Part 13

For three months Bucks sat his new saddle without a word or an act to show what he was thinking: then there came from the little room a general order that swept right and left from trainmaster to wrecking boss. The last one of the old timers in the operating department went except Dave Hawk.

The day the order was bulletined Bucks sent for Dave; sent word by me he wanted to see him.

"Come on," said Dave to me when I gave him the message.

"What do you want me for?"

"Come on," he repeated, and, greatly against my inclination, I went up with him. I looked for a scene.

"Dave, you've been running here a good while, haven't you?" Bucks began.

"Long as anybody, I guess," said Dave curtly.

"How many years?"

"Nineteen."

"There's been some pretty lively shake-outs on the system lately," continued Bucks; the veteran conductor looked at him coldly. "I am trying to shape things here for an entire new deal."

"Don't let me stand in your way," returned Dave grimly.

"That's what I want to see you about."

"It needn't take long," blurted Dave.

"Then I'll tell you what I want----"

"I don't resign. You can discharge me any minute."

"I wouldn't ask any man to resign, Dave, if I wanted to discharge him. Don't make a mistake like that. I suppose you will admit there's room for improvement in the running of this division?"

Dave never twitched. "A whole lot of improvement," Bucks, with perceptible emphasis, added. It came from the new superintendent as a sort of gauntlet and Dave picked it up.

"I guess that's right enough," he replied candidly, "there is room for a whole lot of improvement. If I sat where you do I'd fire every man that stood in the way of it, too."

"That's why I've sent for you," Bucks resumed.

"Then drop the chinook talk and give me my time."

"You don't understand me yet, Dave. I want you to give up your run. I want your friend, Burnes here, to take your run----"

A queer shadow went over Dave's face. When Bucks began he was getting a thunderstorm on. Somehow the way it ended, the way it was coming about--putting me into his place--I, the only boy on the division he cared "a damn" about--it struck him, as it struck me, all in a heap. He couldn't say a word; his eyes went out the window into the mountains: something in it looked like fate. For my part I felt murder guilty.

"What I want you to do, Dave," added Bucks evenly, "is to come into the office here with me and look after the train crews. Just at present I've got to lean considerably on a trainmaster, do you want the job?"

The silent conductor turned to stone.

"The men who own the road are new men, Dave; they didn't steal it. They bought it and paid for it. They want a new deal and they propose to give a new deal to the men. They will pay salaries a man can live on honestly; they will give no excuse for knocking down; they want what's coming to them, and they propose the men shall have their right share of it in the pay checks.

"But there's more than that in it. They want to build up the operating force, as fast as it can be built, from the men in the ranks. I aim to make a start now on this division. If you're with me, hang up your coat here the first of the month, and take the train crews."

Dave left the office groggy. The best Bucks could do he couldn't get a positive answer out of him. He was overcome and couldn't focus on the proposition. Bucks saw how he had gone to pieces and managed diplomatically to leave the matter open, Callahan, whom Bucks had brought with him as assistant, filling in meanwhile as trainmaster.

The matter was noised. It was known that Dave, admittedly the brainiest and most capable of the Old Guard had been singled out, regardless of his past record for promotion. "I'm not here sitting in judgment on what was done last year," Bucks had said plainly. "It's what is done this year and next that will count in this office." And the conductors, thinking there was a chance, believing that at last if they did their work right they would get their share of the promotions, began to carry their lanterns as if they had more important business than holding up stray fares.

Meantime Dave hung to his run. Somehow the old run had grown a part of him and he couldn't give it up. When he told Bucks at the end of the week that he would like another week to make his decision the superintendent waved it to him. Everybody began to make great things of Dave: some of the boys called him trainmaster and told him to drop his punch and give Tommie a show.

He didn't take the humor the way one would expect. Always silent he grew more than that; sombre and dejected. We never saw a smile on his face. "Dave is off," muttered Henry Cavanaugh, his old baggageman, "I don't understand it. He's off. You ought to talk to him, Tommie. You're the only man on the division can do it."

