He had shrewd, brown, little eyes, but, owing to the fact that he had a
small head and wore a large-size, black, greasy peaked cap jammed down
as far over his face as it would go, the color of his eyes could hardly
be said to matter much, for when you looked at Beezer, Beezer was
mostly just a round knob of up-tilted nose--and beard.
Beezer's claims to immortality and fame, such as they are, were vested
in disease. Yes; that's it, you've got it right--disease. Beezer had
a disease that is very common to mankind in general. There's a whole
lot of men like Beezer. Beezer envied the other fellow's job.
Somebody has said that the scarcest thing on earth is hen's teeth, but
the man who hasn't some time or other gone green-eyed over the other
chap's trick, and confidentially complained to himself that he could
"sit in" and hold it down a hanged sight better himself, has the
scarcity-of-hen's-teeth-oracle nailed to the mast from the start. And
a curious thing about it is that the less one knows of what the men he
envies is up against the more he envies--and the better he thinks he
could swing the other's job himself. There's a whole lot like Beezer.
Now Beezer was an almighty good fitter. Tommy Regan said so, and Regan
ought to know; that's why he took Beezer out of the shops where the
other had grown up, so to speak, and gave Beezer the roundhouse repair
work to do. And that's where Beezer caught the disease--in the
roundhouse. Beezer contracted a mild attack of it the first day, but
it wasn't bad enough to trouble him much, or see a doctor about, so he
let it go on--and it got chronic.
Beezer commenced to inhale an entirely different atmosphere, and the
more he inhaled it the more discontented he grew. An engine out in the
roundhouse, warm and full of life, the steam whispering and purring at
her valves, was a very different thing from a cold, rusty, dismantled
boiler-shell jacked up on lumbering blocks in the erecting shop; and
the road talk of specials, holding orders, tissues, running time and
what-not had a much more appealing ring to it than discussing how many
inches of muck No. 414 had accumulated on her guard-plates, the
incidental damning of the species wiper, and whether her boxes wanted
new babbitting or not. Toiling like a slave ten hours a day for six
days a week, and maybe overtime on Sundays, so that the other fellow
could have the fun, and the glory, and the fatter pay check, and the
easy time of it, began to get Beezer's goat. The "other fellow" was
the engineer.
Beezer got to contrasting up the two jobs, and the more he contrasted
the less he liked the looks of his own, and the more he was satisfied
of his superior ability to hold down the other over any one of the
crowd that signed on or off in the grease-smeared pages of the turner's
book, which recorded the comings and goings of the engine crews. And
his ability, according to Beezer's way of looking at it, wasn't all
swelled head either; for there wasn't a bolt or a split-pin in any type
of engine that had ever nosed its pilot on the Hill Division that he
couldn't have put his finger on with his eyes shut. How much, anyhow,
did an engineer know about an engine? There wasn't a fitter in the
shops that didn't have the best engineer that ever pulled a throttle
pinned down with his shoulders flat on the mat on that count--and there
wasn't an engineer but what would admit it, either.
But a routine in which one is brought up, gets married in, and comes to
look upon as a sort of fixed quantity for life, isn't to be departed
from offhand, and at a moment's notice. Beezer grew ardent with envy,
it is true; but the idea of actually switching over from the workbench
to the cab didn't strike him for some time. When it did--the first
time--it took his breath away--literally. He was in the pit, and he
stood up suddenly--and the staybolts on the rocker-arm held, and Beezer
promptly sat down from a wallop on the head that would have distracted
the thoughts of any other man than Beezer.
Engineer Beezer! He had to lift the peak of his cap to dig the tears
out of his eyes, but when he put it back again the peak was just a
trifle farther up his nose. Engineer Beezer--a limited run--the
Imperial Flyer--into division on the dot, hanging like a lord of
creation from the cab window--cutting the miles on the grades and
levels like a swallow--roaring over trestles--diving through
tunnels--there was excitement in that, something that made life worth
living, instead of everlastingly messing around with a hammer and a
cold chisel, and pulling himself thin at the hips on the end of a
long-handled union wrench. Day dreams? Well, everybody day-dreams,
don't they? Why not Beezer?
It is not on record that any one ever metamorphosed himself into a
drunkard on the spot the first time he ever stepped up to a bar; but as
the Irishman said: "Kape yer foot on the rail, an' yez have the makin's
av a dombed foine bum in yez!"
