THE DONOVAN CHANCE
[Illustration: “I reckon you can find your way from here”]
THE
DONOVAN CHANCE
BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
ILLUSTRATED BY
THOMAS FOGARTY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1921
Copyright, 1921, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Copyright, 1920, by The Sprague Pub. Co.
[Illustration: logo]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE BUG AND THE ELEPHANT 1
II IN TOURMALINE CANYON 25
III A BREACH OF DISCIPLINE 51
IV “THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN” 71
V AT TUNNEL NUMBER TWO 93
VI BULL PEAK AND THE CRAWLING SHALE 110
VII THE UNINVITED SPECIAL 130
VIII A FELLOW NAMED JONES 152
IX “GANGWAY!” 173
X THE WINNING GOAL 195
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“I reckon you can find your way from here” _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
“What made you run away and go home?” 22
They had a glimpse of the sleeping sentinel stretched
out before the padlocked door 48
For the first few minutes they could do nothing but stare.
It all seemed like magic 62
The timber raft with its terrific bomb was swinging out
into the current 90
A minute later the prisoners were hauled out 108
Larry went over the edge of the rock ... and worked his
way out to one of the depressions 122
With a rush and a roar the flying locomotive shot down
upon the masterless Pullman 148
THE DONOVAN CHANCE
CHAPTER I
THE BUG AND THE ELEPHANT
Engine 331, the biggest mountain passenger-train puller on the Nevada
Short Line, was a Pacific-type compound, with a bewildering clutter of
machinery underneath that made a wiper’s job a sort of puzzle problem;
the problem being to get the various gadgets clean without knocking
one’s head off too many times against the down-hanging machinery. Larry
Donovan, mopping the last of the gadgets as the shop quitting-time
whistle blew, called it a day’s work, flung down his handful of oily
waste and crawled out of the concrete pit.
Grigg Dunham, fireman of the 246, which was standing next door to the
331, leaned out of his cab window.
“’Lo, Blackface!” he grinned. “Time to go home and eat a bite o’ pie.”
Larry’s return grin showed a mouthful of well-kept teeth startlingly
white in their facial setting of grime. Normally he was what you might
call a strawberry blonde, with lightish red hair that curled and
crinkled discouragingly in spite of a lot of wetting and brushing, and
a skin, where it wasn’t freckled or sunburned, as healthily clear as
a baby’s; but wiping black oil and gudgeon grease from the under parts
of a locomotive would make a blackamoor out of an angel――for the time
being, at least.
“I’m going after that piece of pie as soon as I can wash up,” he told
Dunham; and a minute later he was stripping off his overalls in the
round-house scrub room.
Thanks to a good bath and a change from his working clothes it was an
altogether different looking Larry who presently left the round-house
to go cater-cornering up the yard toward the crossing watchman’s shanty
at Morrison Avenue. One thing his hard-earned High School course――just
now completed――had taught him was to be really chummy with soap and
water, and another was to leave the shop marks behind him when the
quitting whistle blew――as a good many of his fellow workers on the
railroad did not. Big and well-muscled for his age, it was chiefly his
cheerful grin that stamped him as a boy when he looked in upon his
father at the crossing shanty.
“Ready, Dad?” he asked; and the big, mild-eyed crossing watchman, whose
empty left sleeve showed why he was on the railroad “cripple” list,
nodded, took down his coat from its hook on the wall and joined his son
for the walk home.
“Well, Larry, lad, how goes the new job by this time?” John Donovan
asked, after the pair had tramped in comradely silence for a square or
two.
Larry was looking straight ahead of him when he replied:
“I’m going to tell you the truth, Dad; I’m not stuck on it――not a
little bit.”
The crossing watchman shook his big head in mild disapproval.
“You’ve done fine, Larry; pulling yourself through the school by the
night work in the shops. But it’s sorry I am if it’s made you ashamed
of a bit of black oil.”
