Part 6

Here he would gaze wistfully at the big mogul with valves popping and the steam drumming at her gauges, as she waited on the siding just in front of him--‘Big Cloud being a divisional point where the engines were changed--to back down onto Number One for the first stretch of the mountain run--Burke’s run with 503, and big Jim MacAloon looking after the shovel end of it.

There wasn’t anything novel in the sight, but it didn’t seem to strike Spitzer as monotonous although, when it was all over and he watched the vanishing tail lights, he always sighed. It was just the same performance each time. Ten minutes or so before Number One, westbound, was due, MacAloon would run 503 out of the roundhouse, over the turntable, up the line, and back onto the siding. Then Burke would appear on the scene, light a torch, and poke around with a long-spouted oil can.

Spitzer would usually reach his position up the platform in time to see the engineer’s final jab with the torch between the drivers or into the link-motion before swinging himself through the gangway into the cab, as the Limited with snapping trucks and screeching brake-shoes rolled into the station; but one night it fell out a little differently. The station clock had struck ten, Merla had hastened to her domicile, and Spitzer to the far end of the platform as usual, but Number One was late.

Suddenly Spitzer jumped and his heart seemed to shoot into his mouth. There was a wild, piercing scream of agony. It came again. The blood left Spitzer’s cheeks. He saw Burke fly around the end of the pilot, the torch dancing in his hand, and make for the cab. Spitzer involuntarily leaped from the platform to the track and ran in the same direction, then the safety-valve popped with a terrific roar, drowning out all other sounds. He clambered cautiously into the cab. On the floor MacAloon was going through a performance that would have beggared the efforts of a writhing python, and the while he groaned and yelled.

As Spitzer watched, Burke, who was bending over MacAloon with an anxious face, suddenly reached forward and picked up a little round object that rolled from the pocket of the fireman’s jumper, then another and another. Spitzer instinctively craned forward, and in so doing attracted Burke’s notice for the first time. Burke’s look of anxiety gave way to a grin and he held out the objects to Spitzer, just as if it wasn’t Spitzer at all but an ordinary man--humor, like death, is a great leveler, but no matter, let that go. Burke held them out to Spitzer, Spitzer took them, and even Spitzer grinned. It didn’t need any doctor to diagnose MacAloon’s complaint--and the complaint wasn’t poetic! Cramps, old-fashioned, unadulterated cramps--just plain cramps and green crab-apples! Some things lay a man out worse perhaps--but there aren’t many.

Burke’s grin didn’t last long, for at that moment came Number One’s long, clear siren note, and back over the tender a streak of light shot out in a wide circle from around a butte and then danced along the rails and began to light up the platform, as the Limited thundered, five minutes late, into the straight stretch.

“Holy fishplates!” yelled Burke. “I’ve got to get a man to fire. Spitzer, you run like hell to the roundhouse and----”

Burke stopped. Spitzer stopped him. There are moments in everybody’s life when they rise above themselves, above habit, above environment, above everything, if even for only a brief instant. A chance like this would never come again. If he could fire one trip maybe Regan would change his mind. Spitzer grasped at it frantically, despairingly.

“Burke, I _can_ fire,” he fairly screamed. “Give me a chance, Burke. I’ll never get one if you don’t.” Burke gasped for a moment like a man with his breath knocked out of him, then something like a dry chuckle sounded in his throat. No one knows but Burke what decided him. It might have been either of two things, or a combination of them both--Spitzer’s pleading face, or the desire to take a rise out of Regan--Burke and Regan not having been on the best of terms since the last general elections. Be that as it may, Burke pointed at the squirming fireman. “Take his feet,” he grunted.

Together they lifted and dragged the stricken Mac-Aloon out of the cab and to the ground. 1108, pulling Number One, had come to a stop abreast of them by now, and Burke shouted at the engine crew.

“Here!” he bawled. “Lend a hand!”

And as both men stuck their heads out of the gangway, he and Spitzer boosted the fireman up to them.

“Got cramps,” explained Burke tersely. “You’ll be able to fix him up in the roundhouse. Five minutes late, h’m? Well, hurry, you’re clear. There’s your ‘go-ahead.’ Pull out and let me get hold.”

