Part 18

“Strike!” ejaculated McQueen, bewildered. “What for?”

“What for!” cried Noonan. “What for? That’s a sweet question to ask. Well, pretty dashed near everything,”--he waved his hand expansively--“hours, scale, and--and--”

McQueen shook his head. “I’m not kicking,” he said. “I don’t see anything to strike about. Looks to me as though you fellows were hunting trouble. You’ll probably get it, what?”

“You never see anything,” Noonan blurted out, irritation getting the better of diplomacy. “Nothing but the blamed coal you’re forever yapping about.”

“What I know about coal,” returned McQueen with dignity, “you’ll never know. It’s a subject that requires brains.”

“Is that so!” Noonan jeered. “You tell it!”

“It requires brains,” McQueen repeated stolidly.

“It’s a shame that the only man on the division that has ‘em, don’t know how to use ‘em, then,” Noonan prodded. “Who cares about your blazing old coal and what it’s made of? Talk’s cheap. There’s no sense to it, anyhow.”

“Maybe there isn’t, and then again maybe there is. At any rate, there’s a dollar a day for every man pulling a throttle,” McQueen announced triumphantly. “I don’t know yet just how much for the firemen, I haven’t figured it on their schedule.”

Noonan pricked up his ears. “What’s that you say, Mac,” he demanded.

Here was McQueen’s vindication. They’d laugh at his absurd, pointless theories on coal, would they? Well then, he’d show them! And it wasn’t any of their business, either, how many days he’d racked his brains, puzzling out an adequate solution to the question Clarihue had flung at him! He shook two impressive fat fingers at Noonan.

“One dollar a day, every day, and the spare men proportionately, that’s what! Do you get that, Noonan?”

“Rats!” said Noonan. “You’d better go into the shops for repairs. You need new stay-bolts on your dome cover!”

“Never you mind my dome cover,” McQueen flung back, beginning to get exasperated. “It may need a little tinkering, but it’s not ready for the scrap-heap yet, the way some are I could mention--but won’t. It all goes back to what I said. It’s a subject that requires brains--which you haven’t got. There’s no use explaining anything to you because----”

“You can’t,” Noonan interrupted craftily. “You’re only long on wind, Mac.”

“You listen to me, you rust-jointed disgrace to the throttle!” cried McQueen, stung into retort. “You listen to me! What are you paid for? Mileage, ain’t it? How do you get your mileage? Steam! What makes steam? Coal! D’ye hear? Coal! Coal, and don’t you forget it. Well then, poor coal means poor steam, and poor steam means poor mileage, don’t, it, what?”

Noonan burst into a loud and derisive guffaw.

McQueen glared. “You’re a wild, uneducated, hee-hawing ass!” he choked. “What do you know, anyway? Nothing! But _I_ know! A dollar a day I said, and I say so now. I figured it out. It’s the difference between high grade coal and the muck we burn. It’s the difference between the mileage we make and the mileage we _could_ make in the same time. That totes up one dollar a day. Supposing they wouldn’t let us have any more mileage than they do now, well, we’d do it in better time, and the difference would be ours, wouldn’t it? And time’s money. And _that_ totes up one dollar a day just the same. It’s the same either way--time or mileage. Take your choice!”

“There, Johnny, that’s a good boy, run along and fetch me a bucket of steam,” Noonan scoffed.

With a snort of unutterable contempt, McQueen turned to swing himself into his cab.

“Hold on a minute, Mac,” Noonan cried, afraid that he had overstepped himself. “Don’t get whiffy. I swear, I believe you’re right. Let’s see how you figure it.”

And McQueen, mollified, figured it. Figured it with the stub of a pencil in greasy, scrawling characters on the back of a time order. As to the process by which the conclusion was arrived at, that was something of which Noonan was in profound and utter ignorance. Whether it was right or wrong, he did not know. He never knew--and cared less! Certainly the result was there.

McQueen completed the last figure of his calculation with a flourish. “There!” he cried exultingly. “How about it now, eh?”

Noonan took the paper, wrinkled his brows, pursed his lips, and stared at it with the air of a connoisseur of calculus. “H’m,” said he slowly, “are you dead sure it’s right, Mac?”

“Right!” McQueen fairly yelled, touched in another tender spot. “Right! Confound you, it’s there in black and white, ain’t it? Figures don’t lie, do they? Well, what in thunder’s wrong with you, then?”