I was ordered west that night to bring a military special from Washakie. I rode up on Dave's train. The hind Los Angeles sleeper was loaded light, and when Dave had worked the train and walked into the stateroom to sort his collections, I followed him. We sat half an hour alone and undisturbed, but he wouldn't talk. It was a heavy train and the wind was high.

We made Rat River after midnight, and I was still sitting alone in the open stateroom when I saw Dave's green light coming down the darkened aisle. He walked in, put his lamp on the floor, sat down, and threw his feet on the cushions.

"How's Tommie to-night?" he asked, leaning back as if he hadn't seen me before, in his old teasing way. He played light heart sometimes; but it was no more than played: that was easy seeing.

"How's Dave?" He turned, pulled the window shade and looked out. There was a moon and the night was bright, only windy.

"What are you going to do with Bucks, Dave?"

"Do you want my punch, Tommie?"

"You know better than that, don't you?"

"I guess so."

"You're blue to-night. What's the matter?" He shifted and it wasn't like him to shift.

"I'm going to quit the West End."

"Quit? What do you mean? You're not going to throw over this trainmaster offer?"

"I'm going to quit."

"What's the use," he went on slowly. "How can I take charge of conductors, talk to conductors? How can I discharge a conductor for stealing when he knows I'm a thief myself? They know it; Bucks knows it. There's no place among men for a thief."

"Dave, you take it too hard; everything ran wide open here. You're the best railroad man on this division; everybody, old and new, admits that."

"I ought to be a railroad man. I held down a division on the Pan Handle when I was thirty years old."

"Were you a railroad superintendent at thirty?"

"I was a trainmaster at twenty-seven. I'm forty-nine now, and a thief. The woman that ditched me is dead: the man she ran away with is dead: my baby is dead, long ago." He was looking out, as he spoke, on the flying desert ashen in the moonlight. In the car the passengers were hard asleep and we heard only the slew of the straining flanges and the muffled beat of the heavy truck under us.

"There's no law on earth that will keep a man from leaving the track once in a while," I argued; "there's none to keep him from righting his trucks when the chance is offered. I say, a man's bound to do it. If you won't do it here, choose your place and I'll go with you. This is a big country, Dave. Hang it, I'll go anywhere. You are my partner, aren't you?"

He bent to pick up his lantern, "Tommie, you're a great boy."

"Well, I mean it." He looked at his watch, I pulled mine: it was one o'clock.

"Better go to sleep, Tommie." I looked up into his face as he rose. He looked for an instant steadily into mine. "Go to bed, Tommie," he smiled, pulling down his visor, and turning, he walked slowly forward. I threw myself on the couch and drew my cap over my eyes. The first thing I felt was a hand on my shoulder. Then I realized I had been asleep and that the train was standing still. A man was bending over me, lantern in hand. It was the porter.

"What's wrong?" I exclaimed.

"There's trouble up ahead, Mr. Burnes," he exclaimed huskily. I sprang to my feet. "Have you got your pistol?" he stuttered.

Somebody came running down the aisle and the porter dodged like a hare behind me. It was the hind-end brakeman, but he was so scared he could not speak. I hurried forward.

Through the head Los Angeles sleeper, the San Francisco cars and the Portland I ran without meeting a living soul; but the silence was ominous. When I caught a glimpse of the inside of the chair car, I saw the ferment. Women were screaming and praying, and men were burrowing under the foot-rests. "They've killed everybody in the smoker," shouted a travelling man, grabbing me.

"Damnation, make way, won't you!" I exclaimed, pushing away from him through the mob. At the forward door, taking me for one of the train robbers, there was another panic. Passengers from the smoker were jammed together there like sardines. I had to pile them bodily across the seats to get through and into the forward car.

It was over. The front lamps were out and the car smoking bluish. A cowboy hung pitched head and arms down over the heater seat. In the middle of the car Henry Cavanaugh, crouching in the aisle, held in his arms Dave Hawk. At the dark front end of the coach I saw the outline of a man sprawled on his face in the aisle. The news agent crawled out from under a seat. It must have been short and horribly sharp.