“It isn’t that; you know it isn’t, Dad. The black oil doesn’t count.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“It’s――er――oh, shucks! I just can’t tell, when you pin me right down to
it. I don’t mind the work or getting dirty, or anything like that; and
I do like to fool around engines and machinery. I guess it’s just what
there is to look forward to that’s worrying me. I’ll be wiping engines
for a few months, and then maybe I’ll get a job firing a switching
engine in the yard. A year or two of that may get me on a road engine;
and if I make good, a few years more’ll move me over to the right-hand
side of the cab.”
“Good enough,” said John Donovan. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing――except that the last boost will be the end of it; you know
it will, Dad. It’s mighty seldom that a locomotive engineer ever gets
to be anything else, no matter how good an engineer he is. Right there
I’ll stop; and I’ve been sort of asking myself if I’m going to be
satisfied to stop.”
Again John Donovan made the sign of disapproval.
“’Tis too many high notions the school’s been putting into your head,
Larry, boy,” he deprecated. “You’d be forgetting that your father was
an engineer before you――till the old ’69 went into the ditch and gave
me this”――moving the stump in the empty sleeve.
“No, I’m not forgetting, Dad; not for a single minute,” Larry broke in
quickly. “You’ve made the best of your chance――and of everything. And I
want to do the same. Maybe I _am_ doing it in the round-house; I can’t
think it out yet. But I mean to think it out. There are Kathie and
Jimmie and Bessie and little Jack; they’ve got to have their chance at
the schools, too, the same as I’ve had mine.”
“And you’ll give it to them, Larry, if I can’t. With even a fireman’s
pay you could help.”
“I know,” said Larry; and at this point the little heart-to-heart talk
slipped back into the comradely silence and stayed there.
Larry ate supper with the family that evening as usual, but he said so
little, and was so evidently preoccupied, that his mother asked him if
he wasn’t feeling well. The talk with his father on the way home had
been his first attempt to put the vague stirrings inside of him into
spoken words, and the natural consequence was that he was trying to
make the stirrings take some sort of definite and tangible shape. Of
course they refused utterly to do anything so reasonable as that――which
is the way that all ambitious stirrings have in their early stages――and
the result was to make him thoughtful and tongue-tied.
So the table chatter went on through the meal without any help from
him, and he found himself listening with only half an ear when his
father told of a perfectly hair-raising escape an automobile full
of people had had on his crossing during the day. Kathryn, who was
fifteen, was the only one besides the mother to notice Larry’s
preoccupation, and when he came down-stairs after supper to go out, she
was waiting at the front door for him.
“What is it, Larry?” she asked. “Did something go twisty with you
to-day?”
“Not a thing in the wide world, Kathie,” he denied, calling up the
good-natured grin and laying an arm in brotherly fashion across her
shoulders.
“But you’re not going back to work to-night?”
“Not me,” he laughed, cheerfully reckless of his grammar now that his
school-days were over. “I’m just going out to walk around the block and
have a think; that’s all.”
“What about?”
“Oh, I don’t know; everything, I guess. Don’t you worry about me. I’m
all right.” And to prove it he went off whistling and with his hands in
his pockets.
The after-supper stroll, which was entirely aimless as to its
direction, led him first through the quiet streets of the “railroad
colony.” In its beginnings Brewster had been strictly a railroad town;
but now it had become the thriving metropolis of Timanyoni Park; a city
in miniature, with electric lights and power furnished by the harnessed
river, with some manufacturing, and with an irrigated wheat and
apple-growing country around it to take the place of the cattle ranges
which had preceded the coming of the railroad.
Now, though Larry’s stroll was aimless, as we have said, that is, in
any conscious sense of having a definite destination, there was just
one direction it was almost bound to take. Born and bred in a railroad
atmosphere, it was second nature for him to drift toward the handsome,
lava-stone building which served the double purpose of the Nevada Short
Line’s passenger station and general office headquarters.
The long concreted approach platform running down from the foot of the
main street offered itself as a cab rank for the station; and as Larry
traversed it, still deep in the brown study, General Manager Maxwell’s
smart green roadster cut a half circle in the turning area, whisked
accurately into its parking space between two other cars, and the
fresh-faced young fellow who had played at first base on the Brewster
High School nine in the winning series with Red Butte, climbed out and
hailed the brown-studier.
“Hullo, Curly!” he called, using the school nickname which Larry had
long since come to accept merely because he had never been able to
think up any way of killing it off. “What are you doing down here at
this time o’ night?”