“I wanted to be sure, Mac, that’s all. Holy fishplates, I knew it was bad, rotten bad, but I didn’t think they were handing it to us like this.”

“You bet it’s bad. It’s the worst ever. There’s more kinds of coal than there are spikes in the right of way from here to Big Cloud and back again, but the coal we get is the last on the list. Bad! It’s what I’ve always said, ain’t it?”

“It’s fierce!” continued Noonan with rising emphasis. “And when the boys hear this, it’ll be the last straw. They’ll fix ‘em!”

“Fix who?” inquired McQueen, blankly.

“Why, ain’t I telling you! The company.”

“I--I was talking about the coal,” said McQueen a little uneasily.

“Sure you were,” Noonan agreed heartily. “Sure you were, and how the company is robbing every engineer on the division of a dollar a day, to say nothing of the firemen and the train crews. It’s enough to make a man mad. Well, I should say yes!”

“I--I didn’t say the company was robbing us,” protested McQueen.

“What’s that!” cried Noonan sharply; then in apparent disgust: “So your crazy old figures are just gas-bag filling like the rest of your coal talk, eh? They _did_ look pretty scaly, and that’s a fact. I had my suspicions. That’s why I asked you if you were sure they were right. But I might have known they weren’t without asking.”

“Oh, you might, might you?” exploded McQueen, goaded once more into angry outburst. “You and your suspicions! Who are you! I tell you they are right, and that’s the end of it!”

“Well, if they’re right, why don’t you stand by them, then? We’re being robbed every day we work, ain’t we?”

“Ye-e-es, I suppose we are,” McQueen admitted reluctantly; “but I didn’t figure it out for the purpose of----”

“Mac,” Noonan interrupted unctuously, “‘tain’t for you nor me to say the purpose it’s to be put to. There’s others besides us. But I do say, Mac, you’re almighty smart.”

McQueen shook his head. “I’m a company man,” he said dubiously.

“Company man! Of course you are. We’re all company men. But right’s right and wrong’s wrong before anything else. Well, ta ta, Mac, see you again. I’m off. There’s Hake with the tissue. I’ll tell the boys where you stand.”

It was a somewhat dazed McQueen that in turn pulled himself up into his own cab. He stood in the gangway and squinted meditatively at the coal heaped high on the tender. To his conscientious self-communion, his triumphant vindication had somewhat the appearance of a boomerang. “I don’t know,” he reflected. “It is damn poor coal, and--and figures _don’t_ lie. We--we’ve been getting the worst of it, and--and a man _should_ stand up for his rights.” And while McQueen, busy with new and momentous problems, was steaming west into the Rockies, Noonan, with his tongue in his cheek, was cutting along for Big Cloud with a wide-flung throttle.

That night, at Big Cloud, Noonan’s cronies got the story. That is, they got what Noonan saw fit to tell them. And the burden of his tale was that McQueen was with the Brotherhood and against the company. That was sufficient. They looked with appreciative admiration at the man who had done the trick, and then they flew to obey his orders.

By morning, every engineer on the division had the news. On way freights, on stray freights, on regulars, specials, and sections, they got it--every last one of them. And McQueen coming east again on Number Two got it, and marvelled a little at his new importance, never seeing Noonan’s hand in the marked deference paid to him.

First and last it was a bad business. Bad for the company, bad for the hot heads led by Noonan, bad for the others, and bad for McQueen. It caught the company none too well prepared, and Carleton, for this happened in the days of his superintendency, was hard put to it to move anything. There was pretty bitter feeling; and before it was over there was blood spilled. But the roughs at Big Cloud, who didn’t know the pilot from a horn-block, were responsible for the most of that, though, in their own way, too, they ended it.

It came to a show-down the night they carried young Carl Davis home from the yard on a door they had wrenched from a box-car. Davis was braking in the yard then, and he was a nephew of McQueen’s. He had lived with the engineer ever since, as a little chap of ten, he had come out to the West. Childless themselves, McQueen and his wife thought as much of the lad as though he had been their own.

McQueen in his grief didn’t get the rights of it. Only in a confused sort of a way he understood the roughs had winged the boy with a cowardly shot, meaning perhaps to do no more than shoot out his lamp as he swung by on the top of a car. And while his wife with tender hands busied herself in rendering such assistance to the surgeon as she could, McQueen sat in a chair and stared, dry-eyed and bitter of heart, at the white face on the bed.

