Part 11

All day it was that way: train after train and ovation after ovation. The day was cool as a watermelon--August--and bright as a baby's face all through the mountains; and the Templars went up into the high passes with all the swing and noise we could raise. Harold Davis took it all morning steady from 4 A. M. at the despatcher's key. He was used up long before noon; but he stayed, and just at twelve o'clock, while a big Templar train from Baltimore was loading its commandery in front of the Wickiup after an early dinner, and a big Templar band played a tingling two-step, Martin Duffy stuck his dry, parchment face into the platform crowd, elbowed his way unnoticed through it, climbed the Wickiup stairs, walked into the despatcher's room, and, throwing off his hat and coat, leaned over Harold Davis's shoulder and took a transfer.

Young Giddings had been sitting there in a perspiration half an hour then; he copied for Martin Duffy that day. At noon they figured to get the last Templar over the Eagle Pass with the set of the sun. When Duffy took the key he never looked his force cleaner, only he was tired; Giddings could see that. The regular man had been sick a week and Martin had been filling in. Besides that, all Saturday, the day before, he had been spiking the line--figuring what could be annulled and what couldn't; what could be run extra and what could be put into regulars. Callahan had just got married and was going out to the Coast on his wedding tour in Bucks's car. He had refused to look at an order after Saturday night. Sunday morning, and from Sunday morning on, it was all against Duffy. When the Chief took the middle trick there were fourteen Templar Specials still to come with the last one just pulling out of McCloud on the plains. They were ordered to run with right of track over all eastbound trains thirty minutes apart all the way through.

A minute after Martin Duffy sat in, the conductor of the train below registered out. There was a yell pretty soon, and away went the Baltimore crowd--and they were corkers, too, those Baltimore fellows, and travelled like lords.

At five o'clock in the evening the trains in the West Division were moving just like clocks on the hour and the half--thirty minutes, thirty minutes, thirty minutes--and, as far as young Giddings could see, Duffy, after five booming hours, was fresher than when he took the chair. The little despatcher's capacity for work was something enormous; it wasn't till after supper-time, with the worst of the figuring behind him, and in the letting down of the anxiety, that Martin began to look older and his dry Indian hair began to crawl over his forehead. By that time his eyes had lost their snap, and when he motioned Giddings to the key, and got up to walk up and down the hall in the breeze, he looked like a wilted potato vine. His last batch of orders was only a little one compared with those that had gone before. But with the changes to the different crews they read about like this--

Telegraphic Train Order Number 68. Mountain Division.

Superintendent's Office, August 8, 1892.

For Medicine Bend to C. and E. of Engines 664, 738, 810, 326, and 826.

Engines 664, 738, 810, and 326 will run as four Specials, Medicine Bend to Bear Dance. Engine 826 will double-head Special 326 to summit of Eagle Pass.

First No. 80, Engine 179, will run two hours thirty minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend.

Second No. 80, Engine 264, will run three hours and fifteen minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend.

Third No. 80, Engine 210, will run four hours and thirty minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend.

J. M. C.

D.

When young Giddings sat in, the sun was dropping between the Tetons. In the yard the car-cleaners were polishing the plates on Bucks's private car and the darky cook was pulling chickens out of the refrigerator. Duffy had thirteen Conclaves moving smoothly on the middle trick. The final one was due, and the hostlers were steaming down with the double-header to pull it over the Pass. This, the last of the Commandery trains, was to bring DE MOLAY COMMANDERY NUMBER FOUR of Pittsburg, and the orders were to couple Bucks's car on to it for the run west. De Molay--and everybody had notice--was Bucks's old commandery back in Pennsylvania, and he was going to the end of the division that night with the cronies of his youth. Little fellows they were in railroading when he rode the goat with them, but now mostly, like him, big fellows. Half a dozen old salts had been pounding ahead at him all day over the wire. They were to join him and Mr. and Mrs. Callahan for supper in the private car, and the yellow cider lay on the thin-shaven ice and the mountain grouse curled on the grill irons when De Molay Four, Pittsburg, pulled into Medicine Bend.

