patched up and his arm set. Regan didn't say very much as he lay in
his bed, but he asked somebody to go to Maguire's and ask old Bill to
come down.
And an hour later Maguire entered the room--but he halted a good yard
away from the foot of Regan's bed.
"Yez sint for me, Regan," observed the little hostler, in noncommittal,
far-away tones.
"I did, Maguire," said Regan diplomatically. "Things haven't been
going as smooth as they might have over in the roundhouse since you
left, and I want you to come back. What do you say?"
"'Tis not fwhat _I_ say," said Maguire, and he moved no nearer to the
bed. "'Tis whether yez unsay fwhat yez said yersilf. Do yez take ut
back, Regan?"
"I do," said Regan in grave tones--but his hand reached up to help the
bandages hide his grin. "I take it all back, Maguire--every word of
it."
"Thot's all right, thin," said the little hostler, not arrogantly, but
as one justified. "I'm sorry to see yez are sick, Regan, an' I'm glad
to see yez are better--but did I not warn yez, Regan? 'Twas the wrath
av God, Regan, thot's the cause av this."
"Mabbe," said Regan softly. "Mabbe--but to my thinking 'twas the devil
and all his works."
"Fwhat's thot?" inquired Maguire, bending forward. "I didn't catch
fwhat yez said, Regan."
"I said," said Regan, choking a little, "that Noodles is a godson any
godfather would be proud to have."
"Sure he is," said Noodles' father cordially. "He is thot."
VIII
ON THE NIGHT WIRE
Tommy Regan speaks of it yet; so does Carleton; and so, for the matter
of that, does the Hill Division generally--and there's a bit of a smile
goes with it, too, but the smile comes through as a sort of feeble
thing from the grim set of their lips. They remember it--it is one of
the things they have never forgotten--Dan McGrew and the Kid, and the
night the Circus Special pulled out of Big Cloud with Bull Coussirat
and Fatty Hogan in the cab.
Neither the Kid nor McGrew were what you might call born to the Hill
Division; neither of them had been brought up with it, so to speak.
The Kid came from an Eastern system--and McGrew came from
God-knows-where. To pin McGrew down to anything definite or specific
in that regard was something just a little beyond the ability of the
Hill Division, but it was fairly evident that where railroads were
there McGrew had been--he was old enough, anyway--and he knew his
business. When McGrew was sober he was a wizard on the key--but
McGrew's shame was drink.
McGrew dropped off at Big Cloud one day, casually, from nowhere, and
asked for a job despatching. A man in those days out in the new West
wasn't expected to carry around his birth certificate in his vest
pocket--he made good or he didn't in the clothes he stood in, that was
all there was to it. They gave him a job assisting the latest new man
on the early morning trick as a sort of test, found that he was better,
a long way better than the latest new man, gave him a regular
despatcher's trick of his own--and thought they had a treasure.
For a month they were warranted in their belief, for all that McGrew
personally appeared to be a rather rough card--and then McGrew cut
loose. He went into the Blazing Star Saloon one afternoon--and he left
it only when deposited outside on the sidewalk as it closed up at four
o'clock on the following morning. This was the hour McGrew was
supposed to sit in for his trick at the key; but McGrew was quite
oblivious to all such considerations. A freight crew, just in and
coming up from the yards, carried him home to his boarding house.
McGrew got his powers of locomotion back far enough by late afternoon
to reach the Blazing Star again--and the performance was
repeated--McGrew went the limit. He ended up with a week in the hands
of little Doctor McTurk.
McTurk was scientific from the soles of his feet up, and earnestly
professional all the rest of the way. When McGrew began to get a
glimmering of intelligence again, McTurk went at him red-headed.
"Your heart's bad," the little doctor flung at McGrew, and there was no
fooling in his voice. "So's your liver--cirrhosis. But mostly your
heart. You'll try this just once too often--and you'll go out like a
collapsed balloon, out like the snuffing of a candle wick."
McGrew blinked at him.
"I've heard that before," said he indifferently.
"Indeed!" snapped the irascible little doctor.
"Yes," said McGrew, "quite a few times. This ain't my maiden trip.
You fellows make me tired! I'm a pretty good man yet, ain't I? And
I'm likely to be when you're dead. I've got my job to worry about now,
and that's enough to worry about. Got any idea of what Carleton's said
about it?"
