THE TURN IN THE STORM
The beginning of the Crawling Stone Line marked the first determined
effort under President Bucks, while undertaking the reconstruction of
the system for through traffic, to develop the rich local territory
tributary to the mountain division. New policies in construction dated
from the same period. Glover, with an enormous capital staked for the
new undertakings, gave orders to push the building every month in the
year, and for the first time in mountain railroad-building winter was
to be ignored. The older mountain men met the innovation as they met
any departure from their traditions, with curiosity and distrust. On
the other hand, the new and younger blood took hold with confidence,
and when Glover called, "Yo, heave ho!" at headquarters, they bent
themselves clear across the system for a hard pull together.
McCloud, resting the operating on the shoulders of his assistant
Anderson, devoted himself wholly to forwarding the construction plans,
and his first clash over winter road-building in the Rockies came
with his own right-hand man, Mears. McCloud put in a switch below
Piedmont, opened a material-yard, and began track-laying toward the
lower Crawling Stone Valley, when Mears said it was time to stop work
till spring. When McCloud told him he wanted track across the divide
and into the lower valley by spring, Mears threw up his hands. But
there was metal in the old man, and he was for orders all the time. He
kept up a running fire of protests and forebodings about the danger of
exposing men during the winter season, but stuck to his post. Glover
sent along the men, and although two out of every three deserted the
day after they arrived, Mears kept a force in hand, and crowded the
track up the new grade as fast as the ties and steel came in, working
day in and day out with one eye on the clouds and one on the tie-line
and hoping every day for orders to stop.
December slipped away to Christmas with the steel still going down and
the disaffected element among the railroad men at Medicine Bend
waiting for disaster. The spectacle of McCloud handling a flying
column on the Crawling Stone work in the face of the most treacherous
weather in the mountain year was one that brought out constant
criticism of him among Sinclair's sympathizers and friends, and while
McCloud laughed and pushed ahead on the work, they waited only for his
discomfiture. Christmas Day found McCloud at the front, with men
still very scarce, but Mears's gang at work and laying steel. The work
train was in charge of Stevens, the freight conductor, who had been
set back after the Smoky Creek wreck and was slowly climbing back to
position. They were working in the usual way, with the flat cars ahead
pushed by the engine, the caboose coupled to the tender being on the
extreme hind end of the train.
At two o'clock on Christmas afternoon, when there was not a cloud in
the sky, the horizon thickened in the east. Within thirty minutes the
mountains from end to end of the sky-line were lost in the sweep of a
coming wind, and at three o'clock snow struck the valley like a pall.
Mears, greatly disturbed, ordered the men off the grade and into the
caboose. McCloud had been inspecting culverts ahead, and had started
for the train when the snow drove across the valley. It blotted the
landscape from sight so fast that he was glad after an anxious five
minutes to regain the ties and find himself safely with his men.
But when McCloud came in the men were bordering on a panic. Mears,
with his two foremen, had gone ahead to hunt McCloud up, and had
passed him in the storm; it was already impossible to see, or to hear
an ordinary sound ten yards away. McCloud ordered the flat cars cut
off the train and the engine whistle sounded at short intervals, and,
taking Stevens, buttoned his reefer and started up the grade after the
three trackmen. They fired their revolvers as they went on, but the
storm tossed their signals on the ears of Mears and his companions
from every quarter of the compass. McCloud was standing on the last
tie and planning with his companion how best to keep the grade as the
two advanced, when the engine signals suddenly changed. "Now that
sounds like one of Bill Dancing's games," said McCloud to his
companion. "What the deuce is it, Stevens?"
Stevens, who knew a little of everything, recognized the signals in an
instant and threw up his hands. "It's Morse code, Mr. McCloud, and
they are in--Mears and the foremen--and us for the train as quick as
the Lord will let us; that's what they're whistling."
"So much for an education, Stevens. Bully for you! Come on!"
They regained the flat cars and made their way back to the caboose
and engine, which stood uncoupled. McCloud got into the cab with
Dancing and Stevens. Mears, from the caboose ahead, signalled all in,
and, with a whistling scream, the engine started to back the caboose
to Piedmont. They had hardly more than got under full headway when
a difficulty became apparent to the little group around the
superintendent. They were riding an unballasted track and using such
speed as they dared to escape from a situation that had become
perilous. But the light caboose, packed like a sardine-box with men,
was dancing a hornpipe on the rail-joints. McCloud felt the peril,
and the lurching of the car could be seen in the jerk of the engine
tender to which it was coupled. Apprehensive, he crawled back on
the coal to watch the caboose himself, and stayed long enough to
see that the rapidly drifting snow threatened to derail the outfit
any minute. He got back to the cab and ordered a stop. "This won't
do!" said he to Stevens and the engineman. "We can't back that
caboose loaded with men through this storm. We shall be off the
track in five minutes."