“‘Time o’ night’ happens to be time of the early evening,” Larry
corrected; adding: “One thing I’m not doing is joy-riding in a green
chug-wagon.”
“Tag,” said the general manager’s son good-naturedly. “Neither am I.
Father has a conference of some sort on with the bosses. I don’t know
what’s up, but I suppose it’s all this anarchist talk that’s been going
around and stirring things up. He ’phoned me up home a little while ago
and told me to drive down and wait for him.”
“Anarchist talk?” said Larry; “I haven’t heard any.”
“Oh, it’s just that little bunch of trouble-makers over on the west
end. You remember reading in the papers how they spoiled a lot of work
in the shops and raised Cain generally. The court over in Uintah County
sent three of them to prison last week for sabotage and the others have
threatened to get square with the company for prosecuting them. That’s
all.”
Larry caught step with the former first baseman as they walked on
toward the station building.
“Is this all you’re going to do this vacation, Dick?” he asked; “drive
down to the offices once in a while to take your father home in the
car?”
“Not on your sweet life!” was the laughing reply. “What I’m going to
do is tied up in a sort of secret, but I guess it’ll be all right to
tell you. The company is going to build a road up the Tourmaline to
the Little Ophir gold field, and――this is the secret part of it――we’re
going to try to beat the Overland Central to it. I’m to go out with
the surveying party, or rather the construction party, as a sort of
roustabout, chain-bearer――anything you like to call it.”
The difference between Dick Maxwell’s prospects and his own gave Larry
Donovan the feeling of having been suddenly wrapped in a wet blanket.
In a flash he saw a panorama picture of Dick’s summer; the free,
adventurous life in the mountain wilds, the long days crammed full of
the most interesting kind of work, the camp fire at night in the heart
of the immensities, and, more than all, the chance to be helping to
do something that was really adding to the sum of the world’s riches.
Wiping grease from tired machinery wasn’t to be spoken of in the same
day with it. Yet Larry was game; he wouldn’t share the wet blanket with
the lucky one.
“That’s simply bully!” he said; “first lessons in engineering, eh?”
“Y-yes; maybe: but it ought to be you, Larry, instead of me. You’ve got
the head for it, and the math., and all the rest of it. Have you gone
to work in the round-house as you said you were going to?”
“Yep,” said Larry, and he tried to say it as a workingman would have
said it. “I had to make up my mind one way or the other. It was either
the round-house or an apprenticeship in the back shop.”
“Wouldn’t the apprenticeship have been better?”
“Nope; nothing at the end of that alley but maybe a foreman’s job.”
“And maybe a master-mechanic’s,” Dick Maxwell put in.
“Not much!” Larry scoffed. “Might have put that sort of stuff over in
our grandfather’s days――they _did_ put it over then. But you can’t do
it now. Look at our own superintendent of Motive Power――Mr. Dawson;
he’s a college man――has to be; and so is every single one of the
division master-mechanics. It’s all very well to talk about climbing up
through the ranks, Dick, and I guess now and then a fellow does do it
by working his head off. But it’s the education that counts.”
“I guess that’s so, too,” was the half reluctant reply. “But how about
the ‘promosh’ from where you are now in the round-house, Larry?”
“From where I am now I can count on getting an engine to run some day,
if I’ll be good――and if I live long enough. That’s a step higher than a
shop foremanship――at least, in wages.”
By this time they had passed through the station archway that ran
through the first story of the railroad building and were out upon the
broad, five-track train platform.
“Let’s tramp a bit,” said Dick. “They’re still drilling over that
conference in the trainmaster’s office and goodness only knows when
they’ll be through.”
The tramping turned itself into a sort of sentry-go up and down the
long platform; and to go with it there was a lot of talk about things
as they are, and things as they ought to be. Since he couldn’t talk
freely at home――at least to anybody but Kathryn, and she, after all was
said, was only a girl――Larry opened his mind to the fellow with whom,
among all his late classmates, he had been most chummy.
