never get the blues on their account, no matter how intimate you got
with them. But everybody knew the story, of course, for everybody
knows a thing like that; and everybody knew that dollars were scarce up
at the MacCafferys' shanty for, though they didn't know how much old
Dan sent East each year, they knew it had to be a pretty big slice of
what was coming to him to make much impression on that five thousand
dollars at the other end--and they wondered, naturally enough, how the
MacCafferys got along at all. But the MacCafferys got along somehow,
outwardly without a sign of the hurt that was deeper than a mere matter
of dollars and cents, got along through the years--and Mrs. MacCaffery
got a little grayer, a little more gentle and patient and sweet-faced,
and old Dan's hair narrowed to a fringe like a broken tonsure above his
ears, and--but there's our "clearance" now, and we're off with a
clean-swept track and "rights through" into division.
Dan was handling the cab end of one of the local passenger runs when
things broke loose in the East--a flurry in Wall Street. But Wall
Street was a long, long way from the Rockies, and, though the papers
were full of it, there didn't seem to be anything intimate enough in a
battle of brokers and magnates, bitter, prolonged, and to the death
though it might be, to stir up any excitement or enthusiasm on the Hill
Division. The Hill Division, generally speaking, had about all it
could do to mind its own affairs without bothering about those of
others', for the Rockies, if conquered, took their subjection with bad
grace and were always in an incipient state of insurrection that kept
the operating, the motive power and the maintenance-of-way departments
close to the verge of nervous prostration without much let-up to speak
of. But when the smoke cleared away down East, the Hill Division and
Big Cloud forgot their bridge troubles and their washouts and their
slides long enough to stick their tongues in their cheeks and look
askance at each other; and Carleton, in his swivel chair, pulled on the
amber mouthpiece of his brier and looked at Regan, who, in turn, pulled
on his scraggly brown mustache and reached for his hip pocket and his
plug. The system was under new control.
"Who's H. Herrington Campbell when he's at home?" spluttered Regan.
"Our new general manager, Tommy," Carleton told him for the second time.
Regan grunted.
"I ain't blind! I've read that much. Who is he--h'm? Know him?"
Carleton took the pipe from his mouth--a little seriously.
"It's the P. M. & K. crowd, Tommy. Makes quite an amalgamation,
doesn't it--direct eastern tidewater connection--what? They're a
younger lot, pretty progressive, too, and sharp as they make them."
"I don't care a hoot who owns the stock," observed Regan, biting deeply
at his blackstrap. "It's the bucko with the overgrown name in the
center that interests me--who's he? Do you know him?"
"Yes," said Carleton slowly. "I know him." He got up suddenly and
walked over to the window, looked out into the yards for a moment, then
turned to face the master mechanic. "I know him, and I know most of
the others; and I'll say, between you and me, Tommy, that I'm blamed
sorry they've got their fingers on the old road. They're a cold,
money-grabbing crew, and Campbell's about as human as a snow man, only
not so warm-blooded. I fancy you'll see some changes out here."
"I turned down an offer from the Penn last week," said the fat little
master mechanic reminiscently, "mabbe I----"
Carleton laughed--he could afford to. There was hardly a road in the
country but had made covetous offers for the services of the cool-eyed
master of the Hill Division, who was the idol of his men down to the
last car tink.
"No; I guess not, Tommy. Our heads are safe enough, I think. When I
go, you go--and as the P. M. & K. have been after me before, I guess
they'll let me alone now I'm on their pay roll."
"What kind of changes, then?" inquired Regan gruffly.
"I don't know," said Carleton. "I don't know, Tommy--new crowd, new
ways. We'll see."
And, in time, Regan saw. Perhaps Regan himself, together with Riley,
the trainmaster, were unwittingly the means of bringing it about a
little sooner than it might otherwise have come--perhaps not.
Ultimately it would have been all the same. Sentiment and H.
Herrington Campbell were not on speaking terms. However, one way or
the other, in results, it makes little difference.
It was natural enough that about the first official act of the new
directors should be a trip to look over the new property they had
acquired; and if there was any resentment on the Hill Division at the
change in ownership, there was no sign of it in Big Cloud when the word
went out of what was coming. On the contrary, everybody sort of
figured to make a kind of holiday affair of it, for the special was to
lay off there until afternoon to give the Big Fellows a chance to see
the shops. Anyway, it was more or less mutually understood that they
were to be given the best the Hill Division had to offer.