Burke turned to Spitzer, as 1108 slipped away from the baggage-car and moved up the track, and pointed to the gangway of his own engine.

“Get in,” he said grimly. “You’ll get a chance to fire, and, take it from me, you’ll never get a chance to do that or anything else again this side of the happy hunting-grounds, my bucko, if you throw me down.”

And while Regan quarreled amiably over a game of pedro upstairs in the station with Carleton, 503, with Spitzer, touzled-haired, mild-eyed, heart-beating-like-a-trip-hammer Spitzer, in the cab, backed down on the Imperial Limited and coupled on for the mountain run. There was a quick testing of the “air,” a hurried running up and down the platform, and then Burke, leaning from the window with his arms stretched out inside the cab and fingers on the throttle, opened a notch, and the platform began to slide past them.

Spitzer wrinkled his face and stared at the gauge needle--two hundred and ten pounds, all the way, all the time--two hundred and ten pounds. It was up to him. With a jerk of the chain, he swung the furnace door wide and a shovelful of coal shot, neatly scattered, over the grate.

There is art in all things; there is the quintessence of art in the prosaic and laborious task of firing an engine. Spitzer was not without art, for in a way he had had years of experience; but banking a fire in the roundhouse, and nursing a roaring pit of flame to its highest degree of efficiency in a swaying, lurching cab, are two different and distinct operations that are in no way to be confounded. 503 began to lurch and sway. Notch by notch Burke was opening her out, and the bark of her exhaust was coming like the quick crackle of a gatling. Five minutes late in the mountains on a time schedule already marked up to a dizzy height that called for more chances than the passengers paid for is--well, it’s five minutes, just _five minutes_, that’s all. Some men would have left it for the Pacific Division crowd the next day on a level track and a straight sweep--but not Burke.

Spitzer’s initiation was in ample form and he got the full benefit of all the rites and ceremonies with every detail of the ritual worked in--and no favors shown. So far all was well, the rough country was all in front of the pilot, and Spitzer was all business. His pulse was beating in tune to only one thing--the dancing needle on the gauge. Again he swung the door open, and the red flare lighted up the heavens and played on features that Regan would never have known for Spitzer’s--they were set, grim and determined, covered with little sweat beads that glistened like diamonds. The singing sweep of the wind was in his ears as he poised his shovel. There was a sickening slur. 503 shot round a tangent--and the shovelful of coal shot like bullets all over the cab, and, including Burke, hit about everything in sight but the objective point aimed at. Simultaneously, Spitzer promptly performed a gyration that resembled something like a back hand-spring and landed well up on the tender, to roll back to the floor of the cab again with an accompanying avalanche of coal.

He picked himself up and glanced apprehensively at the engineer. There was not a scowl, not even a grin on Burke’s face, just an encouraging flirt of the hand--but the flirt was momentous. Wise and full of guile was Burke, for with that little act Spitzer, biblically speaking, girded up his loins and got his second wind.

They were well into the foothills now, and the right of way was an amazing wonder. Diving, twisting, curving, it circled and bored and trestled its way, and buttes, canons, gorges and coulees roared past like flights of fancy.

The speed was terrific. To Spitzer it was all a wild, mad medley of things he had never known before, of things that had neither beginning nor end. The giddy slew as the big mountain racer hit the curves, the crunching grind of the flanges as for an instant she lifted from her wheel-base, the pitch, the roll, the staggering reel, the gasp for breath, the beat of the trucks, the whir of the racing drivers, the rush of the wind, the echoing thunder of the flying coaches behind--it was all there, all separate, all welded into one, a creation, new, vernal, life, the life of the rail, that beat at his eardrums and quickened the pounding throb of his heart.

At first, from time to time, Burke leaned over his levers to glance at the pressure gauge, but after a bit he crouched a little further forward in his seat and his eyes held on the track ahead where the beam of the electric headlight flooded the glittering ribbons of steel. He was getting what MacAloon or no other man had ever given him before--two hundred and ten pounds _all_ the way. SPITZER was firing Number One, the Imperial Limited, westbound, on the mountain run, _three_ minutes late!