“I don’t know; it looks as if a fellow never does know, until it’s
everlastingly too late, Dick; but I shouldn’t wonder if I’m not taking
that ‘line of the least resistance’ that Professor Higgins used to be
always talking about. I guess I could make out to go to college this
fall and grind my way through somehow, even without much money; in fact
I’m sure I could if I should set my head on it. But then there are the
home folks. Dad’s got about all he can carry, and then some; and Kathie
and the others are needing their boost for the schooling――they’ve got
to have it. I’ll leave it to you, Dick: has a fellow in my fix any
right to drop out for four solid years――just when the money he can earn
is needed most?”
It was too deep a question for Dickie Maxwell and he confessed it. What
he didn’t realize was that it was made a lot deeper for him because
he had never known how much brain or brawn, or both, it takes to roll
up the slow, cart-wheel dollars in this world. He hadn’t had to know,
because his father, in addition to being the railroad company’s general
manager, was half-owner in one of the best-paying gold mines in the
near-by Topaz range. True, Mr. Richard Maxwell was democratic enough
to put his son into an engineering party for the summer, but that
didn’t mean that the wages that Dick might earn――or the wages he might
get without specially earning them――would make any real difference to
anybody.
As the two boys tramped up and down the platform and talked, the stir
around them gradually increased. Train gates and grilles were as yet
unknown in Brewster, and intending travelers, with their tickets bought
and their baggage checked, were free to wander out upon the platform to
wait for their train――which they mostly did.
Dick Maxwell held his wrist watch up to the light of one of the
masthead electrics. The “Flying Pigeon” from the west was almost due;
but Number Eleven, the time freight from the east, had not yet pulled
in, as they could see by looking up through the freight yard starred
with its staring red, yellow and green switch lights.
“Eleven is going to miss making her time-card ‘meet’ here with the
‘Pigeon’ if she doesn’t watch out,” said the general manager’s son, who
knew train schedules and movements on the Short Line much better than
he did some other and――for him, at least――more necessary things.
“That will just about break Buck Dickinson’s heart,” Larry predicted.
“Only day before yesterday I heard him bragging that since they gave
him the big new 356 Consolidated he hadn’t missed a ‘meet’ in over two
months.”
Again Dick looked at his watch.
“If the ‘Pigeon’s’ on time he has only thirteen minutes left,” he
announced; and then: “Hullo!――what’s that?”
“That” was a small white spot-light coming down through the freight
yard from the east. It was too little for an engine headlight――and too
near the ground level. Somewhere up among the yard tracks it stopped;
the switch lamp just ahead of it flicked from yellow to red; the little
headlight moved on a few yards; and then the switch signal flicked back
to yellow.
Larry Donovan laughed.
“I ought to know what that thing is, if you don’t,” he offered. “It’s
Mr. Roadmaster Browder’s gasoline inspection car――‘The Bug,’ as they
call it. _I’d_ say he was taking chances; coming in that way just ahead
of a time freight.”
“A miss is as good as a mile,” Dick countered. “He’s in, and
side-tracked and out of the way, and that’s all he needed. There goes
his light――out.”
As he spoke the little spot-light blinked out, and as the two boys
turned to walk in the opposite direction an engine headlight appeared
at the western end of things, coming up the other yard from the
round-house skip. Since Brewster was a locomotive division station, all
trains changed engines, and the boys knew that this upcoming headlight
was carried by the “Flying Pigeon’s” relief; the engine that would take
the fast train up Timanyoni Canyon and on across the Red Desert.
Half a minute later the big passenger flyer trundled up over the
outside passing-track with a single man――the hostler――in the cab. At
the converging switches just west of the station platform the engine’s
course was reversed and it came backing slowly in on the short station
spur or stub-track to come to a stop within a few yards of where Larry
and the general manager’s son were standing.
“The 331,” said Larry, reading the number. “She ought to run pretty
good to-night. I put in most of the afternoon cleaning her up and
packing her axle-boxes.”
Dick Maxwell didn’t reply. Being a practical manager’s son, he was
already beginning to acquire a bit of the managerial point of view.
What he was looking at was the spectacle of Jorkins, the hostler,
hooking the 331’s reversing lever up to the center notch, and then
dropping out of the engine’s gangway to disappear in the darkness.
