Part 8
Railroad ties, at best, do not make the smoothest walking in the world, and to accomplish the feat under some conditions is decidedly worthy of note. Shanley’s performance beggars the English language--there is no metaphor. For every ten feet he moved forward he covered twenty in laterals, and, considering that the laterals were limited to the paltry four, feet, eight and one-half inches that made the gauge of the rails, the feat was incontestably more than worthy of mere note--it was something to wonder at. He clung grimly to the lantern, with the result that the gyrations of that little red light in the darkness would have put to shame an expert’s exhibition with a luminous dumb-bell. The while Shanley spoke earnestly to himself.
“Queshun is am I drunk--thash’s the queshun. If I’m drunk--lose my job. Thash what Carleton said--lose my job. If I’m not drunk--s’all right. Wish I knew wesser I’m drunk or not.”
He relapsed into silent communion and debate. This lasted for a very long period, during which, marvelous to relate, he had not only reached a point opposite his box-car domicile, but, being oblivious of that fact, had kept on along the track. Progress, however, was becoming more and more difficult. Shanley was assuming a position that might be likened somewhat to the letter C, owing to the fact that the force of gravity seemed to be exerting an undue influence on his head. Shanley was coming to earth.
As a result of his communion with himself he began to talk again, and his words suggested that he had suspicions of the truth.
“Jus’ my luck,” said he bitterly. “Jus’ my luck. Allus same kind of luck. What’d I have to do wis Peto Mara--Mars--Marscheeno’s birthday? Nothing. Nothing ‘tall. ‘Twasn’t my fault. Jus’ my luck. Jus’ my----”
Shanley came to earth. Also his head came into contact with the unyielding steel of the left-hand rail, and as a result he sprawled inertly full across the right of way, not ten yards west of where the Glacier River swings in to crowd the track close up against the mountain base.
Providence sometimes looks after those who are unable to look after themselves. By the law of probabilities the lantern should have met disaster quick and absolute; but, instead, when it fell from Shanley’s hand, it landed right side up just outside the rail between two ties, and, apart from a momentary and hesitant flicker incident to the jolt, burned on serenely. And it was still burning when, five minutes later, above the swish of leaping waters from the Glacier River now a chattering, angry stream with swollen banks, above the moan of the wind and the roll of the thunder through the mountains, above the pelting splash of the steady rain, came the hoarse scream of Number One’s whistle on the grade.
Sanderson, in the cab, caught the red against him on the right of way ahead, and whistled insistently for the track. This having no effect, he grunted, latched in the throttle, and applied the “air.” The ray of the headlight crept along between the rails, hovered over a black object beside the lantern, passed on again and held, not on the glistening rain-wet rails--_they_ had disappeared--but on a crumbling road-bed and a dark blotch of waters, as with a final screech from the grinding brake-shoes Number One came to a standstill.
“Holy MacCheesar!” exclaimed Sanderson, as he swung from the cab.
He made his way along past the drivers to where the pilot’s nose was inquisitively poked against the lantern, picked up the lantern, and bent over Shanley.
“Holy MacCheesar!” he exclaimed again, straightening up after a moment’s examination. “Holy MacCheesar!”
“What’s wrong, Sandy?” snapped a voice behind him, the voice of Kelly, Spider Kelly, the conductor, who had hurried forward to investigate the unscheduled stop.
“Search me,” replied Sanderson. “Looks like the Glacier was up to her old tricks. There’s a washout ahead, and a bad one, I guess. But the meaning of this here is one beyond me. The fellow was curled up on the track just as you see him with the light burning alongside, that’s what saved us, but he’s as drunk as a lord.”
As Kelly bent over the prostrate form, others of the train crew appeared on the scene. One glance he gave at Shanley’s never-under-any-circumstances-to-be-for-gotten homely countenance, and hastily ordered the men to go forward and investigate the washout ahead. Then he turned to the engineer.
“The man is not drunk, Sandy,” said he.
“He is gloriously and magnificently drunk, Kelly,” replied the engineer.
“What would he be doing here, then? He is not drunk.”
“Sleeping it off. He is disgracefully drunk.”
“Can ye not see the bash on his head where he must have stumbled in the dark trying to save the train and struck against the rail? He is not drunk.”
“Can ye not smell?” retorted Sanderson. “He is dead drunk!”
“I have fought with him and he licked me. He is a man and a friend of mine”--Kelly shoved his lantern into Sanderson’s face. “_He is not drunk_.”
