again at the Kid and saw no sign of life--and then they looked at each
other. The bottle was still in Lansing's hand, and he set it back now
on the table with a little shudder.
"We'd better beat it," he croaked hoarsely. "By daylight we want to be
far away from here."
Harvey's answer was a practical one--he made for the door and
disappeared, Lansing close on his heels.
McGrew alternately cursed and pleaded with them long after they were
out of earshot; and then, moved by drunken inspiration, started to
clear up the room. He got as far as reaching for the empty bottles on
the floor, and that act seemed to father a second inspiration--there
were other bottles. He reeled to the table, picked up the one from
which they had been drinking, stared at the Kid upon the floor, brushed
the hair out of his eyes, and, throwing back his head, drank deeply.
"Jus'er steady myself--feel shaky," he mumbled.
He stared at the Kid again. The Kid was beginning to show signs of
returning consciousness. McGrew, blinking, took another drink.
"Nosh dead, after all," said McGrew thickly. "Thank God, nosh dead,
after all!"
Then drunken cunning came into his eyes. He slid the full bottle into
his pocket, and, carrying the ether in his hand, stumbled upstairs,
drank again, and hid them craftily, not beneath the mattress this time,
but under the eaves where the flooring met and there was a loose plank.
When he stumbled downstairs again, the Kid was sitting in a chair,
holding his swimming head in his hands.
"S'all right, Charlie," said McGrew inanely.
The Kid did not look at him; his eyes were fixed upon the table.
"Where are those bottles?" he demanded suspiciously.
"Gone," said McGrew plaintively. "Gone witsh fellows--fellows took 'em
an' ran 'way. Whash goin' to do 'bout it, Charlie?"
"I'll tell you when you're sober," said the Kid curtly. "Get up to
your bunk and sleep it off."
"S'my trick," said McGrew heavily, waving his hand toward the key.
"Can't let nusher fellow do my work."
"Your trick!" The words came in a withering, bitter rush from the Kid.
"Your trick! You're in fine shape to hold down a key, aren't you!"
"Whash reason I ain't? Held it down all right, so far," said McGrew, a
world of injury in his voice--and it was true; so far he had held it
down all right that night, for the very simple reason that Angel Forks
had not been the elected meeting point of trains for a matter of some
three hours, not since the time when Harvey and Lansing had dropped in
and McGrew had been sober.
"Get up to your bunk!" said the Kid between his teeth--and that was all.
McGrew swayed hesitantly for a moment on uncertain legs, blinked
soddenly a sort of helpless protest, and, turning, staggered up the
stairs.
For a little while the Kid sat in his chair, trying to conquer his
dizzy, swimming head; and then the warm blood trickling down his
neck--he had not noticed it before--roused him to action. He took the
lamp and went into the other room, bathed his head in the wash-basin,
sopping at the back of his neck to stop the flow, and finally bandaged
it as best he could with a wet cloth as a compress, and a towel drawn
tightly over it, which he knotted on his forehead.
He finished McGrew's abortive attempt at housecleaning after that, and
sat in to hold down the rest of the night trick, while McGrew in sleep
should recover his senses. But McGrew did not sleep. McGrew was
fairly started--and McGrew had two bottles at command.
At five-thirty in the morning, No. 81, the local freight, west, making
a meeting point, rattled her long string of flats and boxes on the
Angel Forks siding; and the Kid, unknotting his bandage, dropped it
into a drawer of his desk. Brannahan, No. 81's conductor, kicked the
door open, and came in for his orders.
"Hello, Kid!" exclaimed Brannahan. "What you sitting in for? Where's
your mate?"
"Asleep," the Kid laughed at him. "Where do you suppose he is! We're
swopping tricks for a while for the sake of variety."
Brannahan stooped and lunged the stub of the cigar in his mouth over
the lamp chimney, and with the up-draft nearly extinguished the flame;
then he pulled up a chair, tilted back and stuck his feet up on the
desk.
"Guess most anything would be variety in this God-forsaken hole," he
observed between puffs. "What?"
"Oh, it's not so bad--when you get used to it," said the Kid.
He edged his own chair around to face Brannahan squarely--the wound in
the back of his head was bleeding again; perhaps it had never stopped
bleeding, he did not know.
Brannahan made small talk, waiting for the fast freight, east, to
cross; and the Kid smiled, while his fingers clutched desperately now
and then at the arms of his chair to keep himself from pitching over,
as those sickening, giddy waves, like hot and cold flashes, swept him.