They had flagged the train east of Bear Dance. Two men boarded the front platform of the smoker and one the rear. But the two in front opened the smoker door just as Dave was hurrying forward to investigate the stop. He was no man to ask questions. He saw the masks and covered them instantly. Dave Hawk any time and anywhere was a deadly shot. Without a word he opened on the forward robbers. A game cowboy back of him pulled a gun and cut into it; and was the first to go down, wounded. But the train boy said, Hawk himself had dropped the two head men almost immediately after the firing began and stood free handed when the man from the rear platform put a Winchester against his back. Even then, with a hole blown clean through him, he had whirled and fired again; we found the man's blood on the platform in the morning, but, whoever he was, he got to the horses and got away.

When I reached Dave, he lay in his baggage-man's arms. We threw the carrion into the baggage car and carried the cowboy and the conductor back into the forward sleeper. I gave the go-ahead orders and hurried again to the side of the last of the Old Guard. Once his eyes opened, wandering stonily; but he never heard me, never knew me, never spoke. As his train went that morning into division he went with it. When we stopped, his face was cold. It was up to the Grand Master.

A game man always, he was never a cruel one. He called himself a thief. He never hesitated with the other men high and low to loot the company. The big looters were financiers: Dave was only a thief, yet gave his life for the very law he trampled under foot.

Thief, if you please; I don't know: we needn't quarrel about the word he branded himself with. Yet a trust of money, of friendship, of duty were safer far in Dave Hawk's hands than in the hands of abler financiers.

I hold him not up for a model, neither glory in his wickedness. When I was friendless, he was my friend: his story is told.

The Yellow Mail Story

JIMMIE THE WIND

There wasn't another engineer on the division that dared talk to Doubleday the way Jimmie Bradshaw talked.

But Jimmie had a grievance, and every time he thought about it, it made him nervous.

Ninety-six years. It seemed a good while to wait; yet in the regular course of events on the Mountain Division there appeared no earlier prospect of Jimmie's getting a passenger run.

"Got your rights, ain't you?" said Doubleday, when Jimmie complained.

"I have and I haven't," grumbled Jimmie, winking hard; "there's younger men than I am on the fast runs."

"They got in on the strike; you've been told that a hundred times. We can't get up another strike just to fix you out on a fast run. Hang on to your freight. There's better men than you in Ireland up to their belt in the bog, Jimmie."

"It's a pity they didn't leave you there, Doubleday."

"You'd have been a good while hunting for a freight run if they had."

Then Jimmie would get mad and shake his finger and talk fast: "Just the same, I'll have a fast run here when you're dead."

"Maybe; but I'll be alive a good while yet, my son," the master mechanic would laugh. Then Jimmie would walk off very warm, and when he got into the clear with himself, he would wink furiously and say friction things about Doubleday that needn't now be printed, because it is different. However, the talk always ended that way, and Jimmie Bradshaw knew it always would end that way.

The trouble was, no one on the division would take Jimmie seriously, and he felt that the ambition of his life would never be fulfilled; that he would go plugging to gray hairs and the grave on an old freight train; and that even when he got to the right side of the Jordan there would still be something like half a century between him and a fast run. It was funny to hear him complaining about it, for everything, even his troubles, came funny to him, and in talking he had an odd way of stuttering with his eyes, which were red. In fact, Jimmie was nearly all red; hair, face, hands--they said his teeth were sandy.

When the first rumors about the proposed Yellow Mail reached the mountains Jimmie was running a new ten-wheeler; breaking her in on a freight "for some fellow without a lick o' sense to use on a limited passenger run," as Jimmie observed bitterly. The rumors about the mail came at first like stray mallards, opening signs of winter, and as the season advanced flew thicker and faster. Washington never was very progressive in the matter of improving the transcontinental service, but once by mistake they put in a postmaster-general down there, who wouldn't take the old song. When the bureau fellows that put their brains up in curl papers told him it couldn't be done he smiled softly, and sent for the managers of the crack lines across the continent, without suspecting how it bore incidentally on Jimmie Bradshaw's grievance against his master mechanic.