Of course, the thing wasn't feasible. It sounded all right, and was
mighty alluring, but it was all dream. Beezer put it from him with an
unctuous, get-thee-behind-me-Satan air, but he purloined a book of
"rules"--road rules--out of Pudgy MacAllister's seat in the cab of the
1016. He read up the rules at odd moments, and moments that weren't
odd--and gradually the peak of his cap crept up as far as the bridge of
his nose. Beezer was keeping his foot on the rail.
Mrs. Beezer found the book. That's what probably started things along
toward a showdown. She was, as has been said, a very large woman; also
she was a very capable woman of whom Beezer generally stood in some
awe, who washed, and ironed, and cooked for the Beezer brood during the
day, and did overtime at nights on socks and multifarious sewing,
including patches on Beezer's overalls--and other things, which are
unmentionable. The book fell out of the pocket of one of the other
things, one evening. Mrs. Beezer examined it, discovered MacAllister's
name scrawled on it, and leaned across the table under the paper-shaded
lamp in their modest combination sitting and dining room.
"What are you doing with this, Mr. Beezer?" she inquired peremptorily;
Mrs. Beezer was always peremptory--with Beezer.
Beezer coughed behind his copy of the Big Cloud _Daily Sentinel_.
"Well?" prompted Mrs. Beezer.
"I brought it home for the children to read," said Beezer, who, being
uncomfortable, sought refuge in the facetious.
"Mr. Beezer," said Mrs. Beezer, with some asperity, "you put down that
paper and look at me."
Mr. Beezer obeyed a little doubtfully.
"Now," continued Mrs. Beezer, "what's got into you since you went into
the roundhouse, I don't know; but I've sorter had suspicions, and this
book looks like 'em. You might just as well make a clean breast of
what's on your mind, because I'm going to know."
Beezer looked at his wife and scowled. He felt what might be imagined
to be somewhat the feelings of a man who is caught sneaking in by the
side entrance after signing the pledge at a Blue Ribbon rally. It was
not a situation conducive to good humor.
"There ain't anything got into me," said he truculently. "If you want
to know what I'm doing with that book, I'm reading it because I'm
interested in it. And I've come to the conclusion that a fitter's job
alongside of an engineer's ain't any better than a mud-picking
Polack's."
"You should have found that out before you went into the shops ten
years ago," said Mrs. Beezer, with a sweetness that tasted like vinegar.
"Ten years ago!" Beezer flared. "How's a fellow to know what he's cut
out for, and what he can do best, when he starts in? How's he to know,
Mrs. Beezer, will you tell me that?"
Mrs. Beezer was not sympathetic.
"I don't know how he's to know," she said, "but I know that the trouble
with some men is that they don't know when they're well off, and if
you're thinking of----"
"I ain't," said Beezer sharply.
"I said 'if,' Mr. Beezer; and if----"
"There's no 'if' about it," Beezer lied fiercely. "I'm not----"
"You are," declared Mrs. Beezer emphatically, but with some wreckage of
English due to exceeding her speed permit--Mrs. Beezer talked fast.
"When you act like that I know you are, and I know you better than you
do yourself, and I'm not going to let you make a fool of yourself, and
come home here dead some night and wake me up same as poor Mrs. Dalheen
got her man back week before last on a box car door. Don't you know
when you're well off? You an engineer! What kind of an engineer do
you think you'd make? Why----"
"Mrs. Beezer," said Beezer hoarsely, "shut up!"
Mrs. Beezer caught her breath.
"What did you say?" she gasped.
"I said," said Beezer sullenly, picking up his paper again, "that I'd
never have thought of it, if you hadn't put it into my head; and now
the more I think of it, the better it looks."
"I thought so," sniffed Mrs. Beezer profoundly. "And now, Mr. Beezer,
let this be the last of it. The idea! I never heard of such a thing!"
Curiously enough, or perhaps naturally enough, Mrs. Beezer's cold-water
attitude had precisely the opposite effect on Jimmy Beezer to that
which she had intended it should have. It was the side-entrance
proposition over again. When you've been caught sneaking in that way,
you might just as well use the front door on Main Street next time, and
have done with it. Beezer began to do a little talking around the
roundhouse. The engine crews, by the time they tumbled to the fact
that it wasn't just the ordinary grumble that any man is entitled to in
his day's work, stuck their tongues in their cheeks, winked
surreptitiously at each other--and encouraged him.
