"Y-yes," stammered Smithers weakly, with a gulp.
And then Bradley laughed--queerly.
"You're a damn fool, Smithers!" he flung out, with a savage jeer.
"What do you know about it!" And throwing the engineer's arm from him,
his shovel clanged and clanged again, as into the red maw before him he
shot the coal.
Smithers was scared. Bradley never said another word after that--just
kept to his own side of the cab, hugging his seat, staring through the
cab glass ahead, chin down on his breast, pulling the door at
intervals, firing at intervals like an automaton, then back to his seat
again. Smithers was scared.
At Elk River, the end of the local run, Smithers told the train crew
about it, and they laughed at him, and looked around to find out what
Martin Bradley had to say about it--but Bradley wasn't in sight.
Not much of a place, Elk River, not big enough for one to go anywhere
without the whole population knowing it; and it wasn't long before they
knew where Bradley was. The local made a two hours' lay-over there
before starting back for Big Cloud; and Martin Bradley spent most of it
in Kelly's place, a stone's throw from, the station. Not drinking
much, a glass or two all told, sitting most of the time staring out of
the window--not drinking much--getting the _taste_ of it that he hadn't
known for a matter of many years. Two glasses, perhaps three, that was
all--but he left Kelly's for the run back with a flask in his pocket.
It was the flask that did it, not Smithers. Smithers was frightened at
his silent fireman tippling over his shovel, good and frightened before
he got to Big Cloud, and Smithers did not understand; but Smithers, for
all that, wasn't the man to throw a mate down cold. Neither was
Bradley himself bad enough to have aroused any suspicion. It was the
flask that did it.
They made Big Cloud on the dot that morning--11.26. And in the
roundhouse, as Bradley stepped out through the gangway, his overalls
caught on the hasp of the tool-box on the tender, and the jerk sent the
flask flying into splinters on the floor--at Regan's feet.
The fat little master mechanic, on his morning round of inspection,
halted, stared in amazement at the broken glass and trickling beverage,
got a whiff of the raw spirit, and blinked at Bradley, who, by this
time, had reached the ground.
"What's the meaning of this?" demanded Regan, nonplussed. "Not you,
Bradley--on the run?"
Bradley did not answer. He was regarding the master mechanic with a
half smile--not a pleasant one--more a defiant curl of his lips.
Smithers, discreetly attempting to make his escape through the opposite
gangway, caught Regan's attention.
"Here, you, Smithers," Regan called peremptorily, "come----"
Then Bradley spoke, cutting in roughly.
"Leave Smithers out of it," he said.
Regan stared for another moment; then took a quick step forward, close
up to Bradley--and got the fireman's breath.
Bradley shoved him away insolently.
It was a minute before Regan spoke. He liked Bradley and always had;
but from the soles of his feet up to the crown of his head, Regan,
first and last, was a railroad man. And Regan knew but one creed.
Other men might drink and play the fool and be forgiven and trusted
again, a wiper, a shop hand, a brakeman, perhaps, or any one of the
train crew, but a man in the cab of an engine--_never_. Reasons,
excuses, contributory causes, counted not at all--they were not asked
for--they did not exist. The fact alone stood--as the fact. It was a
minute before Regan spoke, and then he didn't say much, just a word or
two without raising his voice, before he turned on his heel and walked
out of the roundhouse.
"I'm sorry for this, Bradley," he said. "You're the last man I
expected it from. You know the rules. You've fired your last run on
this road. You're out."
But Regan might have been making some comment on the weather for all
the concern it appeared to give Bradley. He stood leaning against the
tender, snapping his fingers in his queer way, silent, hard-faced, his
eyes far away from his immediate surroundings. Smithers, a wiper or
two, Reddy MacQuigan amongst them, clustered around him after Regan had
gone; but Bradley paid no attention to them, answered none of their
questions or comments; and after a little while pushed himself through
them and went out of the roundhouse.
Bradley didn't go home that day; but Reddy MacQuigan did--at the noon
hour. That's how Mrs. MacQuigan got it. Mrs. MacQuigan did not wait
to wash up the dishes. She put on the little old-fashioned poke bonnet
that she had worn for as many seasons as Big Cloud could remember, and
started out to find Regan. She ran the master mechanic to earth on the
station platform, and opened up on him, fluttering, anxious, and
distressed.
"Sure, Regan," she faltered, "you did not mean it when you fired Martin
this morning--not for good."