"You keep this up," said McTurk sharply, refusing to sidestep the
point, as, bag in hand, he moved toward the door, "and it won't
interest you much what Carleton or anybody else says--mark my words, my
man."
It was Tommy Regan, fat-paunched, big-hearted, good-natured, who
stepped into the breach. There was only one place on this wide earth
in Carleton's eyes for a railroad man who drank when he should have
been on duty--and that was a six-foot trench, three feet deep. In
Carleton's mind, from the moment he heard of it, McGrew was out. But
Regan saved McGrew; and the matter was settled, as many a matter had
been settled before, over the nightly game of pedro between the
superintendent and the master mechanic, upstairs in the super's office
over the station. Incidentally, they played pedro because there wasn't
anything else to do nights--Big Cloud in those days wasn't boasting a
grand-opera house, and the "movies" were still things of the future.
"He's a pretty rough case, I guess; but give him a chance," said Regan.
"A chance!" exclaimed Carleton, with a hard smile. "Give a despatcher
who drinks a chance--to send a trainload or two of souls into eternity,
and about a hundred thousand dollars' worth of rolling stock to the
junk heap while he's boozing over the key!"
"No," said Regan. "A chance--to make good."
Carleton laid down his hand, and stared across the table at the master
mechanic.
"Go on, Tommy," he prompted grimly. "What's the answer?"
"Well," said Regan, "he's a past master on the key, we know that--that
counts for something. What's the matter with sending him somewhere up
the line where he can't get a drink if he goes to blazes for it? It
might make a man of him, and save the company a good operator at the
same time--we're not long on operators."
"H'm!" observed Carleton, with a wry grin, picking up his cards again
one by one. "I suppose you've some such place as Angel Forks, for
instance, in mind, Tommy?"
"Yes," said Regan. "I was thinking _of_ Angel Forks."
"I'd rather be fired," submitted Carleton dryly.
"Well," demanded Regan, "what do you say? Can he have it?"
"Oh, yes," agreed Carleton, smiling. "He can have _that_--after I've
talked to him. We're pretty short of operators, as you say. Perhaps
it will work out. It will as long as he sticks, I guess--if he'll take
it at all."
"He'll take it," said Regan, "and be glad to get it. What do you bid?"
McGrew had been at Angel Forks--night man there--for perhaps the matter
of a month, when the Kid came to Big Cloud fresh from a key on the
Penn. They called him the Kid because he looked it--he wasn't past the
stage of where he had to shave more than once a week. The Kid, they
dubbed him on the spot, but his name was Charlie Keene; a thin, wiry
little chap, with black hair and a bright, snappy, quick look in his
eyes and face. He was pretty good on the key, too; not a master like
McGrew, he hadn't had the experience, but pretty good for all that--he
could "send" with the best of them, and there wasn't much to complain
about in his "taking," either.
The day man at Angel Forks didn't drink--at least his way-bill didn't
read that way--and they gave him promotion in the shape of a station
farther along the line that sized up a little less tomb-like, a little
less like a buried-alive sepulcher than Angel Forks did. And the Kid,
naturally, being young and new to the system, had to start at the
bottom--they sent him up to Angel Forks on the morning way freight the
day after he arrived in Big Cloud.
There was something about the Kid that got the train crew of the way
freight right from the start. They liked a man a whole lot and pretty
sudden in their rough-and-ready way, those railroaders of the Rockies
in those days, or they didn't like him well enough to say a good word
for him at his funeral; that's the way it went--and the caboose was
swearing by the Kid by the time they were halfway to Angel Forks, where
he shifted from the caboose to the cab for the rest of the run.
Against the rules--riding in the cab? Well, perhaps it is--if you're
not a railroad man. It depends. Who was going to say anything about
it? It was Fatty Hogan himself, poking a long-spouted oil can into the
entrails of the 428, while the train crew were throwing out tinned
biscuits and canned meats and contract pie for the lunch counter at Elk
River, who invited him, anyhow.
That's how the Kid came to get acquainted with Hogan, and Hogan's mate,
Bull Coussirat, who was handling the shovel end of it. Coussirat was
an artist in his way--apart from the shovel--and he started in to guy
the Kid. He drew a shuddering picture of the desolation and the
general lack of what made life worth living at Angel Forks, which
wasn't exaggerated because you couldn't exaggerate Angel Forks much in
that particular respect; and he told the Kid about Dan McGrew and how
headquarters--it wasn't any secret--had turned Angel Forks into what he
called a booze-fighter's sanatorium. But he didn't break through the
Kid's optimism or ambition much of any to speak of.
