Part 3

Breakfastless, he shared the men’s grub and listened wide-eyed as they talked of wrecks in times gone by; but most of all he listened to the story of how his father, when he was pulling Number One, had saved the Limited by sticking to his post almost in the face of certain death. Bunty’s father was his hero, and his small soul glowed with happiness at the tale. He begged so hard for the story over again that Allan told it, and when he had finished, he slapped Bunty on the back. “And I guess you’re a chip of the old block,” he said.

And Bunty was very proud, squaring his shoulders, and planting his feet firmly to swing with the motion of the car.

The speed of the train slackened as they struck the grade leading up the eastern side of the Gap. Flannagan set the men busily at work overhauling the kit. He paused an instant before Bunty. “Look here, kid,” he said, shaking a warning finger, “you keep out of the way, and don’t get into trouble.”

It would have taken more than words from Flanna-gan to have curbed Bunty’s eagerness; so when the train came to a stop and the men tumbled out of the car with a rush, he followed. What he saw caused him to purse his lips and cry excitedly, “Gee!”

Right in front of him a big mogul had turned turtle. Ditched by a spread rail, she had pulled three boxcars with her, and piled them up, mostly in splinters, on the tender. They had taken fire, and were burning furiously. Behind these were eight or ten cars still on the road-bed, but badly demolished from bumping over the ties when they had left the rails. Still farther down the track in the rear were the rest of the string, apparently uninjured. The snow was knee-deep at the side of the track, but Bunty plowed manfully through it, climbing up the embankment to a place of vantage.

His eyes blazed with excitement as he watched the scene before him and listened to the hoarse shouts of the men, the crash of pick and ax, and, above it all, the sharp crackle of the fire as the flames, growing in volume, bit deeper and deeper into the wreck. Fiercely as the men fought, the fire, with its long start, kept them from making any headway against it. Already it had reached some of the cars standing on the track.

From where Bunty stood he could see the track dipping away in a long grade to the valley below. They called that grade the Devil’s Slide, and the wreck was on the edge of it, with the caboose and some half-dozen cars still resting on the incline. As he looked, far below him he saw a trail of smoke. It was Number Two climbing the grade. By this time the excitement of his surroundings had worn off a little, and the arrival of the Limited offered a new attraction.

He clambered down from his perch and began to pick his way past the wreck. Flannagan, begrimed and dirty, was talking to Emmons. “I don’t like to do it,” Bunty heard Flannagan say, “but we’ll have to blow up that box-car if we can’t stop the fire any other way, or we’ll have a blaze down the whole line. The train crew says there’s turpentine--two cars of it--next the flat there, and if that catches--Hi, there, kid,” he broke off to yell, as he caught sight of Bunty, “you get back to the tool-car, and stay there!”

And Bunty ran--in the other direction. He knew Number Two would stop a little the other side of the wreck, and that there would be a great big ten-wheeler pulling her, all as bright as a new dollar and glistening in paint and gold-leaf. When he pulled up breathless and happy by the side of Number Two, Masters, the engineer, was giving Engine 901 an oil round, touching the journals critically with the back of his hand as he moved along.

At sight of Bunty, the engineer laid his oil-can on the slide-bars and grinned as he extended his hand. “How are you, Bunty?” he asked.

And Bunty, accepting the proffered hand, replied gravely: “I’m pretty well, Mr. Masters, thank you.”

“Glad to hear it, Bunty. How did you get here?”

“I comed up with the wrecker-train. It’s a’ awful smash.”

“Is it, now! Think they’ll have the line cleared soon?”

“Oh, no,” Bunty replied, eyeing the cab of the big engine wistfully. “Not for ever and ever so long.”

Masters’ eyes followed Bunty’s glance. “Want to get up in the cab, Bunty?”

“Oh, please!” Bunty cried breathlessly.

“All right,” said Masters, boosting the lad through the gangway. Then warningly: “Don’t touch anything.”

And Bunty promised.