“That’s a mighty reckless thing to do, and it’s dead against the
rules,” Dick said; “to leave a road engine steamed up and standing that
way with nobody on it!”
“Atkins and his fireman will be here in a minute,” Larry hazarded.
“And, anyway, nothing could happen. She’s hooked up on the center, and
even if the throttle should fly open she couldn’t start.”
“Just the same, a steamed-up engine oughtn’t to be left alone,” Dick
insisted. “There’s always a chance that something might happen.”
Now in the case of the temporarily abandoned 331 something did happen;
several very shocking somethings, in fact; and they came so closely
crowding together that there was scarcely room to catch a breath
between them.
First, a long-drawn-out whistle blast announced the approach of the
“Flying Pigeon” from the west. Next, the waiting passengers began to
bunch themselves along the inbound track. Dickie Maxwell, managerial
again, was growling out something about the crying necessity for
station gates and a fence to keep people from running wild all over the
platform when Larry grabbed him suddenly, exclaiming, “Who is that――on
the ’Thirty-one?”
What they saw was a small, roughly dressed man, a stranger, with a
bullet-shaped head two-thirds covered by a cap drawn down to his ears,
snapping himself up to the driver’s step in the cab of the 331. In a
flash he had thrown the reversing lever into the forward motion and
was tugging at the throttle-lever. A short car-length away down the
platform, fat, round-faced Jerry Atkins and his fireman were coming
up to take their engine for the night’s run to Copah. They were not
hurrying. The “Flying Pigeon” was just then clanking in over the
western switches, and the incoming engine must be cut off and taken
out of the way before they could run the 331 out and back it in to a
coupling with the train. And since the two enginemen were coming up
from behind, the high, coal-filled tender kept them from seeing what
was going on in the 331’s cab.
But the two boys could see, and what they saw paralyzed them, just for
the moment. The bullet-headed stranger was inching the throttle-valve
open, and with a shuddering blast from the short stack the wheels of
331 began to turn. An instant later it was lumbering out around the
curving stub-track and as it lurched ahead, somebody, invisible in the
darkness, set the switch to connect the spur-track with the main line.
Dick Maxwell gasped.
“Who is that man at the throttle?” he demanded; but before there could
be any answer they both saw the man hurl himself out of the right-hand
gangway of the moving machine, to alight running, and to vanish in the
nearest shadows. Then they knew.
“The anarchists!――they’re going to wreck her!” yelled Larry. “Come
on!” and then they both did just what anybody might have done under
the stinging slap of the first impulse, and knowing that a horrifying
collision of the runaway with the over-due fast freight couldn’t be
more than a few short minutes ahead: they started out to chase a
full-grown locomotive, under steam and abandoned, afoot!
It was the fact that the 331 was a “compound” that made it seem at
first as though they might be able to catch her. Compound engines are
the kind designed to take the exhaust steam from one pair of cylinders,
using it over again in the second pair. But to get the maximum power
for starting a heavy train there is a mechanism which can be set to
admit the “live” steam from the boiler into both pairs of cylinders;
and the 331 was set that way when the wrecker opened the throttle. As a
consequence the big passenger puller was choking itself with too much
power, and so was gaining headway rather slowly.
“He’s left her ‘simpled’――we can catch her!” Larry burst out as they
raced over the cross-ties in the wake of the runaway. “We――we’ve _got_
to catch her! _Sh-she’ll hit the time freight!_”
It was all perfectly foolish, of course; but perfectly human. If they
could have taken time to think――only there wasn’t any time――they would
have run in exactly the opposite direction; back to the despatcher’s
office where a quick wire alarm call to the “yard limits” operator out
beyond the eastern end of the freight yard might have set things in
motion to shunt the wild engine into a siding, and to display danger
signals for the incoming freight train.
But nobody ever thinks of everything all at once; and to Larry and his
running mate the one thing bitingly needful seemed to be to overtake
that lumbering Pacific-type before it could get clear away and bring
the world to an end.
They were not more than half-way up through the deserted freight yard
before they both realized that even well-trained, base-running legs and
wind were not good enough. Dick Maxwell was the first to cave in.