By the time the way freight whistled for Angel Forks, the Kid had Bull
Coussirat's seat, and Coussirat was doing the listening, while Hogan
was leaning toward them to catch what he could of what was going on
over the roar and pound of the 428. There was better pay, and, what
counted most, better chances for a man who was willing to work for them
out in the West than there was in the East, the Kid told them with a
quiet, modest sincerity--and that was why he had come out there. He
was looking for a train despatcher's key some day after he had got
through station operating, and after that--well, something better still.
There wasn't any jolly business or blowhard about the Kid. He meant
what he said--he was going up. And as far as McGrew was concerned,
he'd get along with McGrew. McGrew, or any other man, wouldn't hold
him back from the goal he had his eyes set upon and his mind made up to
work for. There was perhaps a little more of the youthful enthusiasm
in it that looked more buoyantly on the future than hard-headed
experience would; but it was sincere, and they liked him for it--who
wouldn't? Bull Coussirat and Fatty Hogan in the days to come had
reason to remember that talk in the cab.
Desolate, perhaps, isn't the word to describe Angel Forks--for Angel
Forks was pretty enough, if rugged grandeur is counted pretty. Across
the track and siding, facing the two-story wooden structure that was
the station, the bare gray rock of a cut through the mountain base
reared upward to meet a pine-covered slope, and then blend with bare,
gray rock once until it became a glaciered peak at the sky line; behind
the station was a sort of plateau, a little valley, green and velvety,
bisected by a tumbling, rushing little stream, with the mountains again
closing in around it, towering to majestic heights, the sun playing in
relief and shadow on the fantastic, irregular, snow-capped summits. It
was pretty enough, no one ever disputed that! The road hung
four-by-five-foot photographs of it with
eight-inch-wide-trimmed-with-gilt frames in the big hotel corridors
East, and no one who ever bought a ticket on the strength of the
photographer's art ever sent in a kick to the advertising department,
or asked for their money back--it looked all right from the car windows.
But sign of habitation there was not, apart from the little
station--not even a section man's shanty--just the station. Angel
Forks was important to the Transcontinental on one count, and on one
count only--its siding. Neither freight nor passenger receipts were
swelled, twelve months in or twelve months out, by Angel Forks; but,
geographically, the train despatcher's office back in Big Cloud never
lost sight of it--in the heart of the mountains, single-tracked, mixed
trains, locals, way freights, specials, and the Limiteds that knew no
"rights" on earth but a clean-swept track with their crazy fast
schedules, met and crossed each other as expediency demanded.
So, in a way, after all, perhaps it _was_ desolate--except from the car
windows. Horton, the day man that the Kid was relieving, evidently had
found it so. He was waiting on the platform with his trunk when the
way freight pulled in, and he turned the station over to the Kid
without much formality.
"God be with you till we meet again," was about the gist of what Horton
said--and he said it with a mixture of sympathy for another's
misfortune and an uplift at his own escape from bondage struggling for
the mastery, while he waved his hand from the tail of the caboose as
the way freight pulled out.
There was mighty little formality about the transfer, and the Kid found
himself in charge with almost breathtaking celerity. Angel Forks, Dan
McGrew, way freight No. 47, and the man he had relieved, were sort of
hazy, nebulous things for a moment. There wasn't time for them to be
anything else; for, about one minute after he had jumped to the
platform, he was O.S.-ing "out" the train that had brought him in.
It wasn't quite what he had been used to back in the more sedate East,
and he grinned a little to himself as his fingers tapped the key, and
by the time he had got back his O. K. the tail of the caboose was
swinging a curve and disappearing out of sight. The Kid, then, had a
chance to look around him--and look for Dan McGrew, the man who was to
be his sole companion for the days to come.
He found McGrew upstairs--after he had explored all there was to
explore of the ground floor of the station, which was a sort of
combination kitchen, living room and dining room that led off from the
office--just the two rooms below, with a ladder-like staircase between
them leading up above. And above there was just the one room under the
eaves with two bunks in it, one on either side. The night man was
asleep in one of these, and the Kid did not disturb him. After a
glance around the rather cheerless sleeping quarters, he returned
downstairs, and started in to pick up the threads of the office.