The sweat was rolling in streams from the little fellow now, and he clung in the gangway for a moment’s breathing spell, leaning out, staring ahead at a few shining lights in the distance. Came the hoarse scream of the whistle, the clattering crash as they shattered the yard switches, a blurred vision of dark outlines dotted with tiny scintillating points, and station, yard, lights, switches and all were behind him.

Spitzer drew his sleeve across his forehead, and turned again to his work as they thundered over a long steel trestle--Thief Creek. Spitzer knew the road well enough at second hand, if not from personal experience. Just ahead was The Pass--Sucker Pass--straight enough for its quarter-mile stretch, but where the rock walls rose up on either side so close as to almost scratch the paint off the rolling stock. Eased for a moment in scant deference to switches and trestle just passed, Spitzer felt the forward leap of the racer as Burke threw her wide open again. He bent for his shovel--and then, quick as the winking of an eye, sudden as doom, came a tearing, rending crash, a scream from Burke, and the right-hand side of the cab seemed literally torn in two.

A flying piece of woodwork that struck him across the eyes, a terrific jolt as the engine lifted and fell back, sent Spitzer headlong to the floor of the cab. Dazed, half mad with the pain, the blood streaming from his forehead, he staggered to his feet. Burke lay coiled in an inert heap just in front of him by the furnace door. A whizzing piece of steel rose up, crunched, slithered, gashed a track of ruin for itself, and was gone. It had missed Burke only by a hair’s-breadth--next time there might not be even that limit of safety. With a cry, Spitzer leaped forward and dragged the unconscious engineer across the cab. Again the jolt, the slur, the stagger, the desperate wrench. It seemed like years, like eternity to Spitzer. He was living a lifetime in the passing of a second--it had been no more than that, no more than two or three at most.

There are some things worse, much worse, in railroading than a broken crank-pin and a rod amuck, but not when it comes in The Pass, where derailment at their racing speed spelt death, quick and sudden. There was just one chance for the trailing string of coaches, just one for every last soul aboard--Spitzer. But between Spitzer and the throttle and the air-latch was a thing of steel that rose and fell, now swinging a splintering, murderous arc through the shattered side of the cab, now grinding into the ties land roadbed, threatening with every revolution to pitch 503 and the train behind her headlong from the rails to crumple like flimsy egg-shells against the narrow rocky walls that lined The Pass. Just one chance for the train crew and passengers--_just one in a thousand for Spitzer_. And little five-foot-five Spitzer, diffident, retiring, self-effaced, unobtrusive Spitzer, with a dry, choking sob in his throat, flung himself forward to stop the train. His hands clutched desperately at the levers, there was a hiss, the vicious eventualities, and that’s the way it was with about nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand colonists. The company, of course, did take _some_ risk--they took a chance on the one-thousandth man. The company had sporting blood.

V--SHANLEY’S LUCK

If Shanley had only known what was going to happen, he could have saved some of his money on that ticket. As it stands now, he has still got transportation coming to him from Little Dance on the Hill Division to Bubble Creek, B. C. That may be an asset, or it may not--Shanley never asked for it.

Third class, colonist, no stop over allowed, redhaired, freckle-faced, an uptilt to the nose, a jaw as square as the side of a house, shoulders like a bull’s, and a fist that would fell an ox--that was Shanley. That was Shanley until the sprung rail that ditched the train at Little Dance caused him the loss of two things--his erstwhile status in the general passenger agent’s department, and a well-beloved and reeking brier.

Both were lost forever--his status partly on account of the reasons before mentioned, and partly because Shanley wasn’t particularly interested in Bubble Creek; his brier because it became a part, an integral part, of that memorable wreck, as Shanley, who was peacefully smoking in the front-end compartment of the colonist coach when the trouble happened, left the pipe behind while he catapulted through the open door--it was summer and sizzling hot--and landed, a very much dazed, bewildered, but not otherwise hurt Shanley, halfway up the embankment on the off side of a scene of most amazing disorder.