It was only four hundred yards up to the wreck; but that was enough. Masters and his firemen left their train and went to get a view at close quarters. When it was all over, it was up to the wrecking boss and the engine crew of Number Two. Flannagan swore he blocked the trucks of the cars on the incline; but Flannagan lied, and he got clear. Masters and his mate had no chance to lie, for they broke rules, and they got their time.

Be that as it may, Bunty sat on the driver’s seat of the Imperial Limited and watched the engineer and fireman start up the track. He lost sight of the men long before they reached the wreck. They were still in view, but he was very busy: he was playing “pretend.”

Bunty’s imagination was vivid enough to make the game a fascinating one whenever he indulged in it, and that was often. But now it was almost reality, and his fancy was little taxed to supply what was lacking. He was engineer of the Limited, and they had just stopped at a station. He leaned out of the cab window to get the “go-ahead” signal. Then his hand went through the motion of throwing over the reversing-lever and opening the throttle. And now he was off; faster and faster. He rocked his body to and fro to supply the motion of the cab. He sat very grim and determined, peering straight ahead. He was booming along now at full speed. They were coming to a crossing. “_Too-oo-o, toot, toot!_” cried Bunty at the top of his shrill treble, for the rules said you must whistle at every crossing, and Bunty knew the rules. Now they were coming to the next station, and he began to slow up. “_Ding-dong, ding--_”

_BANG!_

Bunty nearly fell from his seat with fright. Ahead of him, up the track, there was a column of smoke as a mass of wreckage rose in the air, and then a crash. Flannagan had blown up a car. Bunty stared, fascinated, not at the explosion, but at the rear end of the wreck on the grade. He rubbed his eyes in bewilderment, then he scrambled over the side of the seat. He paused half-way off, looking again through the front window to make sure. There was no doubt of it: the cars were beginning to roll down the track toward him. He waited for no more, but rushed to the gangway to jump off. Then he stopped as the story Allan had told about his father came back to him. Bunty’s heart thumped wildly as he turned white-faced and determined. No truly engineer would leave his train; his father had not, and Bunty did not.

The reversing-lever was in the back notch where Masters had left it when he stopped the train. It was Bunty’s task to reach and open the throttle. He climbed up on the seat and stood on tiptoe. Leaning over, he grasped the lever with both hands and pulled it open. What little science of engine-driving Bunty possessed, was lost in the terror that gripped him. The runaway cars were only a couple of hundred yards away now, and, gaining speed with every rail they traveled, spelt death and’ destruction to the Imperial Limited, if they ever reached her. The men at the top of the grade were yelling their lungs out and waving their arms in frantic warning.

The train started with a jolt that threw Bunty back on the seat. For an instant the big drivers raced like pin-wheels, then they bit into the rails, and aided by the grade, Number Two began to back slowly down the hill.

Bunty picked himself up, his little frame shaking with dry sobs. The freight-cars had gained on him in the last minute, and had nearly reached him. Again he leaned over for the throttle, and hanging grimly to it, pulled it open another notch, and then another, and then wide open. 901 took it like a frightened thoroughbred. Rearing herself from the track under her two hundred and ten pounds of steam, she jumped into the cars behind her for a starter with a shock that played havoc with the passengers’ nerves. Then she settled down to travel. The Devil’s Slide is two miles long, and some pretty fair running has been made on it in times of stress; but Bunty holds the record,--it’s good yet,--and Bunty was only an amateur!

It was neck and neck for a while, and there was almost a pile-up on the nose of 901’s pilot before she began to hold her own. Gradually she began to pull away, and by the time they were half-way down the hill the distance between her and the truant freight-cars was widening. The speed was terrific.

Pale and terror-stricken, Bunty now crouched on the driver’s seat. Time and again the engineer’s whistle in the cab over his head signaled, now entreatingly, now with frantic insistence. But Bunty gave it no heed; his only thought was for those cars in front of him that were always there. He cried to himself with little moans.

There was a sickening slur as they flew round a curve. 901 heeled to the tangent, one set of drivers fairly lifted from the track. When she found her wheel base again, Bunty, shaken from his hold, was clinging to the reversing-lever. He shut his eyes as he pulled himself back to his seat. When he looked again, he saw the freight-cars hit the curve above him, then slew as they jumped the track and, with a crash that reached him above the roar and rattle of the train, the booming whir of the great drivers beneath him, go pitching headlong down the embankment.