Brannahan went at last, the fast freight roared by, No. 81 pulled out,
and the Kid went back to the wash-basin and put his bandage on again.
The morning came and went, the afternoon, and the evening; and by
evening the Kid was sick and dropping weak. That smash on his head
must have been more serious than he had thought at first; for, again
and again, and growing more frequent, had come those giddy flashes, and
once, he wasn't sure, but it seemed as though he had fainted for a
moment or two.
It was getting on to ten o'clock now, and he sat, or, rather, lay
forward with his head in his arms over the desk under the lighted lamp.
The sounder was clicking busily; the Kid raised his head a little, and
listened. There was a Circus Special, west, that night, and No. 2, the
eastbound Limited, was an hour off schedule, and, trying to make it up,
was running with clear rights while everything else on the train sheet
dodged to the sidings to get out of the way. The sounder stopped for
an instant, then came the dispatcher's "complete"--the Circus Special
was to cross the Limited at L'Aramie, the next station west of Angel
Forks. It had nothing to do with the Kid, and it would be another two
hours at least before the Circus Special was along.
The Kid's head dropped back on his arms again. What was he to do? He
could stick out the night somehow--he _must_ stick it out. If he asked
for a relief it was the sack for the man upstairs--it was throwing
McGrew cold. It wouldn't take them long to find out what was the
matter with McGrew! And surely McGrew would be straight again by
morning--he wasn't any better now, worse if anything, but by morning
surely the worst of the drink would be out of him. McGrew had been
pretty bad all day--as bad as the Kid had ever seen a man. He wondered
a little numbly about it. He had thought once that McGrew might have
had some more drink hidden, and he had searched for it during the
forenoon while McGrew watched him from the bunk; but he had found
nothing. It was strange, too, the way McGrew was acting, strange that
it took so long for the man to get it out of his system, it seemed to
the Kid; but the Kid had not found those last two bottles, neither was
the Kid up in therapeutics, nor was he the diagnostician that Doctor
McTurk was.
"By morning," said the Kid, with the moan, "if he can't stand a trick
I'll _have_ to wire. I'm afraid to-night 'll be my limit."
It was still and quiet--not even a breeze to whisper through the cut,
or stir the pine-clad slope into rustling murmurs. Almost heavily the
silence lay over the little station buried deep in the heart of the
mighty range. Only the sounder spoke and chattered--at
intervals--spasmodically.
An hour passed, an hour and a half, and the Kid scarcely moved--then he
roused himself. It was pretty near time for the Circus Special to be
going through to make its meeting point with the Limited at L'Aramie,
and he looked at his lights. He could see them, up and down, switch
and semaphore, from the bay window of the station where he sat. It was
just a glance to assure himself that all was right. He saw the lights
through red and black flashes before his eyes, saw that the main line
was open as it should be--and dropped his swooning, throbbing head back
on his arms once more.
And then suddenly he sat erect. From overhead came the dull, ominous
thud of a heavy fall. He rose from his chair--and caught at the table,
as the giddiness surged over him and his head swam around. For an
instant he hung there swaying, then made his way weakly for the stairs
and started up.
There was a light above--he had kept a lamp burning there--but for a
moment after he reached the top nothing but those ghastly red and black
flashes met his eyes--and then, with a strange, inarticulate cry, he
moved toward the side of the room.
Sprawled in a huddled heap upon the floor beneath the eaves, collapsed,
out like the snuffing of a candle wick, as Doctor McTurk had said some
day he would go out, dead, lay Dan McGrew--the loose plank up, two
empty bottles beside him, as though the man had snatched first one and
then the other from their hiding place in the wild hope that there
might be something left of the supply drained to the last drop hours
before.
The Kid stooped over McGrew, straightened up, stared at the lifeless
form before him, and his hands went queerly to his temples and the
sides of his head--the room spun dizzily around and around, the lamp,
the dead man on the floor, the bunks, a red-and-black flashed
whirl--the Kid's hands reached grasping into nothingness for support,
and he slipped inertly to the floor.
From below came the sharp tattoo of the sounder making the Angel Forks
call, quick, imperative at first--then like a knell of doom, in frantic
appeal, the despatchers' life and death, the _seventeen_--and, "Hold
Circus Special." Over and over again the sounder spoke and cried and
babbled and sobbed like a human soul in agony; over and over again
while the minutes passed, and with heavy, resonant roar the long Circus
Special rumbled by--but the man on the night wire at Angel Forks was
dead; and the Kid was past the hearing--there were to come weeks, while
he raved in the furious delirium and lay in the heavy stupor of brain
fever, before a key meant anything to him again.