We had seen a good many swell trains that day, the swellest that ever pounded _our_ fishplates, Pullmans solid, and the finest kind of people. Boston, Washington, New York, Philadelphia sent some pretty gorgeous trains. But with at least half the town on the platform, when De Molay Four rolled in it took their breath so they couldn't yell till the Sir Knights began pouring from the vestibules and gave Medicine Bend their own lordly cheer.

Mahogany vestibules they were and extension platforms; salon lamps and nickeled handrails; buffet smoker and private diner: a royal train and a royal company; olive green from tender to tail lights--De Molay Four, Pittsburg.

Bucks's old gang spied him. Modestly back under the portico, he stood near the ticket window, and they broke through at him solid. They pulled him and hauled him and mauled him and passed him from hand to hand. They stood him on his head and on his hands and on his feet again, and told him of something they wanted and wanted right off.

Bucks looked the least bit uncertain as he considered the opening request. It wasn't much in some ways, what they asked; in other ways it was a good deal. He laughed and bantered and joked them as long as they would stand it; then he called up to Martin Duffy, who was leaning out the despatchers' window, "We'll see how he talks," laughed Bucks in his great big way. "But, boys, it's up to the Chief. I'm not in it on the orders, you know. Martin," he called, as Duffy bent his head, "they want fifteen minutes here to stretch their legs. Say they've been roasted in the alkali all day. Can you do anything for the boys?"

The boys! Big fellows in fezes, Shriner style, and slim fellows in duck, sailor style, and bow-legged fellows in cheviot, any old style. Chaps in white flannel, and chaps in gray, and chaps in blue. Turkish whiskers and Key West cigars and Crusaders' togs--and, between them, Bucks, his head most of the time in chancery. It was the first time they had seen him since he had made our Jim Crow line into a system known from the Boston and Maine to the Mexican Central, and, bar none, run cleaner or better. The first time they had seen him since he had made a name for himself and for his road from Newport News to 'Frisco, and they meant now to kill him, dead.

You know about what it meant and about how it went, how it had to go. What could Martin say to the man who had made him all he was and who stood, now a boy again among the boys of his boyhood, and asked for fifteen minutes--a quarter of an hour for De Molay Number Four? It threw the little Chief completely off his schedules; just fifteen minutes was more than enough to do that. All the work was done, the anxiety nearly past--Martin had risen to rest his thumping head. But fifteen minutes; once in a lifetime--Bucks asking it.

Duffy turned to big Jack Moore standing at his side ready to pull De Molay over the Pass, and spoke him low. Jack nodded; everything went with Jack, even the turn-tables that stuck with other engineers. Martin in his shirt-sleeves leaned out the window and, looking down on the turbaned and turbulent mob, spoke so Bucks could hear.

"What is it?" demanded the most puissant commander of De Molay excitedly. "What does he say, Bucks?"

"What says the slave?" growled a second formidable crusader; "out with it!"

"All we want is fifteen minutes."

"You wouldn't turn us down on fifteen minutes this far from an oasis, would you, Bucks?" protested a glass-eyed Shriner.

Bucks looked around royally. "Fifteen minutes?" he drawled. "What's a quarter of an hour in a lifetime, Jackman, on the last oasis? Take off your clothes, you fellows, and take half an hour. Now will you be good?"

De Molay put up a Templar yell. They always get the good things of life, those Pittsburg men; things other fellows couldn't begin to get. They passed the word through the sleepers, and the women began pouring from the vestibules. In two quick minutes out came the Duquesne band in red pompoms, duck trousers and military jackets, white corded with black. The crowd broke, the band marched down the platform and, striking up the "Washington Post," opened ranks on the grass plot above the Wickiup to receive the De Molay guard. One hundred Knights Templar in fatigue debouched into a bit of a park, and in the purple of the sunset gave a commandery drill to the honor of Bucks--Bucks and the West End.

It was Sunday night, and still as August could make it. The battalion moving silent and mobile as a streamer over the grass, marched, deployed and rested. They broke, to the clear-cut music, into crosses and squares and crescents and stars until small boys went cross-eyed, and wheeling at last on the line, they saluted Bucks--himself a past grand commander--and the railroad men yelled.