Now it is not to be implied that Jimmy Beezer was anybody's fool--not
for a minute--a first-class master fitter with his time served is a
long way from being in that class right on the face of it. Beezer
might have been a little blinded to the tongues and winks on account of
his own earnestness; perhaps he was--for a time. Afterwards--but just
a minute, or we'll be running by a meeting point, which is mighty bad
railroading.
Beezer's cap, when he took the plunge and tackled Regan, had got tilted
pretty far back, so far that the peak stood off his forehead at about
the same rakish angle that his upturned little round knob of a nose
stuck up out of his beard; which is to say that Beezer had got to the
stage where he had decided that the professional swing through the
gangway he had been practising every time, and some others, that he had
occasion to get into a cab, was going to be of some practical use at an
early date.
He put it up to Regan one morning when the master mechanic came into
the roundhouse.
Regan leaned his fat little body up against the jamb of one of the big
engine doors, pulled at his scraggly brown mustache, and blinked as he
listened.
"What's the matter with you, Beezer, h'm?" he inquired perplexedly,
when the other was at an end.
"Haven't I just told you?" said Beezer. "I want to quit fitting and
get running."
"Talks as though he meant it," commented Regan sotto voce to himself,
as he peered earnestly into the fitter's face.
"Of course, I mean it," declared Beezer, a little tartly. "Why
wouldn't I?"
"No," said Regan; "that ain't the question. The question is, why would
you? H'm?"
"Because," Beezer answered promptly, "I like a snap as well as the next
man. It's a better job than the one I've got, better money, better
hours, easier all around, and one I can hold down with the best of
them."
Regan's eyebrows went up.
"Think so?" he remarked casually.
"I do," declared Beezer.
"Well, then," said Regan, "if you've thought it all out and made up
your mind, there's nothing I know of to stop you. Want to begin right
away?"
"I do," said Beezer again. It was coming easier than he had
expected--there was a jubilant trill in his voice.
"All right," said Regan. "I'll speak to Clarihue about it. You can
start in wiping in the morning."
"Wiping?" echoed Beezer faintly.
"Sure," said Regan. "That's what you wanted, wasn't it? Wiping--a
dollar-ten a day."
"Look here," said Beezer with a gulp; "I ain't joking about this."
"Well, then, what are you kicking about?" demanded Regan.
"About wiping and a dollar-ten," said Beezer. "What would I do with a
dollar-ten, me with a wife and three kids?"
"I don't know what you'd do with it," returned Regan. "What do you
expect?"
"I don't expect to start in wiping," said Beezer, beginning to get a
little hot.
"You've been here long enough to know the way up," said Regan.
"Wiping, firing--you take your turn. And your turn'll come for an
engine according to the way things are shaping up now in, say, about
fifteen years."
"Fifteen years!"
"Mabbe," grinned Regan. "I can't promise to kill off anybody to
accommodate you, can I?"
"And don't the ten years I've put in here count for anything?" queried
Beezer aggressively. "Why don't you start me in sweeping up the
round-house? Wiping! Wiping, my eye! What for? I know all about the
way up. That's all right for a man starting in green; but I ain't
green. Why, there ain't a year-old apprentice over in the shops there
that don't know more about an engine than any blooming engineer on the
division. You know that, Regan--you know it hanged well, don't you?"
"Well," admitted the master mechanic, "you're not far wrong at that,
Beezer."
"You bet, I'm not!" Beezer was emphatic. "How about me, then? Do I
know an engine, every last nut and bolt in her, or don't I?"
"You do," said Regan. "And if it's any satisfaction to you to know it,
I wouldn't ask for a better fitter any time than yourself."
"Then, what's the use of talking about wiping? If I've put in ten
years learning the last kink there is in an engine, and have forgotten
more than the best man of the engine crews 'll know when he dies,
what's the reason I ain't competent to run one?"
Regan reached into his back pocket for his chewing, wriggled his head
till his teeth met in the plug, and tucked the tobacco back into his
pocket again.
"Beezer," said he slowly, spitting out an undesirable piece of stalk,
"did it ever strike you that there's a whole lot of blamed good horse
doctors that'd make damn poor jockeys--h'm?"
Beezer scowled deeply, and kicked at a piece of waste with the toe of
his boot.
"All I want is a chance," he growled shortly. "Give me a chance, and
I'll show you."
"You can have your chance," said Regan. "I've told you that."
"Yes," said Beezer bitterly. "It's a hell of a chance, ain't it? A
dollar-ten a day--_wiping_! I'd be willing to go on firing for a
spell."
