Part 16

By this time the caboose was up to where Perley and Lee were standing. Perley motioned Lee aboard, and then swung on himself.

Just as he did so, Clancy’s red shirt loomed up out of the mêlée, his arm lifted, and over the clack of the car trucks pounding the steel came the tinkle of breaking glass from the shattered pane in the door--the bullet had passed between the heads of the two men on the platform, missing them by a hair’s breadth. Another shot followed the first, another and another, dangerously close; splintering the woodwork around them; and then Perley fired. The half-breed spun round like a top, clapped his hand to his face and pitched over.

Then the curve of the track shut out the scene, but for five minutes after they were out of sight they still got the whoops of the redskins, the shouts and curses of the miners, and the crackle of guns like the quick fire of a Gatling. You see it came to that before it was through, and there was some blood spilled--a lot of it--and, not counting Clancy’s, it wasn’t all “blanket” blood, either.

Clancy? I’m coming to him. No, he wasn’t killed--if he had been I’d never be telling you this story.

It was two or three days before Lee and Perley got the details of what happened. The redskins fought like fiends after the miners began to fire on them and had killed one or two, and, though they were finally subdued, the casualties, as I’ve said, weren’t all on their side by a hanged sight.

But I was talking about Clancy. Well, that bullet of Perley’s caught him on the cheek bone, glanced in, plowed through his left eye, and landed up somewhere against the cartilage of his nose--a bullet will make queer tracks sometimes, worse than surveyors by a heap. They got him down to Big Cloud to a doctor’s, and before he was half cured he disappeared. They had a sort of makeshift hospital here in those days, and when I say “disappeared” I mean they found his bed empty one morning, that was all.

I told you I didn’t know whether Perley had any hand in putting that Indian in the car, or the other redskins at the Bend. I don’t. I told you I didn’t know what was between him and the half-breed before all this happened. I don’t. Perley never said. But day after day as he and Lee pounded up and down on the local through the mountains, he began to grow silent and moody.

Lee, young Lee then, was the only one that could get anywhere near the inside of his vest. He took to Lee, and Lee liked him; but even Lee had his limits when it came to confidences. There was lots Perley never opened his lips about. No, I don’t know as it makes much difference now.

Lee was the first of the two to hear that Faro Clancy was “loose.”

“It looks to me like a bad business,” he said, after telling Perley the news.

Perley’s eyes just narrowed a little. “It looks more like a bad shot, a rotten bad shot,” he answered evenly.

“That, if you like,” returned Lee; “but there’ll be more to follow.”

“One would think you _knew_ Clancy,” said Perley, cool as ever.

Lee was anxious. Call it presentiment or what you like, from that moment the thing was on his nerves. Perley had been pretty good to him; had made things a heap easier for the young fellow, green and raw as he was, in a hundred different ways. Things like that mean something.

“Look here, Perley,” said he, “I’ve heard some talk, and I know there’s something behind all this between you and that devil. I’m not asking for confidences----”

Perley cut him short, and caught him almost angrily by the shoulder. “Don’t meddle!” he snapped. “Let it drop. _You_ don’t count in this, whatever happens. Your being at the Bend that day was an accident. What’s between me and Clancy concerns ourselves. You don’t count. Unless you’re looking for another run besides the local, just remember that and don’t meddle.”

That was all. Lee never mentioned it to Perley again. Perley was right, wasn’t he? I told you there were three men in this story, but that one of them didn’t count. No, Lee didn’t count. Why should he?

What did he have to do with it? Perley was right, I leave it to you.

You’ve been over the division, and you know the Devil’s Slide just west of the Gap from here. You know the grade--the worst in the mountains. The trains crawl up at the pace a man could walk, because they can’t go any faster; and they crawl down just as slowly, because they don’t dare do anything else.

I’ve seen the passengers get off the observation and walk--so have you. Done it yourself probably? I thought so. Extra engine on the rear end to push or hold back, and one in the middle if the train’s heavy, to keep it from breaking apart--lessens the drawbar pull, you know. They’re tunneling now to do away with that particular grade, but that’s nothing to do with this story, nor, for that matter, with the night, some six weeks after that business at the Bend, when the local, eastbound, was climbing the Devil’s Slide.