Bunty rose to his knees, and for the first time looked out of the side window, to find a new terror there as the rocks and trees and poles flashed dizzily by him. He turned and looked behind. A man was clinging to the hand-rail of the mail-car, and another, lying flat, was crawling over the coal heaped high on the tender. Bunty dashed the tears from his eyes; he was no “fraidy” kid. He stood up, and holding on to the frame of the window, staggered toward the throttle. As he reached for it, 901 lurched madly, and Bunty lost his balance and fell headlong upon the iron floor plate of the cab. Then it was all dark.

*****

Number Two pulled into Big Cloud that night ten hours late, and it brought Bunty. His father and Carleton and Spence and the shop-hands were on the platform. From the private car, which carried the tail-lights, an elderly gentleman got off with Bunty in his arms. The men cheered, and while the master mechanic rushed forward to take his son, the super and Spence drew back respectfully.

“Mr. Regan,” said the old gentleman, with tears in his eyes, “you ought to be pretty proud of this little lad.”

Regan tried to speak, but the words choked somehow.

The old gentleman swung himself back upon the car. “Good-by, Bunty!” he called.

And Bunty, from the depths of the blanket they had wrapped around him, called back, “Good-by, sir!” When Bunty was propped up in bed, his father told him how the express messenger had stopped the train and carried him back into the Pullmans.

Bunty listened gravely. “Yes,” he said, nodding his head; “they was awful good to me, and the man that tooked me off the train told me stories, and then I told him some, too.”

“What did you tell him?” Regan asked.

“Oh, ’bout trains and shops and presidents and directors and--and lots of things.”

“Presidents and directors!” said Regan, in surprise. “What did you tell him about them?”

“I told him what you said--that they was fools, and you knew, ’cause you’d seen them.”

Regan whistled softly.

“And,” continued Bunty, “he laughed, and when I asked him what he was laughing at, he gived me a piece of paper and told me to give it to you, and you’d tell me.”

Regan groaned. “Guess it’s my time all right,” he muttered. “Where’s the paper, Bunty?”

“He putted it in my pocket.”

Regan drew the chair with Bunty’s clothing on it toward him, and began a hurried search. He fished out a narrow slip of paper and unfolded it on his knee. It was a check for one thousand dollars payable to Master Bunty Regan, and signed by the President of the road.

III--“IF A MAN DIE”

East and West now, the Transcontinental is doubletracked, all except the Hill Division--and that, in the nature of things, probably never will be. If you know the mountains, you know the Hill Division. From the divisional point, Big Cloud, that snuggles at the eastern foothills, the right of way, like the trail of a great sinewy serpent, twists and curves through the mountains, through the Rockies, through the Sierras, and finally emerges to link its steel with a sister division, that stretches onward to the great blue of the Pacific Ocean.

It is a stupendous piece of track. It has cost fabulous sums, and the lives of many men; it has made the fame of some, and been the graveyard of more. The history of the world, in big things, in little things, in battles, in strife, in suddenf death, in peace, in progress, and in achievement, has its counterpart, in miniature, in the history of the Hill Division. There is a page in that history that belongs to “Angel” Breen. This is Breen’s story.

It has been written much, and said oftener, that men in every walk of life, save one, may make mistakes and live them down, but that the dispatcher who falls once is damned forever. And it is true. I am a dispatcher. I know.

Where he got the nickname “Angel” from, is more than I can tell you, and I’ve wondered at it often enough myself. Contrast, I guess it was. Contrast with the boisterous, rough and ready men around him, for this happened back in the early days when men were what a life of hardship and no comfort made them. No, Breen wasn’t soft--far from it. He was just quiet and mild-mannered. It must have been that--contrast. Anyway, he was “Angel” when I first knew him, and you can draw your own conclusions as to what he is now--I’m not saying anything at all about that.