Also McQueen was getting sense. Certainly, he had never intended to strike. Now, the shock of Carl’s hurt had sobered his judgment and he saw things as he should have seen them, saw them as he cursed himself for not having seen them before he had allowed his senseless egotism to carry him off his feet. As the thoughts came crowding through his brain, his cheeks burned dull red at his own shame. But through it all he blamed only himself, with never an inkling that he had been used as a cat’s-paw by the crafty Noonan--that was to come afterward.

McQueen waited only to wring a half-grudging assurance from the doctor that the boy would pull through, then he took his hat and left the house. It was getting on toward eleven o’clock when he walked into the hall across from the station where the boys had their headquarters, and had been in the habit of congregating each night ever since the strike began. Usually noisy in a good-natured, devil-may-care way, there was a subdued and serious quiet pervading the room as McQueen stepped in. The shooting in the yard was something they had not counted on and, like McQueen, it was acting on them as a tonic. All except Noonan who, evidently bolstered up with a few drinks, was more noisy, hilarious and quarrelsome than ever.

McQueen answered the questions they crowded at him as to the boy’s condition soberly, and going over to Noonan took him by the arm and led him into a corner.

“The game ain’t worth it,” he said shortly. “I’ve had my lesson to-night and I’m through!”

“What for?” demanded Noonan aggressively. “We didn’t have anything to do with it. We’re not responsible, are we?”

“We are,” said McQueen sturdily. “Morally responsible.”

“Morally responsible!” Noonan mocked with a sneer. “Oh, mamma, listen to him! Streak of yellow, that’s you, McQueen.” Then fiercely: “You play the scab and I’ll bash your head to jelly.”

“You’re drunk,” retorted McQueen contemptuously.

“Drunk, eh? I’m not so drunk but that I know who’s running this strike. It’s me, and don’t you forget it! And what I says goes, d’ye hear?”

“I’m asking you to call it off. Blood on our heads I won’t stand for. Our grievances don’t warrant what’s likely to happen here if things go on. You owe it to the men who followed you into the strike, Noonan.”

“Oh, I do, do I? Followed _me_ into the strike, eh? How about the men that followed _you?_”

“That followed me?” repeated McQueen in amazement.

“Sure, that followed you! You didn’t think I took any stock in your batty coal talk, did you? You must think I’m green! All I wanted was _you_--you bit fast and easy enough--the rest of the softies came along then like a pack of sheep. What d’ye think now about _me_ owing it all to the men, Mr. Morally Responsible, eh?”

It took McQueen a minute to get the whole of it--the bitter whole of it. Then the blood rushed to his face in a crimson flood. He reached out and grasping Noonan by neck and shoulders shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. “You cur!” he cried hoarsely, and flung the other suddenly away against the wall.

The men at the sound of the scuffle came running over.

“He’s a scab! Kill him!” shrieked Noonan.

McQueen turned to face the men. “If beating this strike’s a scab, I’m a scab,” he said quietly. “I’m out to beat it right now! I’ve been a fool and I’m ready to admit it. But I didn’t know until to-night that I’d been bait for a whining thing like that!” pointing at Noonan. “He says some of you men came in on the strike because I did. If that’s so, then get out of it because I do. Get out of it before there’s more on our hands than we’ll be able to answer for when we go into Division for the last time. That’s all I’ve got to say. I’m going over now to ask Carle-ton to put me on again, if it’s nothing better than pulling a way freight. And--and I hope you’ll come with me.”

As the flood follows the fracture in the dam, so the breaking of the tension filled the room with pandemonium. Cheers, yells, hisses, curses, shouts--the Brotherhood was divided against itself. But ten minutes later, the majority of them were clustered behind McQueen in the super’s office.

Carleton and his staff were sleeping at headquarters those days, and they gathered in a group around the green-shaded lamp on the dispatcher’s table to face the delegation.

“Mr. Carleton,” McQueen began, “we----”

That was all. He never got any further. From the platform outside came hoots and cat-calls, and above the chorus Noonan’s voice:

“Soak the scab! Kill him! If he’s so fond of it, let him have it! _Now!_”

The window pane was shivered with a crash, and McQueen, struck full in the head by a huge hunk of coal, sank without so much as a moan to the floor.

They cured him of brain fever in the course of time all right, but they never cured him of coal. Up and down from one end of the division to the other, when he got around again, he talked coal harder than ever--it was his business. McQueen was doing the buying for the road.