It's queer the way things happen! Call it luck, if you like--maybe it
is--maybe it's something more than luck. It wouldn't be sacrilege,
would it, to say that the hand of God had something to do with keeping
the Circus Special and the Limited from crashing head-on in the
rock-walled, twisting canyon, four miles west of Angel Forks, whatever
might be the direct means, ridiculous, before-unheard-of, funny, or
absurd, that saved a holocaust that night? That wouldn't be sacrilege,
would it? Well, call it luck, if you like--call it anything you like.
Queer things happen in railroading--but this stands alone, queerest of
all in the annals of fifty roads in a history of fifty years.
The Limited, thanks to a clean-swept track, had been making up time,
making up enough of it to throw meeting point with the Circus Special
at L'Aramie out--and the despatcher had tried to Hold the Circus
Special at Angel Forks and let the Limited pass her there. There was
time enough to do it, plenty of it--and under ordinary circumstances it
would have been all in the night's work. But there was blame, too, and
Saxton, who was on the key at Big Cloud that night, relieving Donkin,
who was sick, went on the carpet for it--he let the Limited tear
through L'Aramie _before_ he sent his order to Angel Forks, with the
Circus Special in the open cutting along for her meeting point with
nothing but Angel Forks between her and L'Aramie.
That was the despatcher's end of it--the other end is a little
different. Whether some disgruntled employee, seeking to revenge
himself on the circus management, loosened the door of one of the cars
while the Special lay on the siding waiting for a crossing at Mitre
Peak, her last stop, or whether it was purely an accident, no one ever
knew--though the betting was pretty heavy on the disgruntled employee
theory--there had been trouble the day before. However, be that as it
may, one way or the other, one thing was certain, they found the door
open after it was all over, and--but, we're over-running our holding
orders--we'll get to that in a minute.
Bull Coussirat and Fatty Hogan, in the 428, were pulling the Special
that night, and as they shot by the Angel Forks station the fireman was
leaning out of the gangway for a breath of air.
"Wonder how the Kid's making out?" he shouted in Hogan's ear,
retreating into the cab as they bumped over the west-end siding switch
with a shattering racket. "Good kid, that--ain't seen him since the
day he came up with us."
Hogan nodded, checking a bit for the curve ahead, mindful of his
high-priced, heavily insured live freight.
"Did ever you hear such a forsaken row!" he ejaculated irrelevantly.
"Listen to it, Bull. About three runs a year like this and I'd be
clawing at iron bars and trying to mimic a menagerie. Listen to it!"
Coussirat listened. Every conceivable kind of an animal on earth
seemed to be lifting its voice to High Heaven in earnest protest for
some cause or other--the animals, beyond any peradventure of doubt,
were displeased with their accommodations, uncomfortable, and
indignantly uneasy. The rattle of the train was a paltry thing--over
it hyenas laughed, lions roared, elephants trumpeted, and giraffes
emitted whatever noises giraffes emit. It was a medley fit for Bedlam,
from shrill, whistling, piercing shrieks that set the ear-drums
tingling, to hoarse, cavernous bellows like echoing thunder.
"Must be something wrong with the animals," said Coussirat, with an
appreciative grin. "They weren't yowling like that when we
started--guess they don't like their Pullmans."
"It's enough to give you the creeps," growled Fatty Hogan.
Coussirat reached for the chain, and with an expert flip flung wide the
furnace door--and the bright glow lighted up the heavens and shot the
black of the cab into leaping, fiery red. Coussirat swung around,
reaching for his shovel--and grabbed Hogan's arm instead, as a chorus
of unearthly, chattering shrieks rent the air.
"For the love of Mike, for God's sake, Fatty," he gasped, "look at
that!"
Perched on the tender, on the top of the water tank, just beyond the
edge of the coal, sat a well-developed and complacent ape--and, as
Coussirat looked, from the roof of the property car, behind the tender,
another swung to join the first.
"Jiminy Christmas!" yelled Hogan, screwed around in his seat. "The
whole blasted tribe of monkeys is loose! That's what's wrong with the
rest of the animals--the little devils have probably been teasing them
through the barred air-holes at the ends of the cars. Look at 'em!