Regan pulled at his mustache and looked at her--and shook his head at
her reprovingly.
"I meant it, Mrs. MacQuigan," he said kindly. "You must know that. It
will do neither of us any good to talk about it. I wouldn't have let
him out if I could have helped it."
"Then listen here, Regan," she pleaded. "Listen to the why of it, that
'tis only me who knows."
And Regan listened--and the story lost nothing in the telling because
the faded eyes were wet, and the wrinkled lips quivered sometimes, and
would not form the words.
At the end, big-hearted Regan reached into his back pocket for his
plug, met his teeth in it, wrenched a piece away without looking at
her, and cleared his throat--but he still shook his head.
"It's no use you talking, Mrs. MacQuigan," he said gruffly, to hide his
emotion. "I'd fire any man on earth, 'tis no matter the who or why,
for drinking in the cab on a run."
"But, Regan," she begged, catching at his arm, "he'll be leaving Big
Cloud with his job gone."
"And what then?" said Regan. "Mabbe 'twould be the best thing--h'm?"
"Ah, Regan," she said, and her voice caught a little, "sure, 'twould be
the end of Martin, don't you see? 'Tis me that knows him, and 'twill
not last long, the spell, only till the worst of it is over--Martin is
too fine for that, Regan. If I can keep him by me, Regan, d'ye mind?
If he goes away where there's nobody to give him a thought
he'll--he'll--ah, Regan, faith, Regan, 'tis a lot you've thought of
Martin Bradley the same as me."
Regan examined a crack in the planking of the station platform
minutely, while Mrs. MacQuigan held tenaciously to his coat sleeve.
"I dunno," said Regan heavily. "I dunno. Mabbe I'll----"
"Ah, Regan!" she cried happily. "I knew 'twas----"
"Not in a cab!" interposed Regan hastily. "Not if he was the president
of the road. But I'll see, Mrs. MacQuigan, I'll see."
And Regan saw--Thornley, the trainmaster. And after Thornley, he saw
Reddy MacQuigan in the roundhouse.
"Reddy," said he, with a growl that wasn't real, "there's a vacancy in
the engine crews--h'm?"
"Martin's?" said Reddy quickly.
"Yes," said Regan. "Do you want it?"
"No," said Reddy MacQuigan shortly.
"Good boy," said the fat little master mechanic. "Then I'll give it to
you just the same. Martin's through in here; but he'll get a chance
braking for Thornley. You'll run spare to begin with, and"--as Reddy
stared a little numbly--"don't break your neck thanking me. Thank
yourself for turning into a man. Your mother's a fine woman, Reddy. I
guess you're beginning to find that out too--h'm?"
So Reddy MacQuigan went to firing where Martin Bradley had fired
before, and his pay went up; and Bradley--no, don't get that
idea--whatever else he may have done, Martin Bradley didn't make a
beast of himself. Bradley took the job they offered him, neither
gratefully nor ungratefully, took it with that spirit of utter
indifference for anything and everything that seemed to have laid hold
of him and got him in its grip--and off duty he spent most of his time
in the emporiums along Main Street. He drank some, but never enough to
snow him under; it was excitement that he seemed to crave,
forgetfulness in anything that would absorb him for the moment. It was
not drink so much; it was the faro tables and the roulette and the stud
poker that, crooked from the drop of the hat, claimed him and cleaned
him out night after night--all except Mrs. MacQuigan's board money,
that they never got away from, him. Mrs. MacQuigan got that as
regularly now that she didn't need it with Reddy to look after her as
she had when she was practically dependent upon Bradley for it all.
Silent, grim, taciturn always, more so now than ever, Bradley went his
way; indifferent to Regan when Regan buttonholed him; indifferent to
Thornley and his threats of dismissal, meant to jerk Bradley into the
straight; indifferent to every mortal thing on earth. And the Hill
Division, with Regan leading, shook its head. There wasn't a man but
knew the story, and, big under the greasy jumpers and the oil-soaked
shirts, they never judged him; but Bradley's eyes held no invitation
for companionship, so they left him pretty much alone.
"I dunno," said Regan, tugging at his mustache, twiddling with his
thumbs over his paunch, "I dunno--looks like the scrap heap at the end
of the run--h'm? I dunno."
But Mrs. MacQuigan said no.
"Wait," said she, with her patient smile. "It's me that knows Martin.