Where did he come from? What was he before he came here? I don’t know. I don’t believe anybody knew, or ever gave the matter a thought. That sort of question was never asked--it was too delicate and pointed in the majority of cases. A man was what he was out here, not what he had been; he made good, or he didn’t. Not that I mean to imply that there was anything crooked or anything wrong with Breen’s past, I’m sure there wasn’t for that matter, but I’m just trying to make you understand that when I say Breen had the night trick in the dispatcher’s office here in Big Cloud, I’m beginning at the beginning.

Breen wasn’t popular. He wasn’t a good enough mixer for that. Personally, it isn’t anything I’d hold up against him, or any other man. Popularity is too often cheap, and being a “good fellow” isn’t always a license for a man to puff out his chest--though most of them do it, and that’s the high sign that what I say is right. No, I’m not moralizing, I’m telling a story, you’ll see what I mean before I get through. I say Breen wasn’t popular. He got the reputation of thinking himself a little above the rank and file of those around him, stuck-up, to put it in cold English, and that’s where they did him an injustice. It was the man’s nature, unobtrusive, retiring--different from theirs, if you get my point, and they couldn’t understand just because it was different. The limitations weren’t all up to Breen.

If they had known, or taken the trouble to know, as much about him as they could have known before passing judgment on him, perhaps things might have been a little different; perhaps not, I won’t say, for it’s pretty generally accepted in railroad law that a dispatcher’s slip is a capital offense, and there’s no court of appeal, no stay of execution, no anything, and to all intents and purposes he’s dead from the moment that slip is made. There have been lots of cases like that, lots of them, and there’s no class of men I pity more--a slip, and damned for the rest of their lives! I don’t say that because I’m a dispatcher myself. We’re only human, aren’t we? Mistakes like that, God knows, aren’t made intentionally. Sometimes a man is overworked, sometimes queer brain kinks happen to him just as they do to every other man. We’re ranked as human in everything but our work. I’m not saying it’s not right. In the last analysis I suppose it has to be that way. It’s part of the game, and we know the rules when we “sit in.” We’ve no reason to complain, only I get a shiver every time I read a newspaper headline that I know, besides being a death-warrant, is tearing the heart out of some poor devil. You’ve seen the kind I mean, read scores of them--“Dispatcher’s Blunder Costs Many Lives”--or something to the same effect. Maybe you’ll think it queer, but for days afterward I can’t handle an order book or a train sheet when I’m on duty without my heart being in my mouth half the time.

What’s this got to do with Breen? Well, in one way, it hasn’t anything to do with him; and, then again, in another way, it has. I want you to know that a blunder means something to a dispatcher besides the loss of his job. Do you think they’re a coldblooded, calloused lot? I want you to know that they care. Oh, yes, they’re human. They’ve got a heart and they’ve got a soul; the one to break, the other to sear. My God! think of it--a slip. That’s the ghastly horror of it all--a _slip!_ don’t you think they can _feel?_ don’t you think their own agony of mind is punishment enough without the added reproach, and worse, of their fellows? But let it go, it’s the Law of the Game.

I said they didn’t know much about Breen out here then except that he was a pretty good dispatcher, but as far as that goes it didn’t help him any, rather the reverse, when the smash came. The better the man the harder the fall, what? It’s generally that way, isn’t it? Perhaps you’re wondering what I know about him. I’ll tell you. If any one knew Breen, I knew him. I was only a kid then, I’m a man now. I hadn’t even a coat--Breen gave me one. I’m a dispatcher--Breen taught me, and no better man on the “key” than Breen ever lived, a better man than I could ever hope to be, yet he slipped. Do you wonder I shiver when I read those things? I’m not a religious man, but I’ve asked God on my bended knees, over and over again, to keep me from the horror, the suffering, the blasted life that came to Breen and many another man--through a slip. Yes, if any one knew Breen, I did. All I know, all I’ve got, everything in this whole wide world, I owe to Breen--“Angel” Breen.