"Try it slow," suggested Stevens.
"If we had the time," returned McCloud; "but the snow is drifting on
us. We've got to make a run for it if we ever get back, and we must
have the engine in front of that way car with her pilot headed for the
drifts. Let's look at things."
Dancing and Stevens, followed by McCloud, dropped out of the gangway.
Mears opened the caboose door and the four men went forward to inspect
the track and the trucks. In the lee of the caboose a council was
held. The roar of the wind was like the surge of many waters, and the
snow had whitened into storm. They were ten miles from a habitation,
and, but for the single track they were travelling, might as well have
been a hundred miles so far as reaching a place of safety was
concerned. They were without food, with a caboose packed with men on
their hands, and they realized that their supply of fuel for either
engine or caboose was perilously slender.
"Get your men ready with their tools, Pat," said McCloud to Mears.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to turn the train around and put the nose of the engine
into it."
"Turn the train around--why, yes, that would make it easy. I'd be glad
to see it turned around. But where's your turntable, Mr. McCloud?"
asked Mears.
"How are you going to turn your train around on a single track?" asked
Stevens darkly.
"I'm going to turn the track around. I know about where we are, I
think. There's a little stretch just beyond this curve where the grade
is flush with the ground. Ask your engineman to run back very slowly
and watch for the bell-rope. I'll ride on the front platform of the
caboose till we get to where we want to go to work. Lose no time, Pat;
tell your men it's now or never. If we are caught here we may stay
till they carry us home, and the success of this little game depends
on having everything ready and working quick."
Stevens, who stayed close to McCloud, pulled the cord within five
minutes, and before the caboose had stopped the men were tumbling
out of it. McCloud led Mears and his foreman up the track. They
tramped a hundred yards back and forth, and, with steel tapes for
safety lines, swung a hundred feet out on each side of the track to
make sure of the ground. "This will do," announced McCloud; "you
waited here half a day for steel a week ago; I know the ground.
Break that joint, Pat." He pointed to the rail under his foot. "Pass
ahead with the engine and car about a thousand feet," he said to
the conductor, "and when I give you a signal back up slow and look
out for a thirty-degree curve--without any elevation, either. Get out
all your men with lining-bars."
The engine and caboose faded in the blur of the blizzard as the break
was made in the track. "Take those bars and divide your men into
batches of ten with foremen that can make signs, if they can't talk
English," directed McCloud. "Work lively now, and throw this track to
the south!"
Pretty much everybody--Japs, Italians, and Greeks--understood the game
they were playing. McCloud said afterward he would match his Piedmont
hundred in making a movable Y against any two hundred experts Glover
could pick; they had had the experience, he added, when the move meant
their last counter in the game of mountain life or death. The Piedmont
"hundred," to McCloud's mind, were after that day past masters in the
art of track-shifting. Working in a driving cloud of grit and snow,
the ignorant, the dull, and the slow rose to the occasion. Bill
Dancing, Pat Mears and his foreman, and Stevens moved about in the
driving snow like giants. The howling storm rang with the shouting of
the foremen, the guttural cries of the Japs, and the clank of the
lining-bars as rail-length after rail-length of the heavy track was
slued bodily from the grade alignment and swung around in a short
curve to a right angle out on the open ground.
McCloud at last gave the awaited signal, and, with keen-eyed, anxious
men watching every revolution of the cautious driving-wheels, the
engine, hissing and pausing as the air-brakes went off and on, pushed
the light caboose slowly out on the rough spur to its extreme end and
stopped with the pilot facing the main track at right angles; but
before it had reached its halting-place spike-mauls were ringing at
the fish-plates where a moment before it had left the line on the
curve. The track at that point was cut again, and under a long line
of bars and a renewed shouting it was thrown gradually quite across
the long gap in the main line, and the new joints in a very rough
curve were made fast just as the engine, running now with its pilot
ahead, steamed slowly around the new curve and without accident
regained the regular grade. It was greeted by a screeching yell as the
men climbed into the caboose, for the engine stood safely headed into
the teeth of the storm for Piedmont. The ten miles to cover were now a
matter of less than thirty minutes, and the construction train drew
into the Piedmont yards just as the telegraph wires were heating from
headquarters with orders annulling freights, ordering ploughs on
outgoing engines, and battening the division hatches for a grapple
with a Christmas blizzard.
No man came back better pleased than Stevens. "That man is all right,"
said he to Mears, nodding his head toward McCloud, as they walked up
from the caboose. "That's all I want to say. Some of these fellows
have been a little shy about going out with him; they've hounded me
for months about stepping over his way when Sinclair and his mugs
struck. I reckon I played my hand about right."