It's a sore, hurt heart the boy has now; but you wait and see--I'll win
him through. It's proud yet you'll be to take your hats off to Martin
Bradley!"
Martin Bradley--a game man--that's what they call him now. Mrs.
MacQuigan was right--wasn't she? Not perhaps just in the way she
thought she was--but right for all that. Call it luck or chance if you
like, something more than that if it strikes you that way--but an
accident in the yards one night, a month after Bradley had lost his
engine, put one of the train crew of the Rat River Special out of
commission with a torn hand, and sent a call boy streaking uptown for a
substitute. Call it luck if you like, that the work train with a
hybrid gang of a hundred-odd Polacks, Armenians, and Swedes, cooped up
in a string of box cars converted into bunk houses, mess houses and
commissariat, a window or two in them to take the curse off, and end
doors connecting them for the sake of sociability, pulled out for the
new Rat River trestle work with Reddy MacQuigan handling the shovel end
of it for Bull Coussirat, who had been promoted in the cab--and Bradley
as the substitute brakeman on the front end. Well, maybe it was
luck--but that's not what they call it on the Hill Division.
Perhaps no one quite understood Bradley, even at the end, except Mrs.
MacQuigan; and possibly even she didn't get it all. Inconsistent, to
put it mildly, that a man like Bradley would have let go at all? Well,
it's an easy matter and a very human one, to judge another from the
safe vantage ground of distance--isn't it? Some men take a thing one
way, and some another; and in some the feelings take deeper root than
in others--and find their expression in a different way. Ditched from
the start, Bradley hadn't much to cling to, had he--only the baby girl
he had dreamed about on the runs at night; only the little tot he had
slaved for, who some day was to make a home for him? But about the Rat
River Special----
It was midnight when they pulled out of Big Cloud; and Bradley, in the
caboose, glanced at Heney's tissue, which, as a matter of form, the
conductor gave him to read. The Special was to run twenty minutes
behind No. 17, the westbound mail train, and make a meeting point with
the through freight, No. 84, eastbound, at The Forks. The despatchers
had seized the propitious moment to send the rolling camp through in
the quiet hours of traffic, with an eye out to getting the foreigners
promptly on the job in the morning for fear they might draw an extra
hour or two of time--without working for it! The Special was due to
make Rat River at four o'clock.
Bradley handed back the order without comment, picked up his lantern,
and started for the door.
"No need of going forward to-night," said Heney, laying his arm on
Bradley's arm. "We've only a short train, a dozen cars, and we can
watch it well enough from the cupola. It's damn cold out there."
"Oh, I guess it's all right, Heney," Bradley answered--and went out
through the door.
There weren't any platforms to the box cars, just small end doors.
Once in camp, and stationary on a siding, the cars would be connected
up with little wooden gangways, you understand? Bradley, from the
platform of the caboose, stepped across the buffer, and made his way
through several cars. One was pretty much like another; a stove going,
and stuffy hot; the foreigners stretched out in their bunks, some of
them; some of them playing cards on the floor; some asleep; some
quarrelling, chattering, jabbering; a hard looking lot for the most
part, black-visaged, scowling, unshaven, gold circlets dangling in
their ears--bar the Swedes.
Bradley worked along with scarcely more than a glance at the occupants,
until, in the fourth car, he halted suddenly and shoved his lamp into
the face of a giant of a man, who squatted in the corner, sullen and
apart, with muttering lips.
"What's wrong with you?" he demanded brusquely.
The man drew back with a growl that was like a beast's, lips curling
back over the teeth. Bradley stared at him coolly, then turned
inquiringly to the crowd in the car. He was greeted with a burst of
unintelligible, polyglot words, and spontaneous, excitable
gesticulations. Bradley shrugged his shoulders, and slammed the door
behind him.
Outside on the buffer, he reached for the ladder, swung himself up the
iron rungs to the top of the car, and, with his lantern hooked in his
arm, sat down on the footboard, bracing himself against the brake
wheel, and buttoned his reefer--there was another night--to
think--ahead of him.
To think--if he could only forget! It was that fearful sense of
impotency--impotency--impotency. It seemed to laugh and jeer and mock
at him. It seemed to make a plaything of this father love of his.