You probably read of the Elktail wreck at the time it happened, but you’ve forgotten about it by now. Those things don’t live long in the mind unless they come pretty close home to you; there’s too many other things happening every hour in this big pulsing world to make it anything more than the sensation of the moment. But out here the details have cause enough to be fixed in the minds of most of us, not only of the wreck itself, but of what happened afterward as well--and I don’t know which of the two was the worse. You can judge for yourself I’m not going into technicalities. You’ll understand better if I don’t. You’ll remember I said that the Hill Division is only single-tracked. That means, I don’t need to tell you, that it’s up to the dispatcher every second, and all that stands between the trains and eternity is the bit of tissue tucked in the engineer’s blouse and its duplicate crammed in the conductor’s side pocket. Orders, meeting points, single track, you understand? The dispatcher holds them all, every last one of them, for life or death, men, women and children, train crews and company property, all--and Breen slipped!

No one knows to this day how it happened. I daresay some eminent authority on psychology might explain it, but the explanation would be too high-browed and too far over my head to understand it even if he did. I only know the facts and the result. Breen sent out a lap order on Number One, the Imperial Limited, westbound, and Number Eighty-Two, a fast freight, perishable, streaking east. Both were off schedule, and he was nursing them along for every second he could squeeze. Back through the mountains, both ways, all through the night, he’d given them the best of everything--the Imperial clear rights, and Eighty-Two pretty nearly, if not quite, as good. Then he fixed the meeting point for the two trains.

I read a story once where the dispatcher sent out a lap order on two trains and his mistake was staring at him all the time from his order book. I guess that was a slip of the pen, and he never noticed it. That was queer enough, but what Breen did was queerer still. His order book showed straight as a string. The freight was to hold at Muddy Lake, ten miles west of Elktail, for Number One. Number One, of course, as I told you, running free. Somehow, I don’t know how, it’s one of those things you can’t explain, a subconscious break between the mind and the mechanical, physical action, you’ve noticed it in little things you’ve done yourself, Breen wired the word “Elktail” instead of “Muddy Lake”--and never knew it--never had a hint that anything was wrong--never caught it on the repeat, and gave back his O. K. The order, the written order in the book, was exactly as it should be. It read Muddy Lake--that was right, Muddy Lake. You see what happened? There wasn’t time for the freight to make Elktail, but she got within three miles of it--and that’s as far as she ever got! In a nasty piece of track, full of trestles and gorges, where the right of way bends worse than the letter S, they met, the two of them, head on--Number One and Number Eighty-Two!

And Breen didn’t know what he had done even after the details began to pour in. How could he know? What was Eighty-Two doing east of Muddy Lake? She should have been waiting there for Number One to pass her. The order book showed that plain enough. And all through the rest of that night, while he worked like a madman clearing the line, getting up hospital relief, and wrecking trains--with Carle-ton, he was super then, gray-faced and haggard, like the master of a storm-tossed liner on his bridge giving orders, pacing the room, cursing at times at his own impotency--Breen didn’t know, neither of them knew, where the blame lay. But the horror of the thing had Breen in its grip even then. I was there that night, and I can see him now bent over under the green-shaded lamp--I can see Carleton’s face, and it wasn’t a pleasant face to see. One thing I remember Breen said. Once, as the sounder pitilessly clicked a message more ghastly than any that had gone before, adding to the number of those whose lives had gone out forever, adding to the tale of the wounded, to the wild, mad story of chaos and ruin, Breen lifted his head from the key for a moment, pushed his hair out of his eyes with a nervous, shaky sweep of his hand, and looked at Carleton.

“It’s horrible, horrible,” he whispered; “_but think of the man who did it_. Death would be easy compared to what he must feel. It makes me as weak as a kitten to think of it, Carleton. My God, man, don’t you see! I, or any other dispatcher, might do this same thing to-morrow, the next day, or the day after. Tell me again, Carleton, tell me again, that order’s straight.”

“Don’t lose your nerve,” Carleton answered sharply. “Whoever has blundered, it’s not you.”

Irony? No. It’s beyond all that, isn’t it? It’s getting about as near to the tragedy of a man’s life as you can get. It’s getting as deep and tapping as near bed-rock as we’ll ever do this side of the Great Divide. Think of it! Think of Breen that night--it’s too big to get, isn’t it? God pity him! Those words of his have rung in my ears all these years, and that scene I can see over again in every detail every time I close my eyes.