Regan kept his pet flyer, the 1608, in the roundhouse, and tinkered
over her for two days, and sent for Dan MacCaffery--there'd been a good
deal of speculation amongst the engine crews as to who would get the
run, and the men were hot for the honor.
Regan squinted at old Dan--and squinted at the 1608 on the pit beside
him.
"How'd you think she looks, Dan?" he inquired casually.
The old engineer ran his eyes wistfully over the big racer, groomed to
the minute, like the thoroughbred it was.
"She'll do you proud, Regan," he said simply.
And then Regan's fat little hand came down with a bang on the other's
overalled shoulder--that was Regan's way.
"And you, too, Dan," he grinned. "I got you slated for the run."
"Me!" said MacCaffery, his wizened face lighting up.
"You--sure!" Regan's grin expanded. "It's coming to you, ain't it?
You're the senior engineer on the division, ain't you? Well, then,
what's the matter with you? Riley's doing the same for Pete
Chartrand--he's putting Pete in the aisles. What?"
Old Dan looked at Regan, then at the 1608, and back at Regan again.
"Say," he said a little huskily, "the missus 'll be pleased when I tell
her. We was talking it over last night, and hoping--just hoping, mind
you, that mabbe----"
"Go tell her, then," said the little master mechanic, who didn't need
any word picture to make him see Mrs. MacCaffery's face when she heard
the news--and he gave the engineer a friendly push doorwards.
Not a very big thing--to pull the latch of the Directors' Special?
Nothing to make a fuss over? Well no, perhaps not--not unless you were
a railroad man. It meant quite a bit to Dan MacCaffery, though, and
quite a bit to Mrs. MacCaffery because it was an honor coming to Dan;
and it meant something to Regan, too. Call it a little thing--but
little things count a whole lot, too, sometimes in this old world of
ours, don't they?
There had been a sort of little programme mapped out. Regan, as
naturally fell to his lot, being master mechanic, was to do the honors
of the shops, and Carleton was to make the run up through the Rockies
and over the division with the new directors: but at the last moment a
telegram sent the superintendent flying East to a brother's sick bed,
and the whole kit and caboodle of the honors, to his inward
consternation and dismay, fell to Regan.
Regan, however, did the best he could. He fished out the black Sunday
suit he wore on the rare occasions when he had time to know one day of
the week from the other, wriggled into a boiled shirt and a stiff
collar that was yellow for want of daylight, and, nervous as a galvanic
battery, was down on the platform an hour before the train was due.
Also, by the time the train rolled in, Regan's handkerchief was
wringing wet from the sweat he mopped off his forehead--but five
minutes after that the earnest little master mechanic, as he afterwards
confided to Carleton, "wouldn't have given a whoop for two trainloads
of 'em, let alone the measly lot you could crowd into one private car."
Somehow, Regan had got it into his head that he was going on his mettle
before a crowd of up-to-the-minute, way-up railroaders; but when he
found there wasn't a practical railroad man amongst them, bar H.
Herrington Campbell, to whom he promptly and whole-heartedly took a
dislike, Regan experienced a sort of pitying contempt, which, if it
passed over the nabobs' heads without doing them any harm, had at least
the effect of putting the fat little master mechanic almost
superciliously at his ease.
Inspect the shops? Not at all. They were out for a joy ride across
the continent and the fun there was in it.
"How long we got here? Three hours? Wow!" boomed a big fellow,
stretching his arms lazily as he gazed about him.
"Let's paint the town, boys," wheezed an asthmatic, bowlegged little
man of fifty, who sported an enormous gold watch chain. "Come on and
look the natives over!"
Regan, who had been a little hazy on the etiquette of chewing in select
company, reached openly for his plug--and kind of squinted over it
non-committingly, as he bit in, at H. Herrington Campbell, who stood
beside him. Carleton had sized the new general manager up pretty
well--cold as a snow man--and he looked it. H. Herrington Campbell was
a spare-built man, with sharp, quick, black eyes, a face like a hawk,
and lips so thin you wouldn't know he had any if one corner of his
mouth hadn't been pried kind of open, so to speak, with the stub of a
cigar.
"Go ahead and amuse yourselves, boys." H. Herrington Campbell talked
out of the corner of his mouth where the cigar was. "We pull out at
twelve-thirty sharp." Then to Regan, curtly: "We'll look the equipment
and shops over, Mr. Regan."