There was nothing--nothing he could do to bring her back--that was
it--nothing! Soul, life, mind and body, he would have given them all
to have saved her--would give them now to bring her back--and there was
only this ghastly impotency. It seemed at times that it would drive
him mad--and he could not forget. And then the bitter, crushing grief;
the rebellion, fierce, ungovernable, that his _all_ should have been
taken from him, that the years he had planned should be turned to
nothing but grinning mockery; and then that raging sense of impotency
again, that rocked his turbulent soul as in an angry, storm-tossed sea.
Time passed, and he sat there motionless, save for the jolting of the
train that bumped him this way and that against the brake wheel. They
were into the mountains now; and the snowy summits, moon-touched,
reared themselves in white, grotesque, fanciful shapes, and seemed,
cold in their beauty, to bring an added chill to the frosty night.
Ahead, far ahead, the headlight's ray swept now the track, now the gray
rock side, now, softly green, a clump of pines, as the right of way
curved and twisted and turned; now, slowing up a grade, the heavy,
growling bark of the exhaust came with long intervals between, and now,
on the level, it was quick as the tattoo of a snare drum, with the
short stack belching a myriad fiery sparks insolently skyward in a
steady stream; around him was the sweep of the wind, the roar of the
train, the pound of the trucks beating the fish-plates, the sway, the
jerk, the recovery of the slewing cars, and, curiously, the deep,
brooding silence of the mountains, frowning, it seemed, at this
sacrilege of noise; behind, showed the yellow glimmer from the caboose,
the dark, indistinct outline of a watching figure in the cupola.
Suddenly, snatching at the brake wheel to help him up, Bradley sprang
erect. From directly underneath his feet came a strange, confused,
muffled sound, like a rush of men from one end of the car to the other.
Then there broke a perfect bedlam of cries, yells, shouts and
screams--and then a revolver shot.
In an instant Bradley was scrambling down the ladder to
investigate--they could not hear the row, whatever it was, in the
caboose--and in another he had kicked the car door open and plunged
inside. A faint, bluish haze of smoke undulated in the air, creeping
to the roof of the car; and there was the acrid smell of powder--but
there was no sign of a fight, no man, killed or wounded, sprawling on
the floor. But the twenty men who filled the car were crouched in
groups and singly against the car sides; or sat upright in their bunks,
their faces white, frightened--only their volubility unchecked, for all
screamed and talked and waved their arms at once.
They made a rush for Bradley, explaining in half a dozen languages what
had happened. Bradley pushed them roughly away from him.
"Speak English!" he snapped. "What's wrong here? Can't any of you
speak English?"
An Italian grabbed his arm and pointed through the door Bradley had
left open behind him to the next car forward. "Pietro!" he shouted out
wildly. "Gotta da craze--mad--gotta da gun!"
"Well, go on!" prodded Bradley. "He's run into the next car. I
understand that--but what happened here? Who's Pietro?"
But the man's knowledge, like his English, was limited. He did not
know much--Pietro was not one of them--Pietro had come only that
morning to Big Cloud from the East--Pietro had gone suddenly mad--no
man had done anything to make Pietro mad.
And then suddenly into Bradley's mind leaped the story that he had read
in the papers a few days before of an Italian, a homicidal maniac, who
had escaped from an asylum somewhere East, and had disappeared. The
description of the man, as he remembered it, particularly the great
size of the man, tallied, now that he thought of it, with the fellow
who had been in the car when he had first passed through. He glanced
quickly around--the man was gone. So that was Pietro!
Bradley started on the run for the next car ahead; and, subconsciously,
as he ran, he felt the speed of the train quicken. But that was
natural enough--they had been crawling to the summit of Mitre Peak,
and, over that now, before them lay a four-percent grade to the level
below, one of the nastiest bits of track on the division, curves all
the way--only Bull Coussirat was hitting it up pretty hard for a
starter.
In the next car the same scene was repeated--the smell of powder smoke,
the blue haze hanging listless near the roof out of the air currents;
the crouched, terrified foreigners, one with a broken wrist, dangling,
where a bullet had shattered it. Pietro, Berserker fashion, was
shooting his way through the train.
Bradley went forward more cautiously now, more warily. Strange the way
the speed was quickening! The cars were rocking now with short,
vicious slews. He thought he heard a shout from the track-side
without, but he could not be sure of that.