Dusk comes early in the fall in the mountains, and at five o'clock the
switch and semaphore lamps were already lighted, and in the office
under a green-shaded lamp the Kid sat listening to some stray time
stuff coming over the wire, when he heard the night man moving overhead
and presently start down the stairs. The Kid pushed back his chair,
rose to his feet, and turned with outstretched hand to make friends
with his new mate--and his outstretched hand drew back and reached
uncertainly to the table edge beside him.
For a long minute neither man spoke--staring into each other's eyes.
In the opening through the partition at the foot of the stairs, Dan
McGrew seemed to sway a little on his feet, and his face, what could be
seen of it through the tawny beard that Angel Forks had offered him no
incentive to shave, was ashen white.
It was McGrew who broke the silence.
"Hello, Charlie!" he said in a sort of cheerful bravado, that rang far
from true.
"So _you_ are Dan McGrew! The last time I heard of you your name was
Brodie." The Kid's lips, as he spoke, hardly seemed to move.
"I've had a dozen since then," said McGrew, in a pleading whine,
"more'n a dozen. I've been chased from place to place, Charlie. I've
lived a dog's life, and----"
The Kid cut him short, in a low, passionate voice:
"And you expect me to keep my mouth shut about you here--is that it?"
McGrew's fingers plucked nervously, hesitantly at his beard; his tongue
circled dry lips, and his black eyes fell from the Kid to trace
aimlessly, it seemed, the cracks in the floor.
The Kid dropped back into his chair, and, elbows on the table, chin in
hands, stared out across the tracks to where the side of the rock cut
was now no more than a black shadow.
Again it was McGrew who broke the silence.
"What are you going to do?" he asked miserably. "What are you going to
do? Use the key and put them wise? You wouldn't do that, would
you--Charlie? You wouldn't throw me down--would you? I'm--I'm living
decent here."
The Kid made no answer--made no movement.
"Charlie!" McGrew's voice rose in a high-pitched, nervous appeal.
"Charlie--what are you going to do?"
"Nothing!" The Kid's eyes were still on the black, rock shadow through
the station window, and the words came monotonously. "Nothing! As far
as I am concerned, you are--Dan McGrew."
McGrew lurched heavily forward, relief in his face and voice as he put
his hands on the Kid's shoulders.
"You're all right, Charlie, all right; I knew you wouldn't----"
The Kid sprang to his feet, and flung the other's hands roughly from
his shoulders.
"Keep your hands off me!" he said tensely. "I don't stand for that!
And let's understand each other. You do your work here, and I do mine.
I don't want to talk to you. I don't want you to talk to me. I don't
want anything to do with you--that's as straight as I know how to put
it. The first chance I get I'll move--they'll never move you, for I
know why they sent you here. That's all, and that's where we
stand--McGrew."
"D'ye mean that?" said McGrew, in a cowed, helpless way.
The Kid's answer was only a harsh, bitter laugh--but it was answer
enough. McGrew, after a moment's hesitation, turned and went silently
from the room.
A week passed, and another week came and went, and neither man spoke to
the other. Each lived his life apart, cooked for himself, and did his
work; and it was good for neither one. McGrew grew morose and ugly;
and the Kid somehow seemed to droop, and there was a pallor in his
cheeks and a listless air about him that was far from the cheery
optimism with which he had come to take the key at Angel Forks.
Two weeks passed, and then one night, after the Kid had gone to bed,
two men pitched a rough, weather-beaten tent on the plateau below the
station. Hard-looking specimens they were; unkempt, unshaven, each
with a mount and a pack horse. Harvey and Lansing they told McGrew
their names were, when they dropped in for a social call that night,
and they said that they were prospectors--but their geological hammers
were bottles of raw spirit that the Indians loved, and the veins of ore
they tapped were the furs that an Indian will sell for "red-eye" when
he will sell for no other thing on earth. It was against the
law--enough against the law to keep a man's mouth who was engaged in
that business pretty tightly shut--but, perhaps recognizing a kindred
spirit in McGrew, and warmed by the bottle they had hospitably brought,
before that first night was over no secret of that sort lay between
them and McGrew.
And so drink came to Angel Forks; and in a supply that was not stinted.
It was Harvey and Lansing's stock in trade--and they were well stocked.
McGrew bought it from them with cash and with provisions, and played
poker with them with a kitty for the "red-eye."