"Yes--sure," agreed Regan, without much enthusiasm, and led the way
across the tracks toward the roundhouse as a starting point for the
inspection tour.
The whole blamed thing was different from the way Regan had figured it
out in his mind beforehand; but Regan set out to make himself
agreeable--and H. Herrington Campbell listened. H. Herrington Campbell
was the greatest listener Regan had ever met, and Regan froze--and then
Regan thawed out again, but not on account of H. Herrington Campbell.
Regan might have an unresponsive audience, but then Regan didn't
require an audience at all to warm him up when it came to his
roundhouse, and his big mountain racers, and the shops he lay awake at
night planning and thinking about. Here and there, H. Herrington
Campbell shot out a question, crisp, incisive, unexpected, and lapsed
into silence again--that was all.
They inspected everything, everything there was to inspect; but when
they got through Regan had about as good an idea of what impression it
had made on H. Herrington Campbell as he had when he started out, which
is to say none at all. The new general manager just listened. Regan
had done all the talking.
Not that H. Herrington Campbell sized up as a misfit, not by any means,
far from it! Regan didn't make that mistake for a minute. He didn't
need to be told that the other knew railroading from the ground up, he
could feel it; but he didn't need to be told, either, that the other
was more a high-geared efficiency machine than he was a man, he could
feel that, too.
One word of praise Regan wanted, not for himself, but for the things he
loved and worked over and into which he put his soul. And the one
word, where a thousand were due, Regan did not get. The new general
manager had the emotional instincts of a wooden Indian. Regan, toward
the end of the morning, got to talking a little less himself, that is,
aloud--inwardly he grew more eloquent than ever, cholerically so.
It was train time when they had finished, and the 1608, with old Dan
MacCaffery, half out of the cab window as usual, had just backed down
and coupled on the special, as Regan and the new general manager came
along the platform from the upper freight sheds. And Regan, for all
his inward spleen, couldn't help it, as they reached the big, powerful
racer, spick and span from the guard-plates up.
"I dunno where you'll beat that, East or West," said Regan proudly,
with a wave of his hand at the 1608. "Wish we had more of that type
out here--we could use 'em. What do you think of her, Mr.
Campbell--h'm?"
H. Herrington Campbell didn't appear to take any notice of the
masterpiece of machine design to speak of. His eyes travelled over the
engine, and fixed on Dan MacCaffery in the cab window. Dan had an old,
but spotless, suit of overalls on, spotless because Mrs. MacCaffery,
who was even then modestly sharing her husband's honors from the back
of the crowd by the ticket-office window, had made them spotless with a
good many hours' work the day before, for grease sticks hard even in a
washtub; and on old Dan's wizened face was a genial smile that would
have got an instant response from anybody--except H. Herrington
Campbell. H. Herrington Campbell didn't smile, neither did he answer
Regan's question.
"How old are you?" said he bluntly to Dan MacCaffery.
"Me?" said old Dan, taken aback for a moment. Then he laughed: "Blest
if I know, sir, it's so long since I've kept track of birthdays.
Sixty-one, I guess--no, sixty-two."
H. Herrington Campbell didn't appear to hear the old engineer's answer,
any more than he had appeared to take any notice of the 1608. He had
barely paused in his walk, and he was pulling out his watch now and
looking at it as he continued along the platform--only to glance up
again as Pete Chartrand, the senior conductor, gray-haired,
gray-bearded, but dapper as you please in his blue uniform and brass
buttons, hurried by toward the cab with the green tissue copy of the
engineer's orders in his hand.
Regan opened his mouth to say something--and, instead, snapped his jaws
shut like a steel trap. The last little bit of enthusiasm had oozed
out of the usually good-natured little master mechanic. Two days'
tinkering with the 1608, the division all keyed up to a smile,
everybody trying to do his best to please, a dozen little intimate
plans and arrangements talked over and worked out, were all now a
matter of earnest and savage regret to Regan.
"By Christmas," growled Regan to himself, as he elbowed his way through
the crowd on the platform--for the town, to the last squaw with a
papoose strapped on her back, had turned out to see the Directors'
Special off--"by Christmas, if 'twere not for Carleton's sake, I'd tell
him, the little tin god that he thinks he is, what _I_ think of him!
And mabbe," added Regan viciously, as he swung aboard the observation
car behind H. Herrington Campbell, "and mabbe I will yet!"