The postmaster-general called the managers of the big lines, and they had a dinner at Chamberlain's, and _they_ told him the same thing. "It has been tried," they said in the old, tired way; "really it can't be done."

"California has been getting the worst of it for years on the mail service," persisted the postmaster-general moderately. "But Californians ought to have the best of it. We don't think anything about putting New York mail in Chicago in twenty hours. It ought to be simple to cut half a day across the continent and give San Francisco her mail a day earlier. Where's the fall down?" he asked, like one refusing no for an answer.

The general managers looked at our representative sympathetically, and coughed cigar smoke his way to hide him.

"West of the Missouri," murmured a Pennsylvania swell, who pulled indifferently at a fifty-cent cigar. Everybody at the table took a drink on the _expose_, except the general manager who sat at that time for the Rocky Mountains.

The West End representative was unhappily accustomed to facing the finger of scorn on such occasions. It had become with our managers a tradition. There was never a conference of transcontinental lines in which we were not scoffed at as the weak link in the chain of everything--mail, passenger, specials, what not--the trouble was invariably laid at our door.

This time a new man was sitting for the line at the Chamberlain dinner; a youngish man with a face that set like cement when the West End was trod on.

The postmaster-general was inclined, from the reputation we had, to look on our man as one looks at a dog without a pedigree, or at a dray horse in a bunch of standard-breds. But something in the mouth of the West End man gave him pause; since the Rough Riders, it has been a bit different with verdicts on things Western. The postmaster-general suppressed a rising sarcasm with a sip of Chartreuse, for the dinner was ripening, and waited; nor did he mistake, the West Ender _was_ about to speak.

"Why west of the Missouri?" he asked, with a lift of the face not altogether candid. The Pennsylvania man shrugged his brows; to explain might have seemed indelicate.

"If it is put through, how much of it do you propose to take yourself?" inquired our man, looking evenly at the Allegheny official.

"Sixty-five miles, including stops from the New York post-office to Canal Street," replied the Pennsylvania man, and his words flowed with irritating ease.

"What do you take?" continued the man with the jaw, turning to the Burlington representative, who was struggling, belated, with an artichoke.

"_About_ seventy from Canal to Tenth and Mason. Say, seventy," repeated the "Q" manager, with the lordliness of a man who has miles to throw at almost anybody, and knows it.

"Then suppose we say sixty-five from Tenth and Mason to Ogden," suggested the West Ender. There was a well-bred stare the table round, a lifting of glasses to mask expressions that might give pain. Sixty-five miles an _hour_? Through the _Rockies_?

The postmaster-general struck the table quick and heavily; he didn't want to let it get away. "Why, hang it, Mr. Bucks," he exclaimed with emphasis, "if you will say sixty, the business is done. We don't ask you to do the Rockies in the time these fellows take to cut the Alleghenies. Do sixty, and I will put mail in 'Frisco a day earlier every week in the year."

"Nothing on the West End to keep you from doing it," said General Manager Bucks. He had been put up then only about six months. "But----"

Every one looked at the young manager. The Pennsylvania man looked with confidence, for he instantly suspected there must be a string to such a proposition, or that the new representative was "talking through his hat."

"But what?" asked the Cabinet member, uncomfortably apprehensive.

"We are not putting on a sixty-five mile schedule just because we love our country, you understand, nor to heighten an already glorious reputation. Oh, no," smiled Bucks faintly, "we are doing it for 'the stuff.' You put up the money; we put up the speed. Not sixty miles; sixty-five--from the Missouri to the Sierras. No; no more wine. Yes, I will take a cigar."

The trade was on from that minute. Bucks said no more then; he was a good listener. But next day, when it came to talking money, he talked more money into the West End treasury for one year's running than was ever talked before on a mail contract for the best three years' work we ever did.