Meantime the General Manager's private car had been pasted on the tail-end of De Molay Four, and a pusher edging up, stuck its nose into the rear vestibule. On the head end Jack Moore and Oyster were backing down on the olive-green string with the two smoothest moguls on the division. Bucks and Neighbor had held back everything good all day for De Molay Four, down to engines and runners and conductor. Pat Francis carried the punch, and the little Chief sat again in the despatcher's chair for De Molay Four.

And while the lovely women strolled in the cool of the evening and the odor of mountain sweetness, and the guard drilled, and the band played, the Chief knit his brows over his train sheet. It looked now, re-arranged, re-ordered, re-adjusted and re-organized, as if a Gila Monster had crawled over it without wiping his feet. And when De Molay Four got ready to pull out, with Moore and Oyster on the throttles and old John Parker in the baggage, where he had absolutely nothing to do but drink cigars and smoke champagne and Pat Francis in the aisles, and Bucks, with Mr. and Mrs. Callahan and their crowd, in private Number Twelve--there was that much shouting and tooting and waving that Martin Duffy simply couldn't think for a few seconds; yet he held them all, for life or for death, every last one, in the curve of his fingers.

So they stood ready in the gorge while Duffy studied wearily how to handle First, Second, and Third Eighty against them.

First, Second, and Third Eighty! If they could only have been wiped off the face of the rails as easy as they might have been wiped off a train sheet! But there they were, three sections, and big ones, of the California fast freight. High-class stuff for Chicago and New York that couldn't be held or laid out that Sunday, not for a dozen Conclaves. All day First, Second, and Third Eighty had been feeling their way east through the mountains, trying to dodge the swell commanderies rolling by impudent as pay cars. But all the final plans to keep them out of everybody's way, out of the way of fez and turban and chapeau and Greek cross and crimson-splashed sleepers, were now dashed by thirty minutes at Medicine for De Molay Four.

Order after order went from under his hand. New meeting-points for First, Second, and Third Eighty and De Molay Four, otherwise Special 326.

Pat Francis snatched the tissues from Duffy's hand and, after the battalion had dispersed among their wives and sisters, and among the sisters of the other fellow; after the pomponed chaps had chucked the trombones and cymbals and drums at old John Parker's shins; after the last air-cock had been tested and the last laggard crusader thrown forcibly aboard by the provost guard, the double-header tooted, "Out!" and, with the flutter of an ocean liner, De Molay Four pulled up the gorge.

The orders buttoned in the reefers gave De Molay a free sweep to Elcho, and Jack Moore and Oyster were the men to take it, good and hard. Moreover, there was glory aboard. Pennsylvania nobs, way-up railroad men, waiting to see what for motive power we had in the Woolly West; how we climbed mountains and skirted canon walls, and crawled down two and three per cent grades. Then with Bucks himself in the private car--what wonder they let her out and swung De Molay through the gorge as maybe you've seen a particularly buoyant kite snake its tail out of the grass and drag it careening skyward. When they slowed for Elcho at nightfall, past First and Second Eighty, and Bucks named the mileage, the Pennsys refused to believe it for the hour's run. But fast as they had sped along the iron trail, Martin Duffy's work had sped ahead of them, and this order was waiting:

Telegraphic Train Order Number 79.

C. and E. Third No. 80, Rat River.

C. and E. Special 326, Elcho.

Third No. 80, Engine 210, and Special 326 will meet at Rock Point.

J. M. C.

D.

With this meeting-point made, it would be pretty much over in the despatchers' office. Martin Duffy pushed his sallow hair back for the last time, and, leaving young Giddings to get the last O. K.'s and the last Complete on his trick, got out of the chair.

It had been a tremendous day for Giddings, a tremendous day. Thirty-two Specials on the despatchers, and Giddings copying for the Chief. He sat down after Duffy, filled with a riotous importance because it was now, in effect, all up to Giddings, personally; at least until Barnes Tracy should presently kick him out of the seat of honor for the night trick. Mr. Giddings sat down and waited for the signature of the orders.

Very soon Pat Francis dropped off De Molay Four, slowing at Elcho, ran straight to the operator for his order, signed it and at once Order 79 was throbbing back to young Giddings at Medicine Bend. It was precisely 7.54 P. M. when Giddings gave back the Complete and at 7.55 Elcho reported Special 326, "out," all just like clockwork. What a head Martin Duffy has, thought young Giddings--and behold! all the complicated everlasting headwork of the trick and the day, and of the West End and its honor, was now up to the signature of Third Eighty at Rat River. Just Third Eighty's signature for the Rock Point meeting, and the biggest job ever tackled by a single-track road in America (Giddings thought) was done and well done.