But Regan's cup, brimming as he held it to be, was not yet full. It
was a pretty swell train, the Directors' Special, that the crowd sent
off with a burst of cheering that lasted until the markers were lost to
view around a butte; a pretty swell train, about the swellest that had
ever decorated the train sheet of the Hill Division--two sleepers, a
diner and observation, mostly mahogany, and the baggage car a good
enough imitation to fit into the color scheme without outraging even
the most esthetic taste, and the 1608 on the front end, gold-leafed,
and shining like a mirror from polished steel and brass. As far as
looks went there wasn't a thing the matter with it, not a thing; it
would have pulled a grin of pride out of a Polack section hand--which
is pulling some. And there wasn't anything the matter with the
send-off, either, that was propitious enough to satisfy anybody; but,
for all that, barring the first hour or so out of Big Cloud, trouble
and the Directors' Special that afternoon were as near akin as twin
brothers. Nothing went right; everything went wrong--except the 1608,
that ran as smooth as a full-jewelled watch, when old Dan, for the
mix-up behind him, could run her at all. The coupling on the diner
broke--that started it. When they got that fixed, something else
happened; and then the forward truck of the baggage car developed a
virulent attack of hot box.
The special had the track swept for her clean to the Western foothills,
and rights through. But she didn't need them. Her progress was a
crawl. The directors, in spite of their dollar-ante and the roof of
the observation car for the limit, began to lose interest in their game.
"What is this new toy we've bought?" inquired one of them plaintively.
"A funeral procession?"
Even H. Herrington Campbell began to show emotion--he shifted his cigar
stub at intervals from one corner of his mouth to the other. Regan was
hot--both ways--inside and out; hotter a whole lot than the hot box he
took his coat off to, and helped old Pete Chartrand and the train crew
slosh buckets of water over every time the Directors' Special stopped,
which was frequently.
It wasn't old Pete's fault. It wasn't anybody's fault. It was just
blamed hard luck, and it lasted through the whole blamed afternoon.
And by the time they pulled into Elk River, where Regan had wired for
another car, and had transferred the baggage, the Directors' Special,
as far as temper went, was as touchy as a man with a bad case of gout.
As they coupled on the new car, Regan spoke to old Dan in the
cab--spoke from his heart.
"We're two hours late, Dan--h'm? For the love of Mike, let her out and
do something. That bunch back there's getting so damned polite to me
you'd think the words would melt in their mouths--what?"
Old Dan puckered his face into a reassuring smile under the peak of his
greasy cap.
"I guess we're all right now we've got rid of that car," he said. "You
leave it to me. You leave it to me, Regan."
Pete Chartrand, savage as though the whole matter were a personal and
direct affront, reached up with a new tissue to the cab window.
"Two hours and ten minutes late!" he snapped out. "Nice, ain't it!
Directors' Special, all the swells, we're doing ourselves proud! Oh,
hell!"
"Keep your shirt on, Pete," said Regan, somewhat inconsistently.
"Losing your hair over it won't do any good. You're not to blame, are
you? Well then, forget it!"
Two hours and ten minutes late! Bad enough; but, in itself, nothing
disastrous. It wasn't the first time in railroading that schedules had
gone aglimmering. Only there was more to it than that. There were not
a few other trains, fast freights, passengers, locals and work trains,
whose movements and the movements of the Directors' Special were
intimately connected one with the other. Two hours and ten minutes was
sufficient, a whole lot more than sufficient, to play havoc with a
despatcher's carefully planned meeting points over a hundred miles of
right of way, and all afternoon Donkin had been chewing his lips over
his train sheet back in the despatcher's office at Big Cloud, until the
Directors' Special, officially Special 117, had become a nightmare to
him. Orders, counter orders, cancellations, new orders had followed
each other all afternoon--and now a new batch went out, as the
rehabilitated Special went out of Elk River, and Bob Donkin, with a
sigh of relief at the prospect of clear sailing ahead, pushed the hair
out of his eyes and relaxed a little as he began to give back the
"completes."
It wasn't Donkin's fault; there was never so much as a hint that it
was. The day man at Mitre Peak--forgot. That's all--but it's a hard
word, the hardest there is in railroading. There was a lot of traffic
moving that afternoon, and with sections, regulars, and extras all
trying to dodge Special 117, they were crowding each other pretty
hard--and the day man at Mitre Peak forgot.
It was edging dusk as old Pete Chartrand, from the Elk River platform,
lifted a finger to old Dan MacCaffery in the cab, and old Dan, with a
sort of grim smile at the knowledge that the honor of the Hill
Division, what there was left of it as far as Special 117 was
concerned, was up to him, opened out the 1608 to take the "rights"
they'd given him afresh for all there was in it.