“He is _not_ drunk,” said Sanderson. “He is a hero. What will we do with him?”
“We’ll carry him, you and me, over to the construction shanty, it’s only a few yards, and put him in his bunk. He works here, you know. McCann’s in Big Cloud, for I saw him there. After that we’ll run back to the Bend for orders and make our report.”
“Hurry, then,” said the engineer. “Take his legs. What are you laughing at?”
“I was thinking of Carleton,” said Kelly. “Carleton? What’s Carleton got to do with it?”
“I’ll tell you later when we get to the Bend. Come on.”
“H’m,” said Sanderson, as they staggered with their burden over to the box-car shack. “I’ve an idea that bash on the head is more dirt than hurt. He’s making a speech, ain’t he?”
“Jus’ my luck,” mumbled the reviving Shanley dolefully. “Jus’ my luck. Alius same kind of luck.”
“Possibly,” said Kelly. “Set him down and slide back the door. That’s right. In with him now. We haven’t got time to make him very comfortable, but I guess he’ll do. I can fix him up better at the Bend than I can here.”
“At the Bend? What d’ye mean?” demanded Sanderson.
“You’ll see,” replied Kelly, with a grin. “You’ll see.”
And Sanderson saw. So did Carleton--in a way. Kelly’s report, when they got to the Bend, was a work of art. He disposed of the nature and extent of the washout in ten brief, well-chosen words, but the operator got a cramp before Kelly was through covering Shanley with glory. The passengers, packed in the little waiting-room clamoring for details, yelled deliriously as he read the message aloud--and promptly took up a collection, a very generous collection, because all collections are generous at psychological moments--that is to say, if not delayed too long to allow a recovery from hysteria.
At Big Cloud, the dispatcher, because the washout was a serious matter that not only threatened to tie up traffic, but was tying it up, sent a hurry call to Carleton’s house that brought the super on the run to the office. By this time the collection had been counted, and the total wired in, as an additional detail--one hundred and forty dollars and thirty-three cents. The odd change being a contribution from a Swede in the colonist coach who could not speak English, and who paid because a man in uniform, a brakeman acting as canvasser, made the request. A Swede has a great respect for a uniform.
“H’m,” said Carleton, when he had read it all. “I know a man when I see one. Tell Shanley to report here. I guess we can find something better for him to do than bossing laborers. What? Yes, send the letter up on the construction train. One hundred and forty, thirty-three, h’m? Tell him that, too. He’ll feel good when he sees it in the morning.”
But Shanley did not feel good when he saw it in the morning, for he was nursing a very bad headache and a stomach that had a tendency to squeamishness. The letter was lying on the floor, where some one had considerately chucked it in without disturbing him. His eyes fell on it as he struggled out of his bunk. He picked it up, opened it, read it--and blinked. His face set with a very blank and bewildered expression. He read it again, and again once more. Then he went to the door and looked out.
A construction train was on the line a little below him, and a gang of men, not his nor Pietro Maraschino’s men, were busily at work. As he gazed, his face puckered. The problem that had so obsessed him on his return journey from the birthday celebration the night before was a problem no longer.
“I _was_ drunk,” said he, with conviction. “I _must_ have been.”
He went back to the letter and studied it again, scratching his head.
“Something,” he muttered, “has happened. What it is, I dunno. I was drunk, an’ I’m not fired. I was drunk, an’ I’m promoted. I was drunk, an’ I’m paid well for it, very well. I was drunk--an’ I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
Which was exactly the advice Kelly took pains to give him half an hour later, when Number One crawled down to the Canon and halted for a few minutes opposite the dismantled box-car, while the construction train put the last few touches to its work.
VI--THE BUILDER
There are two sides to every story--which is a proverb so old that it is in the running with Father Time himself. It is repeated here because there must be _some_ truth in it--anything that can stand the wear and tear of the ages, and the cynics, and the wise old philosophical owls without getting any knock-out dints punched in its vital spots must have some sort of merit fundamentally, what? Anyway, the company had their side, and the men’s version differed--of course. Maybe each, in a way, was more or less right, and, equally, in a way, more or less wrong. Maybe, too, both sides lost their tempers and got their crown-sheets burned out before the arbitration pow-wow had a chance to get the line clear and give anybody rights, schedule or otherwise. However, be that as it may, whoever was right or whoever was wrong, one or the other, or both, it is the strike, not the ethics of it, that has to do with--but just a moment, we’re over-running our holding orders.