The potentialties that lie in a sprung rail are something to marvel at. Up ahead, the engine had promptly turned turtle, and, as promptly giving vent to its displeasure at the indignity heaped upon it, had incased itself in an angry, hissing cloud of steam; behind, the baggage and mail cars seemed to have vied with each other in affectionate regard for the tender. Only the brass-polished, nickel-plated Pullmans at the rear still held the rails; the rest was just a crazy, slewed-edge-ways, up-canted, toppled-over string of cars, already beginning to smoke as the flames licked into them.

The shouts of those who had made their escape, the screams of those still imprisoned within the wreckage, the sight of others crawling through the doors and windows brought Shanley back to his senses. He rose to his feet, blinked furiously, as was his habit on all untoward occasions, and the next instant he was down the embankment and into the game--to begin his career as a railroad man. That’s where he started--in the wreck at Little Dance.

In and out of the blazing pyre, after a woman or a child; the crash of his ax through splintering woodwork; the scorching heat; prying away some poor devil wedged down beneath the débris; tinkling glass as the heat cracked the windows or he beat through a pane with his fist--it was all hazy, all a dream to Shanley as, hours afterward, a grim, gaunt figure with blackened, bleeding face, his clothes hanging in ribbons, he rode into the Big Cloud yards on the derrick car.

Some men would have hit up the claim agent for a stake; Shanley hit up Carleton for a job. But for modesty’s sake, previous to presenting himself before the superintendent’s desk, he borrowed from one of the wrecking crew the only available article of wearing apparel at hand--a very dirty and disreputable pair of overalls. Dirty and disreputable, but--whole.

“I want a job, Mr. Carleton,” said he bluntly, when he had gained admittance to the super.

“You do, eh?” replied Carleton, looking him up and down. “You do, eh? You’re a pretty hard-looking nut, h’m?”

Shanley blinked, but, being painfully aware that he undoubtedly did look all if not more than that, and being, too, not quite sure what to make of the super, he contented himself with the remark:

“I ain’t a picture, I suppose.”

“H’m!” said Carleton. “Been up at the wreck, I hear--what?”

“Yes,” said Shanley shortly. No long story, no tale of what he’d done, no anything--just “Yes,” and that was what caught Carleton.

“What can you do?” demanded the super.

“Anything. I’m not fussy,” replied Chanley.

“H’m!” said Carleton. “You don’t look it.” And he favored Shanley with another prolonged stare.

Shanley, at first uncomfortable, shifted nervously from one foot to the other; then, as the stare continued, he began to get irritated.

“Look here,” he flung out suddenly. “I ain’t on exhibition. I come for a job. I ain’t got any letters of recommendation from pastors of churches in the East. I ain’t got anything. My name’s Shanley, an’ I haven’t even got anything to prove _that_.”

“You’ve got your nerve,” said Carleton, leaning back in his swivel chair and tucking a thumb in the armhole of his vest. “Ever worked on a railroad?”

“No,” answered Shanley, a little less assertively, as he saw his chances of a job vanishing into thin air, and already regretting his hasty speech--a few odd nickels wasn’t a very big stake for a man starting out in a new country, and that represented the sum total of Shanley’s worldly wealth. “No, I never worked on a railroad.”

“H’m,” continued Carleton. “Well, my friend, you can report to the trainmaster in the morning and tell him I said to put you on breaking. Get out!”

It came so suddenly and unexpectedly that it took Shanley’s breath. Carleton’s ways were not Shanley’s ways, or ways that Shanley by any peradventure had been accustomed to. A moment before he wouldn’t have exchanged one of his nickels for his chances of a job, therefore his reply resolved itself into a sheepish grin; moreover--but of this hereafter--Shanley back East was decidedly more in the habit of having his applications refused with scant ceremony than he was to receiving favorable consideration, which was another reason for his failure to rise to the occasion with appropriate words of thanks.

Incidentally, Shanley, like a select few of his fellow creatures, had his failings; concretely, his particular strayings from the straight and narrow way, not having been hidden under a bushel, were responsible, with the advice and assistance of a distant relative or two--advice being always cheap, and assistance, in this case, a marked-down bargain--for his migration to the West, as far West as the funds in hand would take him--Bubble Creek, B. C, the distant relatives saw to that. They bought the ticket.