"Wiping," said Regan with finality, as he turned away and started
toward the shops; "but you'd better chew it over again, Beezer, and
have a talk with your wife before you make up your mind."
Somebody chuckled behind Beezer--and Beezer whirled like a shot. The
only man in sight was Pudgy MacAllister. Pudgy's back was turned, and
he was leaning over the main-rod poking assiduously into the internals
of the 1016 with a long-spouted oil can; but Beezer caught the
suspicious rise and fall of the overall straps over the shoulders of
the fat man's jumper.
Beezer was only human. It got Beezer on the raw--which was already
pretty sore. The red flared into his face hard enough to make every
individual hair in his beard incandescent; he walked over to Pudgy,
yanked Pudgy out into the open, and shoved his face into the engineer's.
"What in the double-blanked, blankety-blanked blazes are you grinning
at?" he inquired earnestly.
"H'm?" said Pudgy.
"Yes--_h'm_!" said Beezer eloquently. "That's what I'm asking you."
Whether Pudgy MacAllister was just plain lion-hearted, or a rotten bad
judge of human nature isn't down on the minutes--all that shows is that
he was one or the other. With some labor and exaggerated patience, he
tugged a paper-covered pamphlet out of his pocket from under his
jumper. It was the book of rules Beezer had "borrowed" some time
before.
"Mrs. Beezer," said Pudgy blandly, "was over visiting the missus this
morning, and she brought this back. From what she said I dunno as it
would do any good, but I thought, perhaps, if you were going to take
Regan's advice about talking to your wife, you and Mrs. Beezer might
like to look it over again together before you----"
That was as far as Pudgy MacAllister got. Generally speaking, the more
steam there is to the square inch buckled down under the valve, the
shriller the whistle is when it breaks loose. Beezer let a noise out
of him that sounded like a green parrot complaining of indigestion, and
went at MacAllister head-on.
The oil can sailed through the air and crashed into the window glass of
Clarihue's cubby-hole in the corner. There was a tangled and revolving
chaos of arms and legs, and lean and fat bodies. Then a thud. There
wasn't any professional ring work about it. They landed on the floor
and began to roll--and a pail of packing and black oil they knocked
over greased the way.
There was some racket about it, and Regan heard it; so did Clarihue,
and MacAllister's fireman, and another engine crew or two, and a couple
of wipers. The rush reached the combatants when there wasn't more than
a scant thirty-second of an inch between them and the edge of an empty
pit--but a thirty-second is a whole lot sometimes.
When they stood them up and got them uncoupled, MacAllister's black eye
was modestly toned down with a generous share of what had been in the
packing bucket, but his fist still clutched a handful of hair that he
had separated from Beezer's beard--and Beezer's eyes were running like
hydrants from the barbering. Take it all around, thanks mostly to the
packing bucket, they were a fancy enough looking pair to send a
high-class team of professional comedians streaking for the sidings all
along the right of way to get out of their road.
It doesn't take very much, after all, to make trouble, not very much;
and, once started, it's worse than the measles--the way it spreads.
Mostly, they guyed Pudgy MacAllister at first; they liked his make-up
better owing to the black eye. But Pudgy was both generous and modest;
what applause there was coming from the audience he wanted Beezer to
get--he wasn't playing the "lead."
And Beezer got it. Pudgy opened up a bit, and maybe drew on his
imagination a bit about what Mrs. Beezer had said to Mrs. MacAllister
about Jimmy Beezer, and what Beezer had said to Regan, and Regan to
Beezer, not forgetting Regan's remark about the horse doctor.
Oh, yes, trouble once started makes the measles look as though it were
out of training, and couldn't stand the first round. To go into
details would take more space than a treatise on the manners and
customs of the early Moabites; but, summed up, it was something like
this: Mrs. Beezer paid another visit to Mrs. MacAllister, magnanimously
ignoring the social obligation Mrs. MacAllister was under to repay the
former call. Mrs. MacAllister received Mrs. Beezer in the kitchen over
the washtubs, which was just as well for the sake of the rest of the
house, for when Mrs. Beezer withdrew, somewhat shattered, but in good
order, by a flank movement through the back yard, an impartial observer
would have said that the kitchen had been wrecked by a gas explosion.
This brought Big Cloud's one lawyer and the Justice of the Peace into
it, and cost Beezer everything but the odd change on his month's pay
check--when it came.