So the ambitious Giddings by means of a pocket-mirror inspected a threatening pimple on the end of his chubby nose palming the glass skilfully so Barnes Tracy couldn't see it even if he did interrupt his eruption, and waited for Bob Duffy, the Rat River nightman, to come back at him with Third Eighty's signature. Under Giddings' eye, as he sat, ticked Martin Duffy's chronometer--the watch that split the seconds and chimed the quarters and stopped and started so impossibly and ran to a second a month--the watch that Bucks (who never did things by halves) had given little Martin Duffy with the order that made him Chief. It lay at Giddings's fingers, and the minute hand wiped from the enamelled dial seven o'clock fifty-five, fifty-six, seven, eight--nine. Young Giddings turned to his order book and inspected his entries like a methodical bookkeeper, and Martin Duffy's chronometer chimed the fourth quarter, eight o'clock. One entry he had still to make. Book in hand he called Rat River.

"Get Third Eighty's signature to Order 79 and hurry them out," he tapped impatiently at Bob Duffy.

There was a wait. Giddings lighted his pipe the way Callahan always lighted _his_ pipe--putting out his lips to catch all the perfume and blowing the first cloud away wearily, as Callahan always did wearily. Then he twirled the match meditatively, and listened, and got suddenly this from Bob Duffy at Rat River:

"I forgot Order 79," came Bob Duffy's message. "I let Third Eighty go without it. They left here at seven--fifty"--fifty something, Giddings never heard fifty what. The match went into the ink, the pipe into the water-pail, and Giddings, before Bob Duffy finished, like a drowning man was calling Elcho with the life and death, the Nineteen call.

"Hold Special 326!" he cried over the wire the instant Elcho replied.

But Elcho, steadily, answered this:

"Special--Three-twenty-six--left--here--seven-fifty-five."

Giddings, with both hands on the table, raised up like a drunken man. The West End was against it. Third Eighty in the open and going against the De Molay Four. Bucks, Callahan, wife--everybody--and Rock Point a blind siding that no word from anybody on earth could reach ahead of Third Eighty.

Giddings sprang to the open window and shouted to anybody and everybody to call Martin Duffy. But Martin Duffy spoke behind him.

"What do you want?" he asked; it came terribly quick on Giddings as he turned.

"What's the matter?" exclaimed Martin, looking into the boy's face. "Speak, can't you? What's the matter, Giddings?"

"Bob forgot Order 79 and let Third Eighty go without it--and Special 326 is out of Elcho," choked Giddings.

"_What?_"

"Bob at--Rat River--gave Third Eighty a clearance without the Order 79."

Martin Duffy sprang straight up in the air. Once he shut his lifted hands; once he looked at Giddings, staggering again through the frightful news, then he dropped into the chair, looked wildly around, seized his key like a hunted man, stared at his train sheet, grabbed the order book, and listened to Giddings cutting off one hope after another of stopping Special 326. His fingers set mechanically and he made the Rat River call; but Rat River was silent. With Barnes Tracy tiptoeing in behind on the instinct of trouble, and young Giddings shaking like a leaf, the Chief called Rat River. Then he called Elcho, asked for Special 326, and Elcho again repeated steadily:

"Special--326--left--here--on--Order--79--at--seven-fifty-five P. M."

Martin Duffy bent before the message; young Giddings, who had been whispering to Tracy, dropped on a stool and covered his face.

"Don't cry, Giddings." It was Duffy who spoke; dry and parched his voice. "It's nothing you--could help." He looked around and saw Tracy at his elbow. "Barnes," he said, but he tried twice before his voice would carry. "Barnes--they will meet in the Cinnamon cut. Giddings told you? Bob forgot, forgot my order. Run, Giddings, for Benedict Morgan and Doubleday and Carhart--_quick!_"

Giddings ran, the Rat River call echoing again down the hall behind him. Rat River was closest to Rock Point--would get the first news of the wreck, and Martin Duffy was calling his recreant brother at the River; but the River was silent.