From the time the last rail was spiked home and bridging the Rockies was a reality, not a dream--from then to the present day, there isn’t any very much better way of describing the Hill Division than to call it rough and ready. Coming right down to cases, the history of that piece of track, the history of the men who gave the last that was in them to make it, and the history of those who have operated it since isn’t far from being a pretty typical and comprehensive example of the pulsing, dominating, dogged, go-forward spirit of a continent whose strides and progress are the marvel of the world; and, withal, it is an example so compact and concrete that through it one may see and view the larger picture in all its angles and in all its shades. Heroism and fame and death and failure--it has known them all--but ever, and above all else, it has known the indomitable patience, the indomitable perseverance, the indomitable determination against which no times, nor conditions, nor manners, nor customs, nor obstacles can stand--the spirit of the New Race and the Great New Land, the essence and the germ of it.
Building a road through the Rockies and tapping the Sierras to give zest to the finish wasn’t an infant’s performance; and operating it, single-track, on crazy-wild cuts and fills and tangents and curves and tunnels and trestles with nature to battle and fight against, isn’t any infant’s performance, either. The Hill Division was rough and ready. It always was, and it is now--just naturally so. And Big Cloud, the divisional point, snuggling amongst the buttes in the eastern foothills, is even more so. It boasts about every nationality classified in certain erudite editions of small books with big names, and, to top that, has an extra anomaly or two left over and up its sleeve for good measure; but, mostly, it is, or rather was--it has changed some with the years--composed of Indians, bad Americans, a scattering of Chinese, and an indescribable medley of humans from the four quarters of Europe, the Cockney, the Polack, the Swede, the Russian and the Italian--laborers on the construction gangs. Big Cloud was a little more than rough and ready--it wasn’t exactly what you’d call a health resort for finnicky nerves.
So, take it by and large, the Hill Division, from one end to the other, wasn’t the quietest or most peaceful locality on the map even before the trouble came. After that--well, mention the Big Strike to any of the old-timers and they’ll talk fast enough and hard enough and say enough in a minute to set you wondering if the biographers hadn’t got mixed on dates and if Dante hadn’t got his material for that little hair-stiffener of his no further away than the Rockies, and no longer back than a few years ago. But no matter----
The story opens on the strike--_not_ the ethics of it. There’s some hard feeling yet--too much of it to take sides one way or the other. But then, apart from that, this is not the story of a strike, it is the story of men--a story that the boys tell at night in the darkened roundhouses in the shadow of the big ten-wheelers on the pits, while the steam purrs softly at the gauges and sometimes a pop-valve lifts with a catchy sob. They tell it, too, across the tracks at headquarters, or on the road and in construction camps; but they tell it better, somehow, in the roundhouse, though it is not an engineer’s tale--and Clarihue, the night turner, tells it best of all. Set forth as it is here it takes no rank with him,--but all are not so fortunate as to have listened while Clarihue talked.
Just one word more to make sure that the red isn’t against us anywhere and we’ll get to Keating and Spirlaw--just a word to say that Carleton, “Royal” Carle-ton, was superintendent then, and Regan was master mechanic, Harvey was division engineer, Spence was chief dispatcher, and Riley was trainmaster. Pretty good men that little group, pretty good railroaders--there have never been better. Some of them are bigger now in the world’s eyes, heads of systems instead of departments--and some of them will never railroad any more. However------
If you haven’t forgotten Shanley you will recall the Glacier Canon, and, most of all, you will recall the Glacier River with its treacherous sandy bed that snuggled close to the right of way and forced the track hard against the rocky walls of the mountain’s base. The havoc the Glacier played with the operating department on the night of Shanley’s memorable heroism was not the first time it had misbehaved itself, nor was it the last--that was the trouble. It washed out the road-bed with such consistent persistency, on so little provocation, and did it so effectually as to stir at last to resentment even the torpid blood of the directors down East. So they voted the sum, though it hurt, and solaced themselves with the thought that after all it was economy--which was true.
There was only one thing to do against that overhospitable and affectionate little stream, and that was to get away from it; but, before proceeding to do so--in order to get elbow room to work so that the flyers and the fast mails and the traffic generally wouldn’t be hung up every time a Polack swung a pick--they pushed the track out over the chattering river on a long, temporary, hybrid trestle of wood and steel. That done, the rest was up to Spirlaw--up to Spirlaw and Keating.