It was a dirty night outside the caboose. A storm had been racketing through the mountains all afternoon, and by the time it got dark it was a howling gale, raining hard enough to float the ties.

Lee’s place was on the front end, going up that bit of track, but he wasn’t well that night, and the other brakeman was doing his snatch. Touch of mountain fever, or something, nothing serious; just enough to make him shiver and boil alternately over the little stove in the caboose, sitting with his back to the door. Up above him in the cupola, holding down the swivel chair where he could watch the train--that is, see his engine fling up the sparks, for that’s about all he could see, I guess--was Perley.

The car was swinging like a hammock with the heave and strain of the big pusher coupled right behind it--it acts queer, that does. Every time I’ve felt it I’ve always thought of a cat and a mouse. It’s like the engine had the caboose by the scruff and was trying to shake the life out of it.

You’ve felt it a little if you’ve ever been in the rear Pullman going up--the difference is that a caboose hasn’t any springs to speak of, you understand? Racket enough to raise the dead. You couldn’t hear yourself think. Not so much from the noise of the train or the storm, but from the booming roar of the trailer’s exhaust--like she was trying to cough her boiler tubes out every time the valves slid.

Now, there’s just one more thing I want you to get. The engine crew of a pusher naturally can’t see any track, road-bed, or anything of that kind, and it isn’t their business to, either. All they watch is the leader and the intermediate, if there is one. Their headlight plays along over a few cars if it’s high enough, or loses itself on the top of the door or the roof of the caboose if it isn’t, understand?

Lee didn’t hear anything. He was sitting bent over with his head between his hands, and it was the current of air from the opening door that made him twist around and look up, thinking it had blown open. I don’t know as you’d call him a coward; maybe yes, maybe no; anyway, he was a white-faced, terrified man that next instant, as he started up from his chair. He never got to his feet. Instead, he shut up like a jackknife, and went down to the floor with a blow over the head from a revolver butt that knocked him senseless.

It all happened in a second, but in that second Lee got it with more vividness than a thousand hours would have given him--the great, hulking figure, the water trickling to the floor in little pools from the dripping clothes, the sickly pallor of the face, the thin new skin of the livid scar across the cheek, the sightless eye--Clancy.

Lee couldn’t have lain unconscious more than twenty minutes, perhaps it was only fifteen, for it takes about forty minutes to climb the four miles of the Slide, you see. Call it twenty, that allows for what happened before and what happened after. When he came to his senses the light in the bracket lamp was out; blown out by the draft, for the door was open. A stray beam or two from the pusher’s headlight filled the caboose with an uncertain, wavering light--from the jolt and swing, you know, though Lee thought at first it was his head.

He tried to get up, but he couldn’t move. He was bound hand and foot, laid out on the flat of his back--helpless. For a minute he was too dazed to understand, then he remembered--Clancy. He stared up into the cupola above him. The swivel chair was empty--Perley had gone.

The car trucks were beating a steady _clack, clack-clack_, as they pounded the fishplates; from behind came the full, deep-chested thunder of the trailer’s exhaust; around, the hundred noises of the creaking, groaning, swaying car; without, the patter of rain, the wail of the wind. But over it all, low though it was, came a sound that sent a chill to Lee’s heart.

It was like a breathless moan, do you understand? That was the inhuman part of it; it was breathless--there was no break--a sort of sobbing monotone. It came from behind him. Lee shivered as he listened, and then his heart began to pound as though it would burst. He was afraid--_afraid_. Premonition, perhaps; I don’t know. He rolled himself over on his side, and he saw----

How can I tell it! A figure was crouched against the side of the car in a half-sitting posture, the face was red--red with the blood that was flowing from the forehead. Lee shrieked aloud in terror. “Perley! Perley!” Then he grew sick with the horror that was on him. Worse than murder the half-breed had threatened--and he had kept his word. Perley had been scalped!

Lee’s cry must have reached the poor wretch’s consciousness, for he staggered to his feet, sweeping his eyes clear with both hands. Lee, sick to the depths of his soul, the sweat breaking out in great, cold drops upon his forehead, fought like a maniac with his bonds.