“There wasn’t anything wrong with what I said about coal,” he asserts with a smile, when the boys put it up to him. “Not for a minute! Good coal makes better steam, better everything, and pays the company. They saw that all right. That’s why I’m buying it, see? As for figuring it into the schedule, the sum was too hard and they couldn’t do it. Me? Oh, I can’t, either, I lost the paper I did it for Noonan on. I ain’t so good on figures as I was, what?”

XIII--THE REBATE

He was known as Dutchy, but his name was Damrosch.

This is Dutchy’s story when Dutchy and the Transcontinental were in the making; and before, as has been recorded elsewhere, he came to Big Cloud. He started railroading as cook’s helper on a construction gang that was laying track across the prairie. As the mileage grew, so Dutchy grew. At first lank and lean, he took on, little by little, the appearance of being comfortably nourished, until, by the time they hit the Rockies, Dutchy’s gait had become a waddle and his innocent blue eyes were almost hidden by the great rolls of fat that puffed out his face like a toy balloon. Then Dutchy, slow of body and likewise of brain, and yearning for a quiet and peaceful existence, secured the lunch-counter rights for Dry Notch.

Now, Dry Notch, half-way across the prairie, consisted of a water-tank, a small roundhouse, a smaller station and a diminutive general store. But because of its geographical position, it was headquarters for the Mid-Plains Division.

Here, T. V. Brett was superintendent; Thornley was his chief clerk; and MacDonald was dispatcher. And these, with the railroad hands and train-crews comprised the population of Dry Notch, unless there might be added a few ranchers somewhere in the neighborhood.

The staff bunked in a room over the station, and the men had their quarters in the roundhouse, but one and all they ate at Dutchy’s counter. Sinkers and coffee, apple pie and sandwiches they stood as a steady diet for a month after he had appeared upon the scene, and then a delegation waited upon him and demanded dishes more substantial.

“You can make meat pies and chicken stew and all that sort of thing, can’t you?” they demanded. “Sure!” said Dutchy. “But dot iss oxpensive.” Money was no object, they assured him, and thereupon proceeded to fix a schedule of prices--fifteen cents for a meat pie; twenty cents for a chicken stew--with two slices of bread and butter thrown in for good measure.

“Veil,” said Dutchy, “so iss it.”

And a few nights later, true to his promise, they got their chicken stew--canned chicken stew.

The huge pot, full to the brim, had been emptied, and Dutchy, his face beaming with smiles, had bustled into the back room for a further supply, when MacDonald’s voice rose plaintively:

“It’s--it’s _chicken_, isn’t it?”

The crowd looked inquiringly at the dispatcher.

“Because,” went on MacDonald softly, “I--never heard of any chickens, in Dry Notch.”

And then, amid the laughter that ensued, Thornley rose dramatically from his seat, and, picking up a bone from his plate, waved it aloft.

“Gentlemen, this is no time for mirth!” he cried. “We are the victims of a swindle. We are in the clutch of an octopus--that is to say, a food trust, composed of Dutchy and the dining-car conductors of Numbers One and Two. It is my painful duty to assert that I recognize this bone as the identical bone on which I fed two nights ago coming up the line on Number One.”

Dutchy entered, staggering under the load of the replenished pot, when Thornley solemnly demanded a rebate on the spot.

“Vat iss it?” said Dutchy, halting and peering anxiously into the pot; then, evidently reassured that no essential ingredient had been forgotten, he looked up at the ring of faces that were regarding him with grave inquiry. “Vat iss a repate?” he demanded. “It something iss mit der bread und butter for twenty cents to go, yess?”

The crowd roared, and up and down the division train-crews, engine-crews, and section-gangs got the joke and passed it on until the lunch-counter became known to every man on the system as “The Rebate.”

They did not explain the joke to Dutchy, and for days he endured the chaff stolidly, though with much bewilderment, until, one afternoon, MacDonald patiently and ploddingly acquainted him with the unhallowed baseness of one Thornley--helping himself, by way of compensation, to the heap of doughnuts under the glass cover.

Dutchy listened, his cheeks getting redder and redder as MacDonald, exaggerating some hundredfold, suavely rubbed it in.

“Dot Thornley iss--iss a pig!” shouted Dutchy suddenly, as the light burst in upon him.

MacDonald nodded assent, his mouth too full of doughnut to speak.