“W-we can’t do it!” he gurgled――“she’s gone!”
It was at this crisis that Larry Donovan had his inspiration; found
himself grappling breathlessly with that precious quality which makes
the smashed fighter get up and dash the sweat out of his eyes and
fight again. The inspiration came at the sight of the roadmaster’s
transformed hand-car which had been fitted with a gasoline drive,
standing on the siding where its late users had left it.
“The Bug――Browder’s motor car!” he gasped, leading a swerving dart
aside toward the new hope. “Help me push it out to the switch――quick!”
They flung themselves against the light platform car, heaved, shoved,
got it in motion, and ran it swiftly to the junction of the siding with
the main track. Here, tugging and lifting a corner at a time (they
had no key with which to unlock the switch, of course,) they got it
over upon the proper pair of rails. Another shove started the little
pop-popping motor and they were off, with Larry, who as a night helper
in the shops the winter before had worked on the job of transforming
the hand-car and installing the engine in it, at the controls.
By the time all this was done the runaway had passed the “yard limits”
signal tower and was disappearing around the first curve in the track
beyond. Neither of the boys knew anything about the speed possibilities
in the “Bug,” but they soon found that it could run like a scared
jack rabbit. Recklessly Larry depressed the lever of the accelerator,
trusting to the lightness of the car to keep it from jumping as it
squealed around the curves, and at the first mile-post they could see
that they were gaining upon the wild engine, which was still choking
itself with too much power.
“Another mile and we’ll get there!” Dick Maxwell shouted――he had to
shout to make himself heard above the rattle and scream of the flying
wheels; “another mile, if that freight’ll only――――”
There was a good reason why he didn’t finish whatever it was that he
was going to say. The two racing machines, the beetle and the elephant,
had just flicked around a curve to a long straight-away, and up ahead,
partly hidden by the thick wooding of another curve, they both saw the
reflection from the beam of a westbound headlight. The time freight was
coming.
It was small wonder that Dickie Maxwell lost his nerve for just one
flickering instant.
“Stop her, Larry――stop her!” he yelled. “If we keep on, the smash’ll
catch us, too!”
But Larry Donovan was grimly hanging on to that priceless gift so
lately discovered; namely, the gift which enables a fellow to hang on.
“No!” he yelled back. “We’ve got to stop that runaway. Clamp onto
something――I’m giving her all she’s got!”
It was all over――that is, the racing part of it was――in another
half-minute. As the gap was closing between the big fugitive and its
tiny pursuer, Larry shouted his directions to Dick.
“Listen to me, Dick: there’s no use in two of us taking the chance
of a head-ender with Eleven. When we touch I’m going to climb the
’Thirty-one. As I jump, you shut off and reverse and get back out of
the way, quick! Do you hear?”
The Brewster High School ex-first-baseman heard, but he had a firm grip
on his nerve, now, and had no notion of heeding.
“I won’t!” he shouted back. “Think I’m going to let you hog all the
risk? Not if I know it!”
Circumstances, and the quick wit of one Larry Donovan, cut the
protest――and the double risk――as the poor dog’s tail was cut off;
close up under the ears. As the motorized hand-car surged up under the
“goose-neck” coupling buffer on the rear of the 331’s tender, Larry
did two separate and distinct things at the same instant, so to speak;
snapped the motor car’s magneto spark off and so killed it, and leaped
for a climbing hold on the goose-neck.
With his hold made good he permitted himself a single backward glance.
True to form, the Bug, with its power cut off, was fading rapidly out
of the zone of danger. Larry gathered himself with a grip on the edge
of the tender flare, heaved, scrambled, hurled himself over the heaped
coal and into the big compound’s cab and grabbed for the throttle and
the brake-cock handle.
There wasn’t any too much time. After he had shut off the steam and was
applying the air-brakes with one hand and holding the screaming whistle
open with the other, the headlight of the fast freight swung around the
curve less than a quarter of a mile away. As you would imagine, there
was also some pretty swift work done in the cab of the freight engine
when Engineer Dickinson saw a headlight confronting him on the single
track and heard the shrill scream of the 331’s whistle.