From Elk River to Mitre Peak, where the right of way crosses the
Divide, it is a fairly stiff climb--from Mitre Peak to Eagle Pass, at
the canyon bed, it is an equally emphatic drop; and the track in its
gyrations around the base of the towering, jutting peaks, where it
clings as a fly clings to a wall, is an endless succession of short
tangents and shorter curves. The Rockies, as has been said, had been
harnessed, but they had never been tamed--nor never will be. Silent,
brooding always, there seems a sullen patience about them, as though
they were waiting warily--to strike. There are stretches, many of
them, where no more than a hundred yards will blot utterly one train
from the sight of another; where the thundering reverberations of the
one, flung echoing back and forth from peak to peak, drown utterly the
sounds of the other. And west of Mitre Peak it is like this--and the
operator at Mitre Peak forgot the holding order for Extra Freight No.
69.
It came quick, quick as the winking of an eye, sudden as the crack of
doom. Extra Freight No. 69 was running west, too, in the same
direction as the Directors' Special; only Extra No. 69 was a heavy
train and she was feeling her way down the grade like a snail, while
the Directors' Special, with the spur and prod of her own delinquency
and misbehavior, was hitting up the fastest clip that old Dan, who knew
every inch of the road with his eyes shut, dared to give within the
limits of safety on that particular piece of track.
It came quick. Ten yards clear on the right of way, then a gray wall
of rock, a short, right-angled dive of the track around it--and, as the
pilot of the 1608 swung the curve, old Dan's heart for an instant
stopped its beat--three red lights focussed themselves before his eyes,
the tail lights on the caboose of Extra No. 69. There was a yell from
little Billy Dawes, his fireman.
"My God, Dan, we're into her!" Dawes yelled. "We're into her!"
Cool old veteran, one of the best that ever pulled a throttle in any
cab, there was a queer smile on old Dan MacCaffery's lips. He needed
no telling that disaster he could not avert, could only in a measure
mitigate, perhaps, was upon them; but even as he checked, checked hard,
and checked again, the thought of others was uppermost in his mind--the
train crew of the freight, some of them, anyway, in the caboose. Dawes
was beside him now, almost at his elbow, as nervy and as full of grit
as the engineer he'd shovelled for for five years and thought more of
than he did of any other man on earth--and for the fraction of a second
old Dan MacCaffery looked into the other's eyes.
"Give the boys in the caboose a chance for their lives, Billy, in case
they ain't seen or heard us," he shouted in his fireman's ear. "Hold
that whistle lever down."
Twenty yards, fifteen between them--the 1608 in the reverse bucking
like a maddened bronco, old Dan working with all the craft he knew at
his levers--ten yards--and two men, scurrying like rats from a sinking
ship, leaped from the tail of the caboose to the right of way.
"Jump!" The word came like a half sob from old Dan. There was nothing
more that any man could do. And he followed his fireman through the
gangway.
It made a mess--a nasty mess. From the standpoint of traffic, as nasty
a mess as the Hill Division had ever faced. The rear of the freight
went to matchwood, the 1608, the baggage and two Pullmans turned
turtle, derailing the remaining cars behind; but, by a miracle, it
seemed, there wasn't any one seriously hurt.
Scared? Yes--pretty badly. The directors, a shaken, white-lipped
crowd, poured out of the observation car to the track side. There was
no cigar in H. Herrington Campbell's mouth.
It was dark by then, but the wreckage caught fire and flung a yellow
glow far across the canyon, and in a shadowy way lighted up the
immediate surroundings. Train crews and engine crews of both trains
hurried here and there, torches and lanterns began to splutter and
wink, hoarse shouts began to echo back and forth, adding their quota to
a weird medley of escaping steam and crackling flame.
Regan, from a hasty consultation with old Dan MacCaffery and old Pete
Chartrand, that sent the two men on the jump to carry out his orders,
turned--to face H. Herrington Campbell.
"Nobody hurt, sir--thank God!" puffed the fat little master mechanic,
in honest relief.
H. Herrington Campbell's eyes were on the retreating forms of the
engineer and conductor.
"Oh, indeed!" he said coldly. "And the whole affair is hardly worth
mentioning, I take it--quite a common occurrence. You've got some
pretty old men handling your trains out here, haven't you?"