“Und I a fool iss, yess?” continued the proprietor, pounding a fat fist on the counter.

Again MacDonald nodded, smiling sweetly--and reached for another doughnut.

But this time Dutchy’s fingers were firmly clasped around the cover, and he peered suspiciously through the glass at the number of doughnuts remaining, then glared at the dispatcher.

“You--you git out from here!” he said slowly, but with rising emphasis.

And MacDonald, chuckling, went.

It was not until after supper that same evening, when Number One pulled in, that Dutchy made any move toward retribution--then Dutchy cut loose. It was Taggart who got it--little Shorty Taggart, the driver of Number One, who was red-haired and an inveterate joker, and likewise a great crony of Thornley’s.

The first intimation MacDonald had that anything was up was an enraged howl that, rising above the tumult of the station, reached him where he sat in the dispatcher’s office. There was no mistaking the voice--it was Dutchy’s. MacDonald stuck his head hastily out of the window, while Thornley, who was in the room, leaned over his shoulder.

Dutchy was bellowing like a mad bull. “Say it! Shusht say it. Oh! py golly!”

Here followed a volcanic eruption of guttural German with one or two words common to all languages intermingled.

Then, flying through the doorway of the lunchroom, dashing down the platform, scattering loungers, passengers, and car-tinks in all directions, in a mad rush for the engine end of the train, tore a short figure in tight-fitting, bandy-legged overalls, whose flaming red hair presented a shining mark for the plate that whizzed past his ear and smashed into a hundred pieces against a baggage-truck.

And Dutchy, blowing hard, his sleeves rolled up over the fat of his arms, waddled to the center of the platform and shook a frantic fist after the retreating engineer.

“Ta fool iss no longer yet, don’d it?” he screamed, and, puffing his cheeks in and out like a whezzy injector, he turned, reentered the restaurant, and the door closed behind him with a resounding bang.

MacDonald drew in his head, and the tears were running down his cheeks as he held his sides.

Thornley groped for a chair.

“Guess Taggart was asking for a rebate,” he gasped. “It was worth pay to see him run.”

“You bet!” said MacDonald eloquently, when he could get his breath.

The door opened, and Brett, the super, came in.

“D’ye see Taggart and Dutchy, Brett?” cried Thornley.

“Yes,” said Brett, laughing. Then, more seriously: “Look here, you’d better patch it up with Dutchy. There’s no use rubbing it in too hard. MacDonald, tell Blaney to put my car on Number Two when she comes in. I’m going east to-night.”

The patching, however, was quite a different matter than talking about it.

The next morning the lunch-room door was ominously closed--and the staff went breakfastless. By listening at the keyhole, and from an occasional glimpse through the window, they knew that Dutchy was inside.

But to pleadings, threats, and door-kickings the occupant was, to all intents and purposes, oblivious. Things began to look serious for the staff and station hands who were wont to depend on Dutchy for their grub-stakes.

Thornley whistled softly and pulled at his pipe, his feet on the dispatcher’s desk.

“He’ll _have_ to open up when Number Ninety-Seven pulls in,” Thornley was saying, more by way of reassuring himself than of presenting any new view of the case to MacDonald. “The company won’t stand for any inconvenience to the passengers--that is” he hastened to amend, “not of this kind. What? They’ve got a sort of lien on that joint, and if he waits for them to get after him he’ll get into trouble. Wish Brett were back--he’d make him open up quick, I guess. What’s the matter with Number Ninety-Seven, anyhow? Thought you said she was on time?”

“So she is,” said MacDonald, grinning. “Hear her?”

From the eastward came the hoarse shriek from the whistle of a five-hundred class.

“Guess I’ll go down,” said Thornley. “Coming?”

MacDonald nodded and got up from his chair. The two men reached the platform in time to acknowledge a flirt of the hand from Sanders in the cab as the big machine, wheel-tires sparking from the tight-set brakes, rolled slowly past them, coming to a halt farther on.

Simultaneously the door of the lunch-room swung wide open, and on the threshold, completely filling the opening with his bulk, stood Dutchy. In his left hand he held his bell, which he began to ring clamorously; in his right hand, almost but not quite concealed behind his apron, was no less a weapon than a substantial-looking rolling-pin. A crowd of passengers began to surge toward the restaurant, and among them mingled the hungry railroad men of Dry Notch.

“Come on!” shouted Thornley exultantly. “I knew he’d have to open up. Here’s where we feed--h’m?”