Doubleday and the company surgeon, Dr. Carhart, rushed into the room almost together. Then came with a storm the wrecking boss, Benedict Morgan; it was only an evil hour that brought Benedict Morgan into the despatchers' office. Stooped and silent, Martin Duffy, holding the chair, was calling Rat River. Carhart watched him just a moment, then he took Barnes Tracy aside and whispered--and, going back, bent over Duffy. The Chief pulled himself up.

"Let Tracy take the key," repeated the doctor. "Get away from the table a minute, Martin. It may not be as bad as you think."

Duffy, looking into the surgeon's face, put his hand on his arm. "It's the De Molay train, the Special 326, with Bucks's car, double-headed. Oh, my God--I can't stop them. Doctor, they will meet!"

Carhart unfastened the fingers on his arm. "Come away a minute. Let Tracy have the key," he urged.

"A head-ender, eh?" croaked Benedict Morgan from the counter, and with a frightful oath. "A head-ender!"

"Shut up, you brute!" hissed Carhart. Duffy's hands were creeping queerly up the sides of his head.

"Sure," growled Benedict Morgan, loweringly, "sure. Shut up. Of course. Shut up."

Carhart was a quick man. He started for the wrecker, but Duffy, springing, stopped him. "For God's sake, keep cool, everybody," he exclaimed, piteously. There was no one else to talk, to give the orders. Bucks and Callahan both on the Special--maybe past order-giving now. Only Martin Duffy to take the double load and the double shame. He stared, dazed again, into the faces around as he held to the fiery surgeon. "Morgan," he added steadily, looking at the surly wrecker, "get up your crew, quick. Doubleday, make up all the coaches in the yard for an ambulance train. Get every doctor in town to go with you. Tracy, clear the line."

The Master Mechanic and Benedict Morgan clattered down stairs. Carhart, running to the telephone, told Central to summon every medical man in the Bend, and hurried out. Before he had covered a block, roundhouse callers, like flaws of wind before a storm, were scurrying the streets, and from the tower of the fire-house sounded the harsh clang of the emergency gong for the wreckers.

Caught where they could be caught, out of saloons, beds, poker joints, Salvation barracks, churches,--the men of the wrecking crew ran down the silent streets, waking now fast into life. Congregations were dispersed, hymns cut, prayers forgotten, bars deserted, hells emptied, barracks raided at that call, the emergency gong call, fell as a fire-bell, for the Mountain Division wrecking gang.

While the yard crews shot up and down the spurs switching coaches into the relief train, Benedict Morgan with solid volleys of oaths was organizing his men and filling them at the lunch counters with huge schooners of coffee. Carhart pushed again through the jam of men and up to the despatchers' office. Before and behind him crowded the local physicians with instrument bags and bandages. The ominous baggage deposited on the office floor, they sat down about the room or hovered around Carhart asking for details. Doubleday, tall and grim, came over from the roundhouse. Benedict Morgan stamped up from the yard--the Mountain Division was ready.

All three despatchers were in the room. John Mallers, the day man, stood near Tracy, who had relieved Giddings. The line was clear for the relief run. Elcho had been notified of the impending disaster, and at Tracy's elbow sat the Chief looking fixedly at the key--taking the bob of the sounder with his eye. A dozen men in the room were talking; but they spoke as men who speaking wait on the life of a fuse. Duffy, with suspense deepening into frenzy, pushed Tracy's hand from the key and, sliding into the chair, began once more to call his brother at Rat River.

"R, T--R, T--R, T--R, T--" clicked the River call. "R, T--R, T--R, T--Bob--Bob--Bob," spelled the sender. "Answer me, answer, answer. R, T--R, T--R, T--R, T--"

And Barnes Tracy edged away and leaned back to where the shadow hid his face. And John Mallers, turning from the pleading of the current, stared gloomily out of the window across the yard shimmering under the double relay of arc lights; and young Giddings, who couldn't stand it--just _couldn't_ stand it--bending on his stool, shook with gulping sobs.

The others knew nothing of the heartbreaking in the little clicks. But they all knew the track--knew where the trains would meet; knew they could not by any possibility see each other till they whirled together on the curve of the Cinnamon cut or on the trestle west of it and they waited only for the breaking of the suspense that settled heavily over them.