Look at 'em come!"
Coussirat was looking--he hadn't stopped looking. Along the roof of
the property car they came, a chattering, jabbering, swaying string of
them--and on the brake wheel two sat upright, lurching and clinging for
dear life, the short hair blown straight back from their foreheads with
the sweep of the wind, while they peered with earnest, strained faces
into the cab. And the rest, two dozen strong now, massed on the roof
of the property car, perilously near the edges for anything but
monkeys, inspected the cab critically, picked at each other's hides,
made gestures, some of which were decidedly uncomplimentary, and
chattered volubly to their leaders already on the tender. The tender
seemed to appeal. Down came another monkey via the brake-rod, and
swung by its tail with a sort of flying-trapeze effect to the
tender--and what one did another did--the accommodation on the water
tank was being crowded--the front rank moved up on the coal.
"Say!" bawled Coussirat to his mate. "Say, Fatty, get up and give 'em
your seat--there's ladies present. And say, what are we going to do
about it? The little pets ought to be put back to bed."
"Do nothing!" snapped Hogan, one wary eye on the monkeys, and the other
on the right of way ahead. "If the circus people don't know enough to
shut their damned beasts up properly it's their own lookout--it's not
our funeral, whatever happens."
The advance guard of the monkeys had approached too close to the crest
of the high-piled coal, and as a result, while they scrambled back for
firmer footing, they sent a small avalanche of it rolling into the cab.
This was touching Coussirat personally--and Coussirat glared.
Coussirat was no nature faker--he knew nothing about animals, their
habits, peculiarities, or characteristics. He snatched up a piece of
coal, and heaved it at the nearest monkey.
"Get out, you little devil--_scut_!" he shouted--and missed--and the
effect was disconcerting to Coussirat.
Monkeys are essentially imitative, earnestly so--and not over-timid
when in force--they imitated Coussirat. Before he could get his
breath, first one and then another began to pick up hunks of coal and
heave them back--and into the cab poured a rain of missiles. For an
instant, a bare instant, Coussirat stood his ground, then he dove for
the shelter of his seat. Soft coal? Yes--but there are some fairish
lumps even in soft coal.
Crash went the plate-glass face of the steam gauge! It was a good
game, a joyous game--and there was plenty of coal, hunks and hunks of
it--and plenty of monkeys, "the largest and most intelligent collection
on earth," the billboards said.
Crash went the cab glass behind Fatty Hogan's head--and the monkeys
shrieked delight. They hopped and jumped and performed gyrations over
each other, those in the rear; while those on the firing line, with
stern, screwed up, wizened faces, blinking furiously, swung their hairy
arms--and into the cab still poured the hail of coal.
With a yell of rage, clasping at his neck where the glass had cut him,
Fatty Hogan bounced forward in his seat.
"You double-blanked, blankety-blanked, triple-plated ass!" he bellowed
at Coussirat. "You--you _damned_ fool, you!" he screamed. "Didn't you
know any better than that! Drive 'em off with the hose--turn the hose
on them!"
"Turn it on yourself," said Coussirat sullenly; he was full length on
his seat, and mindful that his own glass might go as Hogan's had.
"D'ye think I'm looking for glory and a wreath of immortelles?"
Funny? Well, perhaps. Is this sacrilege--to say it wasn't luck?
Crash! There was a hiss of steam, a scalding stream of water, and in a
moment the cab was in a white cloud. Mechanically, Hogan slammed his
throttle shut, and snatched at the "air." It was the water glass--and
the water glass sometimes is a nasty matter. Coussirat was on his feet
now like a flash, and both men, clamped-jawed, groped for the cock; and
neither got off scathless before they shut it--and by then the train
had stopped, and not a monkey was in sight.
Jimmie Burke, the conductor, came running up from the rear end, as
Coussirat and Hogan swung out of the gangway to the ground.
"What's wrong?" demanded Burke--he had his watch in his hand.
"Monkeys," said Hogan, and he clipped the word off without any undue
cordiality.
"How?" inquired Burke.
"Monkeys," said Hogan--a little more brittle than before.
"Monkeys?" repeated Burke politely.
"Yes, monkeys!" roared Hogan, dancing up and down with the pain of his
scalded hands. "Monkeys--that's plain enough, ain't it? Monkeys,
blast you!--MONKEYS!"
To the group came one of the circus men.