Perley never spoke, never paid any attention to Lee--he was past all that--but his brain, at least, was still capable of coherent impression. It must have been--to account for what he did. Right in front of him, as he hung there tottering and swaying, was a broken bit of mirror tacked up on the side of the car. He was staring into it.

His moaning stopped. The shock of his own awful horror must have revolted, shaken his very being. His hand groped weakly, subconsciously perhaps, for his pocket--his revolver--the end.

Again Lee shrieked as he struggled to free himself, and then, as Perley fired, he burst out into a peal of wild, discordant laughter. His mind was giving way. He began to gibber like a madman--that’s the way they found him--with Perley’s body pitched full across his chest.

Don’t ask me. I told you Perley was a little, undersized, sawed-off man. I don’t know, do I? The halfbreed, physically, could have handled him like a baby, once he caught him unawares. That’s all I know.

They buried Perley down at Big Cloud; and they buried Clancy where the posse dropped him, drilled full of holes. That’s the story.

Lee? Charlie Lee? Why, he doesn’t count, does he? He had nothing to do with it. Well, if you’re interested in him I’ll tell you. His college diploma never did him any good. Once he got better and out of the hospital, he took to drinking periodically--_hard_. Between times straight as a string, you understand, for six weeks say, then off again. That was fifteen years ago, and he’s done it ever since. The doctors said that blow on the head unsettled him, skull splinter, or something like that; but medicine’s not an exact science. The doctors were wrong. The trouble was deeper than the skull--it was in his soul. Lee drank to save himself from the madhouse--I told you, didn’t I, that some men drink because they have to?

Carleton, the super, and the men before Carleton, understood what the doctors didn’t, so Lee’s working for the railroad yet. Not braking--he’s not fit for that, but he keeps the job they gave him--and it’s kept for him--when he gets back after his spells. I------there’s the foreman shouting for me. Sorry, but I’ll have to go. “If you’re going out on Number One she’s just coming down the gorge now. Good night, sir.”

I lost him in the shadows of the big mogul on the pit behind me. Then I turned and walked slowly out of the roundhouse, over the turntable, and across the tracks to the station platform. Number One’s mellow chime floated down from the gorge, then the flare of the electric headlight, and the rumble of the train. And in quick, fierce tempo, the beating, drumming trucks caught up the name I had heard the foreman shout, and rang it over and over again in my ears:

“Oh-you-Lee! Charlie-Lee! Lee! Charlie-Lee--Lee!”

XI--“WHERE’S HAGGERTY?”

“The Hill Division was proud enough over it, of course, for Carleton was its old chief; but, none the less, it read General Order Number 38 with dismay and misgiving.

“T. J. Hale,” the G. O. ran, “is hereby appointed Superintendent of the Hill Division, with headquarters at Big Cloud, vice H. B. Carleton promoted to General Manager of the System.”

“Now who in the double-blanked, blankety-blanked blazes is Hale?” demanded the roundhouse and the engine crews.

“Carleton was all to the good, h’m?--what!” growled the dispatchers.

The train crews swung their lanterns with a defiant air, and the passenger conductors juggled their punches around their little fingers, smiling a superior smile to themselves. Hale might be a good, man, perhaps he was, but Carleton was--“Royal” Carleton. “I guess he’ll get along all right with us, _but_ he don’t want to get fresh, that’s all. Where’d he come from, h’m?”

That question, at first, no one seemed able to answer. The general impression was that the Transcontinental had got him from some Eastern road. Certainly he was a new man, bran new, to the System.

And then the renown of one Haggerty, who was braking on a passenger local, became great, and, in consequence, the displeasure of the Division increased.

Said Haggerty: “When I was on the Penn five years back, this fellow Hale was assistant super. I knew him well. You wanter look out for him, you can take my little word for that. He’s a holy terror, an’ that’s a fact. Got any chewin’?”

Haggerty got his chewing, being an egregious liar; and Hale got a damaged reputation for the same reason.

But Haggerty got more than his chewing--and he had not long to wait. On the day that the new super was expected, Haggerty, on passenger local Number Seven, got into Big Cloud about noon, and, taking advantage of the ten-minute wait for refreshments, straddled a stool at the lunch-counter. Between bites, he fired questions at Spence the dispatcher, who was bolting his mid-day meal.