There was nothing riotous about it at first, not bad enough to
incapacitate McGrew; and it was a night or two before the Kid knew what
was going on, for McGrew was cautious. Harvey and Lansing were away in
the mountains during the daytime, and they came late to fraternize with
McGrew, around midnight, long after the Kid was asleep. Then McGrew
began to tipple steadily, and signs of drink came patently enough--too
patently to be ignored one morning when the Kid relieved McGrew and
went on for the day trick.
The Kid said nothing, no word had passed between them for two weeks;
but that evening, when McGrew in turn went on for his trick, the Kid
went upstairs and found a bottle, nearly full, hidden under McGrew's
mattress. He took it, went outside with it, smashed it against a
rock--and kept on across the plateau to the prospectors' outfit.
Harvey and Lansing, evidently just in from a day's lucrative trading,
were unsaddling and busy over their pack animals.
"Hello, Keene!" they greeted in chorus; and Lansing added: "Hang 'round
a bit an' join in; we're just goin' TO cook grub."
The Kid ignored both the salutation and the proffered hospitality.
"I came down here to tell you two fellows something," he said slowly,
and there was a grim, earnest set to his lips that was not to be
misunderstood. "It's none of my business that you're camping around
here, but up there is railroad property, and that _is_ my business. If
you show your faces inside the station again or pass out any more booze
to McGrew, I'll wire headquarters and have you run in; and somehow,
though I've only met you once or twice, I don't fancy you're anxious to
touch head-on with the authorities." He looked at the two steadily for
an instant, while they stared back half angrily, half sheepishly.
"That's fair warning, isn't it?" he ended, as he turned and began to
retrace his steps to the station. "You'd better take it--you won't get
a second one."
They cursed him when they found their tongues, and did it heartily,
interwoven with threats and savage jeers that followed him halfway to
the embankment. But their profanity did not cloak the fact that, to a
certain extent, the Kid's words were worthy of consideration.
The extent was two nights--that night, and the next one.
On the third night, or rather, far on in the early morning hours, the
Kid, upstairs, awakened from sleep, sat suddenly up in his bunk. A
wild outburst of drunken song, accompanied by fists banging time on the
table, reached him--then an abashed hush, through which the click of
the sounder came to him and he read it mechanically--the despatcher at
Big Cloud was making a meeting point for two trains at the Bend, forty
miles away, nothing to do with Angel Forks. Came then a rough
oath--another--and a loud, brawling altercation.
The Kid's lips thinned. He sprang out of his bunk, pulled on shirt and
trousers, and went softly down the stairs. They didn't hear him, they
were too drunk for that; and they didn't see him--until he was fairly
inside the room; and then for a moment they leered at him, suddenly
silent, in a silly, owl-like way.
There was an anger upon the Kid, a seething passion, that showed in his
bloodless face and quivering lips. He stood for an instant motionless,
glancing around the office; the table from the other room had been
dragged in; on either side of it sat Harvey and Lansing; at the end,
within reach of the key, sat Dan McGrew, swaying tipsily back and
forth, cards in hand; under the table was an empty bottle, another had
rolled into a corner against the wall; and on the table itself were two
more bottles amongst greasy, scattered cards, one almost full, the
other still unopened.
"S'all right, Charlie," hiccoughed McGrew blandly. "S'all right--jus'
havin' little game--good boy, Charlie."
McGrew's words seemed to break the spell. With a jump the Kid reached
him, flung him roughly from his seat, toppling him to the floor, and
stretched out his hand for the key--but he never reached it. Harvey
and Lansing, remembering the threat, and having more reason to fear the
law than on the simple count of trespassing on railroad property,
lunged for him simultaneously. Quick as a cat on his feet, the Kid
turned, and his fist shot out, driving full into Lansing's face,
sending the man staggering backward--but Harvey closed. Purling oaths,
Lansing snatched the full bottle, and, as the Kid, locked in Harvey's
arms, swung toward him, he brought the bottle down with a crash on the
back of the Kid's head--and the Kid slid limply to the floor.
White-faced, motionless, unconscious, the Kid lay there, the blood
beginning to trickle from his head, and in a little way it sobered the
two "prospectors"--but not McGrew.
"See whash done," said McGrew with a maudlin sob, picking himself up
from where the Kid had thrown him. "See whash done! Killed him--thash
whash done."