Shanley, still smiling sheepishly and in obedience to the super’s instruction to “get out,” was halfway to the door when Carleton halted him.

“Shanley!”

“Yes, sir?” said Shanley, finding his voice and swinging around.

“Got any money?”

Shanley’s hand mechanically dove through the overalls and rummaged in the pocket of his torn and ribboned trousers--the pocket had not been spared--the nickels, every last one of them, were gone. The look on his face evidently needed no interpretation.

Carleton was holding out two bills--two tens.

“Cleaned out, eh? Well, I wouldn’t blame any one if they asked you for your board bill in advance. Here, I guess you’ll need this. You can pay it back later on. There’s a fellow keeps a clothing store up the street that it wouldn’t do you any harm to visit--h’m?”

With gratitude in his heart and the best of resolutions exuding from every pore--he was always long on resolutions--Shanley being embarrassed, and therefore awkward, made a somewhat ungraceful exit from the super’s presence.

But neither gratitude nor resolutions, even of steelplate, double-riveted variety, are of much avail against circumstances and conditions over which one has absolutely, undeniably, and emphatically no control. If Dinkelman’s clothing emporium had occupied a site between the station and MacGuire’s Blazing Star saloon, instead of the said Blazing Star saloon occupying that altogether inappropriate position itself, and if Spider Kelly, the conductor of the wrecked train, had not run into Shanley before he had fairly got ten yards from the super’s office, things undoubtedly would have been very different. Shanley took that view of it afterward, and certainly he was justified. It is on record that he had no hand in the laying out of Big Cloud nor in the control of its real estate, rentals, or leases.

Railroad men are by no stretch of the imagination to be regarded as hero worshipers, but if a man does a decent thing they are not averse to telling him so. Shanley had done several very decent things at the wreck. Spider Kelly invited him into the Blazing Star.

Shanley demurred. “I’ve got to get some clothes,” he explained.

“Get ‘em afterward,” said Kelly; “plenty of time. Come on; it’s just supper-time, and there’ll be a lot of the boys in there. They’ll be glad to meet you. If you’re hungry you’ll find the best free layout on the division. There’s nothing small about MacGuire.”

Shanley hesitated, and, proverbially, was lost.

An intimate and particular description of the events of that night are on no account to be written. They would not have shocked, surprised, or astonished Shanley’s distant relatives--but everybody is not a distant relative. Shanley remembered it in spots--only in spots. He fought and whipped Spider Kelly, who was a much bigger man than himself, and thereby cemented an undying friendship; he partook of the hospitality showered upon him and returned it with a lavish hand--as long as Carleton’s twenty lasted; he made speeches, many of them, touching wrecks and the nature of wrecks and his own particular participation therein--which was seemly, since at the end, about three o’clock in the morning, he slid with some dignity under the table, and, with the fond belief that he was once more clutching an ax and doing heroic and noble service, wound his arms grimly, remorselessly, tenaciously, like an octopus, around the table leg--and slept.

MacGuire before bolting the front door studied the situation carefully, and left him there--for the sake of the table.

The sunlight next morning was not charitable to Shanley. Where yesterday he had borne the marks of one wreck, he now bore the marks of two--his own on top of the company’s. Up the street Dinkelman’s clothing emporium flaunted a canvas sign announcing unusual bargains in men’s apparel. This seemed to Shanley an unkindly act that could be expressed in no better terms than “rubbing it in.” He gazed at the sign with an aggrieved expression on his face, blinked furiously, and started, with a step that lacked something of assurance, for the railroad yards and the trainmaster’s office.

He was by no means confident of the reception that awaited him. If there is one characteristic over and above any other that is common to human nature, it is the faculty, though that’s rather an imposing word, of worrying like sin over something that _may_ happen--but never does. Shanley might just as well have saved himself the mental worry anent the trainmaster’s possible attitude. He did not report to the trainmaster that morning, never saw that gentleman until long, very long afterward. Instead, he reported to Carleton--at the latter’s urgent solicitation in the shape of a grinning call-boy, who intercepted his march of progress toward the station.

“Hi, you, there, cherub face!” bawled the urchin politely. “The super wants you--on the hop!”