"The door of the monkey car is open!" he announced breathlessly. "The
monkeys have escaped."
"You don't say!" said Coussirat heavily.
"Yes," said the circus man. "And, look here, we'll have to find them;
they couldn't have got away from the train until it stopped just now."
"Are they intelligent," inquired Coussirat in a velvet voice, "same as
the billboards say?"
"Of course," said the circus man anxiously.
"Well, then, just write them a letter and let them know when to be on
hand for the next performance," said Coussirat grimly. "There's lots
of time--we can hang around here and stall the line for another hour or
two, anyway!"
Burke and Hogan were in earnest consultation.
"We're close on the Limited's time as it is," said Hogan. "And look at
that cab."
"We'd better back up to the Forks, then, and let her cross us there,
that's the safest thing to do," said Burke--and swung his lamp.
"Look here," said the circus man, "we've got to find those monkeys."
Burke looked at him unhappily--monkeys had thrown their meeting point
out--and there was the trainmaster to talk to when they got back to Big
Cloud.
"Unless you want to spend the night here you'd better climb aboard," he
snapped. "All right, Hogan--back away!" And he swung his lamp again.
Ten minutes later, as the Circus Special took the Angel Forks siding
and the front-end brakeman was throwing the switch clear again for the
main line, a chime whistle came ringing long, imperiously, from the
curve ahead. Fatty Hogan's face went white; he was standing up in the
cab and close to Coussirat, and he clasped the fireman's arm. "What's
that?" he cried.
The answer came with a rush--a headlight cut streaming through the
night, there was a tattoo of beating trucks, an eddying roar of wind, a
storm of exhausts, a flash of window lights like scintillating
diamonds, and the Limited, pounding the fish-plates at sixty miles an
hour, was in and out--and _gone_.
Hogan sank weakly down on his seat, and a bead of sweat spurted from
his forehead.
"My God, Bull," he whispered, "do you know what that means?
Something's wrong. _She's against our order_."
They found the Kid and Dan McGrew, and they got the Kid into little
Doctor McTurk's hands at Big Cloud--but it was eight weeks and more,
while the boy raved and lay in stupor, before they got the story. Then
the Kid told it to Carleton in the super's office late one afternoon
when he was convalescent--told him the bald, ugly facts in a sort of
hopeless way.
Carleton listened gravely; it had come near to being a case of more
lives gone out on the Circus Special and the Limited that night than he
cared to think about. He listened gravely, and when the Kid had
finished, Carleton, in that quiet way of his, put his finger instantly
on the crux of the matter--not sharply, but gently, for the Kid had
played a man's part, and "Royal" Carleton loved a man.
"Was it worth it, Keene?" he asked. "Why did you try to shield McGrew?"
The Kid was staring hard at the floor.
"He was my father," he said.
IX
THE OTHER FELLOW'S JOB
There is a page in Hill Division history that belongs to Jimmy Beezer.
This is Beezer's story, and it goes back to the days of the building of
the long-talked-of, figure-8-canted-over-sideways tunnel on the Devil's
Slide, that worst piece of track on the Hill Division, which is to say,
the worst piece of track, bar none, on the American continent.
Beezer, speaking generally, was a fitter in the Big Cloud shops;
Beezer, in particular, wore a beard. Not that there is anything
remarkable in the fact that one should wear a beard, though there are
two classes of men who shouldn't--the man who chews tobacco, and the
man who tinkers around a railroad shop and on occasions, when major
repairs are the order of the day, is intimate with the "nigger-head" of
a locomotive. Beezer combined both classes in his person--but with
Beezer there were extenuating circumstances. According to Big Cloud,
Beezer wore a beard because Mrs. Beezer said so; Mrs. Beezer, in point
of size, made about two of Beezer, and Big Cloud said she figured the
beard kind of took the cuss off the discrepancy.
Anyway, whether that is so or not, Beezer wore a beard, and the reason
it is emphasized here is because you couldn't possibly know Beezer
without it. Its upper extremity was nicotine-dyed, in spots, to a nut
brown, and from thence shaded down to an indeterminate rust color at
its lower edge--when he hadn't been dusting off and doing parlor-maid
work with it in the unspeakable grime of a "front-end." In shape it
never followed the prevailing tonsorial fashions--as far as any one
knew, no barber was ever the richer for Beezer's beard. Beezer used to
trim it himself Sunday mornings--sort of half moon effect he always
gave it.