Through the next car and the next he went, trailing the maniac; and
then he started to run again. Stumbling feet, trying to hold their
footing, came to him from the top of the car. With every instant now
the speed of the train was increasing--past the limit of safety--past
the point where he would have hesitated to use the emergency brakes, if
there had been any to use--a luxury as yet extended only to the
passenger equipment in those days. The Polacks, the Armenians, and the
Swedes were beginning to yell with another terror, at the frantic
pitching of the cars, making a wild, unearthly chorus that echoed up
and down the length of the train.
Bradley's brain was working quickly now. It wasn't only this madman
that he was chasing fruitlessly. There must be something wrong, more
serious still, in the engine cab--that was Heney, and Carrol, the other
brakeman, who had run along the top.
Bradley dashed through the door, and, between the cars, jumped for the
ladder and swarmed up--the globe of his lamp in a sudden slew shivered
against the car roof, and the flame went out in a puff. He flung the
thing from him; and, with arms wide outspread for balance on his
reeling foothold, ran, staggered, stumbled, recovered himself, and sped
on again, springing from car to car, up the string of them, to where
the red flare, leaping from the open fire box in the cab ahead,
silhouetted two figures snatching for their hold at the brake-wheel on
the front end of the forward car--Heney and Carrol. And as Bradley
ran, a thin stream of flame spurted upward from the cab, and there came
faintly, almost lost in the thunder of the train, the bark of a
revolver shot--and the two figures, ducking instantly, crouched lower.
And then Bradley stood beside the others; and Heney, that no man ever
called a coward, clutched at Martin Bradley and shouted in his ear:
"For God's sake, Martin, what'll we do? The throttle was wide at the
top of the grade when he threw Bull Coussirat off. We saw it from the
cupola. It's certain death to make a move for him!"
But Bradley made no answer. Tight-lipped, he was staring down into the
cab; and a livid face stared back at him--the face of the man that he
had stopped to look at as they had pulled out of Big Cloud--Pietro--the
face, hideously contorted, of a maniac. And on the floor of the cab,
stretched out, wriggling spasmodically, Reddy MacQuigan lay upon his
back; and Pietro half knelt upon him, clutching with one hand at the
boy's throat, pointing a revolver with the other at the roof of the car.
Wild, crazy fast now, the speed was; the engine dancing ahead; the cars
wriggling behind; the yellow glimmer of the caboose shooting this way
and that like a pursuing phantom will-o'-the-wisp; and from beneath the
roofs of the cars rose that muffled, never-ending scream of terror from
the Polacks, the Armenians and the Swedes--rose, too, from the roofs of
the cars themselves, for some were climbing there. It was disaster
absolute and certain not a mile ahead where the track in a short,
murderous curve hugged Bald Eagle Peak, with the canyon dropping a
thousand feet sheer down from the right of way, disaster there--if they
ever got that far!
But Bradley, though he knew it well enough from a hundred runs, was not
thinking of that. In a calm, strange way there seemed to come one more
analogy between Mrs. MacQuigan's life and his--this human thing that
looked like a gorilla was choking her son to death, the son that was
making a home for her as she had dreamed he would do some day, the son
that was all she had to depend upon. Mrs. MacQuigan's son--his little
girl. Both out!
There seemed to flash before him the picture of the gray head bowed
upon the red-checkered tablecloth in the little dining room, the frail
shoulders shaking with the same grief that he was drinking now to the
dregs, the same grief that he would have sold his soul to avert--only
he had been impotent--impotent. But he was not impotent here--to keep
those dregs from Mrs. MacQuigan, the only soul on earth he cared for
now. And suddenly Bradley laughed--loud--high above the roar of the
train, the shouts and screams of the maddened creatures it was sweeping
to eternity, and the human gorilla in the cab shot its head forward and
covered Bradley with its revolver, teeth showing in a snarl.
And so Bradley laughed, and with the laugh poised himself--and sprang
far out from the car roof in a downward plunge for the tender, reached
the coal and rolled, choking with the hot blood in his throat from the
shot that had caught him in mid-air, rolled down with an avalanche of
coal, grappled with the frothing creature that leaped to meet him,
staggered to his feet, struggled for a moment, fast-locked with the
madman, until a lurch of the engine hurled them with a crash against
the cab frame, and the other, stunned, slid inertly from his grasp.
And then for an instant Bradley stood swaying, clutching at his
throat--then he took a step forward--both hands went out pawing for the
throttle, found it, closed it--and he went down across Bull Coussirat's
empty seat--dead.