Luckily, the freight happened to be a rather light train that
night――light, that is, as modern, half-mile-long freight trains go――and
the trundling flats, boxes, gondolas and tank-cars, grinding fire
under every clamped wheel, were brought to a stand while there was
yet room enough, say, to swing a cat between the two opposed engines.
Explanations, such as they were, followed hastily; and the freight crew
promptly took charge of the situation. The Bug was brought up, lifted
off the rails, carried around, and coupled in to be towed instead of
pushed; and then Dickinson’s fireman was detailed to run the 331 back
to Brewster, with the freight following at a safe interval.
Larry and Dick Maxwell rode back in the cab of 331, Larry doing what
little coal shoveling was needed on the short run. When the big
Pacific-type, towing the transformed hand-car, backed through the
freight yard and edged its way down to the passenger platform, there
was an excited crowd waiting for it, as there was bound to be. News of
the bold attempt at criminal sabotage had spread like wildfire, and the
two criminals――the one who had started the locomotive, and the other
who had set the outlet switch for it――had both been caught before they
could escape.
Larry Donovan, dropping his shovel, saw the crowd on the station
platform and knew exactly what it meant; or rather, exactly what was
going to happen to him and Dick when they should face it. Like most
normal young fellows he had his own special streak of timidity, and it
came to the fore with a bound when he saw that milling platform throng.
With a sudden conviction that it would be much easier to face loaded
cannon than those people who were waiting to yell themselves hoarse
over him and Dickie Maxwell, he slid quickly out of the left-hand
gangway before the 331 came to a full stop, whisked out of sight around
an empty passenger-car standing on the next track, and was gone.
It was still only in the shank of the evening when he reached home. A
glance through the window showed him the family still grouped around
the lamp in the sitting-room. Making as little noise as possible he
let himself into the hall and stole quietly up-stairs to his room. Now
that the adventure was over there were queer little shakes and thrills
coming on to let him know how fiercely he had been keyed up in the
crisis.
After a bit he concluded he might as well go to bed and sleep some of
the shakiness off; and he already had one shoe untied when somebody
tapped softly on his door.
“It’s only me――Kathie,” said a voice, and he got up to let her in. One
glance at the sort of shocked surprise in his sister’s pretty eyes made
him fear the worst.
“Mr. Maxwell has just sent word for you to come to his office, right
away,” was the message that was handed in; and Larry sat on the edge of
his bed and held his head in his hands, and said, “Oh, _gee_!”
“What have you been doing to have the general manager send for you at
this time of night?” Kathie wanted to know. The question was put gently,
as from one ready either to sympathize or congratulate――whichever might
be needed.
“You’ll probably read all about it in the _Herald_ to-morrow,” said
Larry, gruffly; and with that he tied his shoe string and found his cap
and went to obey the summons.
It is hardly putting it too strongly to say that Larry Donovan found
the six city squares intervening between home and the headquarters
building a rather rocky road to travel as he made his third trip over
the same ground in a single evening. The timidity streak was having
things all its own way now, and he thought, and said, he’d rather be
shot than to have to face what he supposed he was in for――namely, the
plaudits of a lot of people who would insist upon making a fuss over a
thing that was as much a bit of good luck as anything else.
But, as often happens, if you’ve noticed it, the anticipation
proved to be much worse than the reality. Reaching the railroad
headquarters-station building he found that the “Flying Pigeon” had
long since gone on its way eastward, the crowd had dispersed, and there
was nobody at all in the upper corridor of the building when he passed
through it on his way to the general manager’s suite of rooms at the
far end.
Still more happily, after he had rather diffidently let himself
in through the ante-room, he found only the square-shouldered,
grave-faced general manager sitting alone at the great desk between the
windows. There was a curt nod for a greeting; the nod indicating an
empty chair at the desk end. Larry sat on the edge of the chair with
his cap in his hands, and the interview began abruptly.
“You are John Donovan’s son, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“H’m; so you’re the fellow who was with my Dick. What made you run away
and go home after you got back with the 331?”
[Illustration: “What made you run away and go home?”]
Larry grinned because he couldn’t help it, though it was a sort of
_lesé majesté_ to grin in the presence of the general manager.