Meanwhile, what with a disturbed condition of marital bliss at home,
Beezer caught it right and left from the train crews, engine crews and
shop hands during the daytime. They hadn't anything against Beezer,
not for a minute, but give a railroad crowd an opening, and there's no
aggregation on earth quicker on the jump to take it. They dubbed him
"Engineer" Beezer, and "Doctor" Beezer; but mostly "Doctor" Beezer--out
of compliment to Regan. And old Grumpy, the timekeeper in the shop,
got so used to hearing it that he absent-mindedly wrote it down "Doctor
Beezer" when he came to make up the pay roll. That put it up to
Carleton, the super, who got a curt letter from the auditors' office
down East, asking for particulars, and calling his attention to the
fact that all medical services were performed by contract with the
company. Carleton scowled perplexedly at the letter, scrawled Tommy
Regan's initials at the bottom of the sheet, plus an interrogation
mark, and put it in the master mechanic's basket. Regan grinned, and
wrote East, telling them facetiously to scratch out the "Doctor" and
squeeze in a "J" in front of the "Beezer" and it would be all right;
but it didn't go--you can't get by a high-browed set of red-tape-bound
expert accountants of unimpeachable integrity, who are safeguarding the
company's funds like that. Hardly! They held out the money, and by
the time the matter was straightened out the pay car had come and gone,
and Beezer got a chance to find out how good his credit was.
Considering everything, Beezer took it pretty well--he went around as
though he had boils.
But if Beezer had a grouch, and cause for one, it didn't make the other
fellow's job look any the less good to Beezer. Mrs. Beezer's sharp
tongue, barbed with contemptuous innuendo that quite often developed
into pointed directness as to her opinion of his opinions, and the kind
of an engineer he'd make, which he was obliged to listen to at night,
and the men--who didn't know what an innuendo was--that he was obliged
to listen to by day, didn't alter Beezer's views on that subject any,
whatever else it might have done. Beezer had a streak of stubbornness
running through the boils.
He never got to blows again. His tormentors took care of that. They
had MacAllister as an example that Beezer was not averse to bringing
matters to an intimate issue at any time, and what they had to say they
said at a safe distance--most of them could run faster than Beezer
could, because nature had made Beezer short. Beezer got to be a pretty
good shot with a two-inch washer or a one-inch nut, and he got to
carrying around a supply of ammunition in the hip pocket of his
overalls.
As for MacAllister, when the two ran foul of each other, as the
engineer came on for his runs or signed off at the end of one, there
wasn't any talking done. Regan had warned them a little too hard to
take chances. They just looked at each other sour enough to turn a
whole milk dairy. The men told Beezer that MacAllister had rigged a
punching bag up in his back yard, and was taking a correspondence
course in pugilism.
Beezer said curried words.
"Driving an engine," said they, "is a dog's life; it's worse than
pick-slinging, there's nothing in it. Why don't you cut it out?
You've had enough experience to get a job in the _shops_. Why don't
you hit Regan up and change over?"
"By Christmas!" Beezer would roar, while he emptied his pocket and gave
vent to mixed metaphor, "I'd show you a change over if I ever got a
chance; and I'd show you there was something to running an engine
besides bouncing up and down on the seat like balls with nothing but
wind in them, and grinning at the scenery!"
A chance--that's all Beezer asked for--a chance. And he kept on asking
Regan. That dollar-ten a day looked worse than ever since Mrs.
Beezer's invasion of Mrs. MacAllister's kitchen. But Regan was
obdurate, and likewise was beginning to get his usually complacent
outlook on life--all men with a paunch have a complacent, serene
outlook on life as a compensation for the paunch--disturbed a little.
Beezer and his demands were becoming ubiquitous. Regan was getting
decidedly on edge.
"Firing," said Beezer. "Let me start in firing--there's as much in
that as in fitting, and I can get along for the little while it'll be
before you'll be down on your knees begging me to take a throttle."
"Firing, eh!" Regan finally exploded one day. "Look here, Beezer; I've
heard about enough from you. Firing, eh? There'd have been some
firing done before this that would have surprised you if you hadn't
been a family man! Get that? The trouble with you is that you don't
know what you want or what you're talking about."
"I know what I want, and I know what I'm talking about," Beezer
answered doggedly; "and I'm going to keep on putting it up to you till
you quit saying 'No.'"
"You'll be doing it a long time, then," said Regan bluntly, laying a
few inches of engine dust with blackstrap juice; "a long time,
Beezer--till I'm dead."
But it wasn't. Regan was wrong about that, dead wrong. It's
unexplainable the way things work out sometimes!