should, if it didn't, have sent the disciples of that creed to the mat
for the full count. When he got through his education, he got into a
bank and backed the brain development, the old couple had scrimped to
the bone to give him, against the market--with five thousand dollars of
the bank's money. Old Dan and Mrs. MacCaffery got him off--Mrs.
MacCaffery with her sweet old face, and Dan with his grim old honesty.
The bank didn't prosecute. The boy was drowned in a ferryboat accident
the year after. And old Dan had been paying up ever since.
He was always paying up. Five thousand dollars, even in instalments
for a whole lot of years, didn't leave much to come and go on from his
monthly pay check. He talked some of dropping the benefit orders he
belonged to, and he belonged to most of them, but Mrs. MacCaffery
talked him out of that on account of the insurance, she said, but
really because she knew that Dan and his lodge rooms and his regalias
and his worshipful titles were just part and parcel of each other, and
that he either was, or was just going to be, Supreme High Chief
Illustrious Something-or-other of every Order in town. Besides, after
all, it didn't cost much compared with the other, just meant pinching a
tiny bit harder--and so they pinched.