“I――I guess it was because I was afraid of the crowd,” he confessed.
“Modest?――or just bashful?”
“J-just scared, I guess.”
The barest shadow of a smile flickered for an instant in the general
manager’s shrewd gray eyes.
“I don’t know as I blame you so much for that,” he commented. Then:
“Dick tells me that you are wiping engines in the round-house. Did you
pick out that job for yourself?”
“N-not exactly,” Larry managed to stammer. “I was through school and
had to go to work at something. I guess I just took the first thing I
could find.”
“Well, do you like it? Is it what you want to do?”
Larry somehow found his courage returning.
“No, sir; it isn’t,” he said baldly.
“Why isn’t it?”
Stumblingly and most awkwardly, as it seemed to him when he recalled
it afterward, Larry blurted out some of his half-formed ambitions, and
the conditions which were handcuffing them; the desire to get on in the
world without knowing just how it was to be accomplished.
“If Dad hadn’t been crippled,” he finished; “if he could have gone
on getting an engineer’s pay, things would be different. But as it
is――well, I guess you can see how it is, Mr. Maxwell. I’m the oldest.”
The general manager heard him through without breaking in, and at
the end of the story he was looking aside out of one of the darkened
windows.
“You may not realize it,” he said, without looking around, “but you did
a mighty brave thing to-night, boy. Dick has told me all about it; how
it was your idea to take the roadmaster’s gasoline inspection car for
the chase; how you kept on when he would have given up; how you drove
him back at the last and wouldn’t let him share the risk which you took
alone.”
Larry felt that this was too much. He had time for the sober second
thought now, and he saw how all of the danger might have been avoided.
“I’m sort of ashamed of myself, Mr. Maxwell,” he said sheepishly. “The
’Thirty-one wasn’t going very fast; she was ‘simpled’ and was choking
herself. If, instead of chasing her, we had run up to the despatcher’s
office, they could have caught her all right at ‘yard limits’.”
“That doesn’t cut any figure,” was the sober reply. “The main thing
is that you did what you set out to do――stopped that runaway engine.
Results are what count. You didn’t think of the easy thing to do, but
you did think of something that worked. For that the company is
indebted to you. How should you like to have the debt paid?”
“We didn’t do it for pay,” Larry protested.
“I know that,”――curtly. “Just the same, you have earned the pay. What
would you like? Don’t be bashful twice in the same evening.”
Thus adjured, Larry took his courage in both hands and gripped it so
hard that if it had had a voice it must have yelled aloud.
“I――I’d like to have a job this summer where I could earn enough money
to count for something at home, and where I could have a chance to
learn something and get ahead.”
Again the grave-eyed “big boss” was looking out of the darkened window.
“Tell me just what the job would be――if you could have your choice,” he
said quietly.
For one flitting instant Larry thought of the engineering party that
was going to the Tourmaline, and what a perfectly rip-roaring good time
he could have with Dick if he should be along; but so he dismissed that
picture before it should get too strong a hold.
“I guess I’m not picking and choosing much,” he made shift to say.
“I’ll do anything you tell me to, Mr. Maxwell.”
“But that wouldn’t be paying the company’s debt. If you’ve got it
in you to make good, you shall have the kind of job to give you the
opportunity,” said the general manager, adding: “That is, of course, if
your father approves.”
Larry leaned forward anxiously.
“Would it be――would it be to go on wiping engines?” he made bold to
ask, rather breathlessly.
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought there was just a hint of a twinkle
in the grave gray eyes to go with Mr. Maxwell’s reply.
“That wouldn’t be much of a reward――to make you foreman of
engine-wipers: you’d probably earn that for yourself in course of
time. I said you might have the kind of job you wanted most. Dick
has been telling me of your talk just before the 331 was stolen.
Next Monday morning you and he will both go out with the Tourmaline
Canyon construction force――to do whatever Mr. Ackerman, the chief
of construction, may want you to do; always providing your father
approves. Your pay will be something better than you are at present
getting in the round-house. That’s all; run along, now, and talk it
over with your father and mother.”
And Larry ran, treading upon air for the space of six city squares.
For now, you see, he had been given his chance――which was all that a
Donovan could ask.