“Hale come yet?” he demanded.

“Haven’t seen him,” replied Spence.

“When d’ye expect him?” persisted Haggerty.

“I don’t know,” Spence answered.

“Oh, don’t be so blasted close!” snapped Haggerty. “You ain’t givin’ away any weighty secret if you let out what time his special ‘ll be along, I suppose.”

“I haven’t heard of any special,” said Spence. “Say, Haggerty, they tell me Hale’s an old friend of yours, h’m? No wonder you’re anxious. I forgot about that. As soon as I get word about him, I’ll wire up the line to you so’s you can jump your train, come back on a hand-car, and be here on the platform to meet him.”

“You go to blazes!” retorted Haggerty, and scowled across the counter at an inoffensive looking little fellow who had taken the liberty of smiling at the dispatcher’s words.

At Haggerty’s look, the smile disappeared in a cup of coffee raised hastily to the lips. “Huh!” snorted Haggerty, by way of driving home to the other the audacity and temerity of his act, and likewise the inadvisability of repeating it. Haggerty was galled. Once before that morning he had been obliged to relegate this insignificant, squint, eye-glassed individual, who had persisted in riding on the platform, to a proper sense of submission. And the method employed had been no more delicate a one than that of jerking the man bodily into the car by the collar of his coat. “Huh!” he repeated, with rising inflexion.

“No, Haggerty,” went on Spence pleasantly, “Don’t you worry. I won’t fail you. When the super steps off the train, and the first words he says is, ‘Where’s Haggerty?’ and you’re not here to respond in kind I can plainly see there’ll be doings. Oh, no, don’t you fret, I’ll not throw you down on anything like that----‘twouldn’t be wise for us, that’s got to live with him, to rile him up at the outset! No, it certainly wouldn’t, what?”

“You go bite on a brake-shoe, you’re too sharp to be munchin’ doughnuts,” snarled Haggerty. And, swinging himself from his seat, he went back to his train.

An hour later when he reached Elk River, the end of his run, he found a telegram waiting for him from Spence. He sucked in his under lip as he read it.

“You sly joker,” wired the dispatcher, “why didn’t you tell us that your friend came up with you on Number Seven?”

Haggerty pushed his cap to the back of his head, and swore softly under his breath. He began to go over in his mind the passengers that had been aboard the train when they ran into Big Cloud. No one individual seemed to stand out carded and waybilled as the new super.

Then an idea struck Haggerty, and he climbed into the rear coach where Berkely, his conductor, was making up his report sheets.

“Say, Jim,” said Haggerty, “was there any passes into Big Cloud this mornin’?”

Berkely looked up suspiciously. “You mind your own business, an’ you’ll get along better!” he snapped.

“Oh, punk!” returned Haggerty. “My count’s the same as your’n, ain’t it? What’s the matter with you, then? Honest, Jim, I wanter know. Was there any passes?”

“No, there wasn’t,” grunted Berkely, cooling down a little.

“Well, then, you might have said so at first, instead of jumpin’ a fellow for nothin’,” said Haggerty, and went out of the car to hang meditatively over the handrail and spit reflectively at the ties.

“Now wouldn’t that sting you?” he demanded of the universe in general. “Wouldn’t that sting you? Who ever heard of a new super comin’ on the job ridin’ a local on a _ticket!_ An’ me askin’ when he was goin’ to turn up. Oh, yes, it sure would sting you! That funny boy Spence ‘ll pass this along an’--oh, punk! I ain’t sure it wouldn’t have been better if I’d kept my mouth shut about knowin’ Hale, but who’d ever thought he’d come up on _my_ train! How was I to know, h’m?” And during all that afternoon’s layup at Elk River, Haggerty pondered the matter. He continued to ponder it as they pulled out for the return trip in the evening, and he was still pondering it when they whistled for Big Cloud.

There was no moon up that night, and it was pretty dark as they ran in. Haggerty, with his lantern, was standing on the rear end. As the train slowed itself to a halt, a man came tearing down the station platform at a run.