When they asked him how much time he wanted to get ready, and told him to take plenty, three months was stipulated. The contracts were drawn, and they were signed by our people without hesitation because they knew Bucks. But while the preparations for the fast schedule were being made, the government weakened on signing. Nothing ever got through a Washington department without hitch, and they said our road had so often failed on like propositions that they wanted a test. There was a deal of wrangling, then a test run was agreed on by all the roads concerned. If it proved successful, if the mail was put to the Golden Gate on the second of the schedule, public opinion and the interests in the Philippines, it was concluded, would justify the heavy premium asked for the service.

In this way the dickering and the figuring became, in a measure, public, and keyed up everybody interested to a high pitch. We said nothing for publication, but under Bucks's energy sawed wood for three whole months. Indeed, three months goes as a day getting a system into shape for an extraordinary schedule. Success meant with us prestige; but failure meant obloquy for the road and for our division chief who had been so lately called to handle it.

The real strain, it was clear, would come on his old, the Mountain, division; and to carry out the point, rested on the Motive Power of the Mountain Division; hence, concretely, on Doubleday, master mechanic of the hill country.

In thirty days, Neighbor, superintendent of the Motive Power, called for reports from the division master mechanics on the preparations for the Yellow Mail run, and they reported progress. In sixty days he called again. The subordinates reported well except Doubleday. Doubleday said merely, "Not ready"; he was busy tinkering with his engines. There was a third call in eighty days, and on the eighty-fifth a peremptory call. Everybody said ready except Doubleday. When Neighbor remonstrated sharply he would say only that he would be ready in time. That was the most he would promise, though it was generally understood that if he failed to deliver the goods he would have to make way for somebody that could.

The Plains Division of the system was marked up for seventy miles an hour, and, if the truth were told, a little better; but, with all the help they could give us, it still left sixty for the mountains to take care of, and the Yellow Mail proposition was conceded to be the toughest affair the Motive Power at Medicine Bend had ever faced. However, forty-eight hours before the mail left the New York post-office Doubleday wired to Neighbor, "Ready"; Neighbor to Bucks, "Ready"; and Bucks to Washington, "Ready"--and we were ready from end to end.

Then the orders began to shoot through the mountains. The test run was of especial importance, because the signing of the contract was believed to depend on the success of it. Once signed, accidents and delays might be explained; for the test run there must be no delays. Despatchers were given the eleven, which meant Bucks; no lay-outs, no slows for the Yellow Mail. Roadmasters were notified; no track work in front of the Yellow Mail. Bridge gangs were warned, yard masters instructed, section bosses cautioned, track walkers spurred--the system was polished like a barkeeper's diamond, and swept like a parlor car for the test flight of the Yellow Mail.

Doubleday, working like a boiler washer, spent all day Thursday and all Thursday night in the roundhouse. He had personally gone over the engines that were to take the racket in the mountains. Ten-wheelers they were, the 1012 and the 1014, with fifty-six-inch drivers and cylinders big enough to sit up and eat breakfast in. Spick and span both of them, just long enough out of the shops to run smoothly to the work; and on Friday Oliver Sollers, who, when he opened a throttle, blew miles over the tender like feathers, took the 1012, groomed like a Wilkes mare, down to Piedmont for the run up to the Bend.

Now Oliver Sollers was a runner in a thousand, and steady as a clock; but he had a fireman who couldn't stand prosperity, Steve Horigan, a cousin of Johnnie's. The glory was too great for Steve, and he spent Friday night in Gallagher's place celebrating, telling the boys what the 1012 would do to the Yellow Mail. Not a thing, Steve claimed after five drinks, but pull the stamps clean off the letters the minute they struck the foothills. But when Steve showed up at five A.M. to superintend the movement, he was seasick. The minute Sollers set eyes on him he objected to taking him out. Mr. Sollers was not looking for any unnecessary chances on one of Bucks's personal matters, and for the general manager the Yellow Mail test had become exceedingly personal. Practically everybody East and West had said it would fail; Bucks said no.