“Where’s Haggerty?” he called breathlessly. “Where’s----”

“Here,” said Haggerty promptly, leaning out over the steps and showing his light. “What d’ye want?”

“Oh, all right,” said the man. “I’ll be back--” and he disappeared in the shadow of the station.

“He acts like he was nutty,” muttered Haggerty, and swung himself off the steps.

But, though Haggerty waited, the man did not come back, and he had not come back when the train began to roll out of the station, and Haggerty was again on the rear platform of the car. Then, just as his hand reached out to open the door, he stopped and started suddenly as though he had been stung.

A voice came out of the darkness from the other side of the track over by the roundhouse. “Where’s Haggerty?” it demanded anxiously.

Then Haggerty tumbled, and his face went red with rage. He leaned far out over the rail, and, forgetful that the pantomime was lost in the darkness, shook his clinched fist in the direction from whence the voice had come.

“You go to he-ee-ll-lll!” he bawled, the exclamation shaken into syllables by reason of the car wheels jolting over the siding switches at that precise moment. And then, his senses being very acute, from where the light shone in the dispatcher’s window he-thought he heard, above the momentarily increasing rattle of the train, a laugh--a laugh that produced anything but a quieting effect on his already outraged sensibilities.

Now Haggerty was not the nature of those who can pass lightly over a joke at their own expense, especially if that joke be too prolonged and carries with it a hint of underlying venom. Therefore, as the “one on Haggerty” spread over the division, and scarcely an hour of the day passed that the cry “Where’s Haggerty?” did not reach his ears, he began to sulk and treasure up his injury. The division was rubbing it in pretty hard. But the curious part of it all was that his bitterness was not directed against himself who was the direct cause of his discomfiture, nor against Spence who was the indirect cause, but against Hale, who was no cause at all.

Just once had Haggerty seen the superintendent. Hale was pointed out to him on the platform at Big Cloud, and Haggerty had ducked hastily back inside his train. Hale was the inoffensive little fellow he had treated with such scant courtesy at the lunch-counter, the insignificant, squint-eye-glassed individual he had hauled from the car platform by the coat collar! When Haggerty’s mingled feelings of perturbation and amazement permitted him any speech at all, it was rather incoherent.

“_That_--the runt!” he gasped, and subsided into an empty seat.

And in this inelegant, but pithy, summing up of the capacity and dimensions of the new official the division was with him to the last section hand. Him--a railroad man! The Hill Division remembered “Royal” Carleton and was ashamed, and it rankled for the shame that it considered had been put upon it. Out of it all, Haggerty was the only thing of saving grace! So upon Haggerty they loosened, behind the humor, some of their bitterness. Haggerty became the safety valve of the division.

A month had gone by and Hale had lived well up to what his appearance had led them to expect. He might have been an automaton for all the signs of life that emanated from his office. Just routine, the routine business, routine, that was all. The disquiet and unrest that brooded over the division became contempt--the kind of contempt that made the car-tinks put on airs, and in their heart of hearts figure themselves better railroad men than he who sat over them in supreme authority.

Even Haggerty no longer ducked out of sight when circumstances required that he should breathe the same air as his superior. Haggerty had acquired a swagger; also, he now voiced his opinion, his cordially poor opinion, of Mr. Hale without restraint and with no check upon his tongue.

And then Haggerty got a shock. It was imparted by Spence.

“Got it from Hale’s clerk last night,” said the dispatcher. “He’s going to run an inspection special over the division, and he’s picked out the fag end of all things for the crew. He picked you first, Haggerty.”

“Aw, forget it!” growled Haggerty, with a scowl.

“I think there’s something behind it, though,” Spence went on, his voice modulated confidentially. “Between you and me, Haggerty, the inspection trip is a bluff.”

Haggerty pricked up his ears. “How’s that?” he demanded.

“Well,” said Spence serenely, backing to a safe distance, “I think he’s hurt at the way you’ve cut him since he’s been here. He’s pining for your company, and----”

Haggerty sprang to his feet from the baggage truck on which he had been seated, and shook his fist frantically at the fast retreating figure. He was still gesticulating fiercely and muttering savagely to himself when the window in the dispatcher’s room overhead opened softly, and Spence stuck out his head.