The plans called for the shaving down of the mountain-side, the barbering, mostly, to be done with dynamite, for the beard of the Rockies is not the down of a youth. So, when the trestle was finished, Spirlaw with a gang of some thirty Polacks moved into construction camp, promptly tore up the old track, and set themselves to the task in hand. A little later, Keating joined them.
Spirlaw was a road boss, and the roughest of his kind. Physically he was a giant; and which of the three was the hardest, his face, his fist, or his tongue, would afford the sporting element a most excellent opportunity to indulge in a little book-making with the odds about even all round. His hair was a coarse mop of tawny brown that straggled over his eyes; and his eyes were all black, every bit of them--there didn’t seem to be any pupil at all, which gave them a glint that was harder than a cold chisel. Take him summed up, Spirlaw looked a pretty tough proposition, and in some ways, most ways perhaps, he was--he never denied it.
“What the blue blinding blazes, d’ye think, h’m?” he would remark, reaching into his hip pocket for his “chewing,” as he swept the other arm comprehensively over the particular crowd of sweating foreigners that happened to be under his particular jurisdiction at the time. “What d’ye think! You can’t run cuts an’ fills with an outfit like this on soft soap an’ candy sticks, can you? Well then--h’m?”
That last “h’m” was more or less conclusive--very few cared to pursue the argument any further. At a safe distance, the Big Fellows on the division, as a salve to their consciences when humanitarian ideas were in the ascendancy, would bombard Spirlaw with telegrams which were forceful in tone and direful in threat--but that’s all it ever amounted to. Spirlaw’s work report for a day on anything, from bridging a canon to punching a hole in the bitter hard rock of the mountain-side, was a report that no one else on the division had ever approached, let alone duplicated--and figures count perhaps just a little bit more in the operating department of a railroad than they do anywhere else in the world. Spirlaw used the telegrams as spills to light a pipe as hard-looking as himself, whose bowl was down at the heels on one side from much scraping, and on such occasions it was more than ordinarily unfortunate for the sour-visaged Polack who should chance to arouse his ire.
Some men possess the love of a fight and their natures are tempestuous by virtue of their nationality, because some nationalities are addicted that way. This may have been the case with Spirlaw--or it may not. There’s no saying, for Spirlaw’s nationality was a question mark. He never delivered himself on the subject, and, certainly, there was no figuring it out from the derivation of his name--_that_ could have been most anything, and could have come from most anywhere.
To say that “opposites attract” isn’t any more original, any less gray-bearded, than the words at the head of these pages. Generally, that sort of thing is figured in the worn-out, stale, familiarity-breeds-con-tempt realm of platitude, and at its unctuous repetition one comes to turn up his nose; but, once in a while, life has a habit of getting in a kink or a twist that gives you a jolt and a different side-light, and then, somehow, a thing like that rings as fresh and virile as though you had just heard it for the first time. As far as any one ever knew, Keating was the only one that ever got inside of Spirlaw’s shell, the only one that the road boss ever showed the slightest symptoms of caring a hang about--and yet, on the surface, between the two there was nothing in common. Where one was polished the other was rough; where one was weak the other was strong. Keating was small, thin, pale-faced, and he had a cough--a cough that had sent him West in a hurry without waiting for the other year that would have given him his engineer’s diploma from the college in the East.
When the boy, he wasn’t much more than a boy, dropped off at Big Cloud, and Carleton read the letter he brought from one of the big Eastern operators, the super raised his eyebrows a little, looked him over and sent him out to Spirlaw. Afterwards, he spoke to Regan about him.
“I didn’t know what to do with him, Tommy; but I had to do something, what? Any one with half an eye could tell that he had to be kept out of doors. Thought he might be able to help Spirlaw out a little as assistant, h’m? Guess he’ll pick up the work quick enough. He don’t look strong.”
“Mabbe it’s just as well,” grinned the master mechanic. “He won’t be able to batter the gang any. One man doing that is enough--when it’s Spirlaw.”
Spirlaw heard about it before he saw Keating, and he swore fervently.
“What the hell!” he growled. “Think I’m runnin’ a nursery or an outdoor sanatorium? I guess I’ve got enough to do without lookin’ after sick kids, I guess I have. Fat lot of help he’ll be--help my eye! I don’t need no help.”
But for all that, somehow, from the first minute when Keating got off the local freight, that stopped for him at the camp, and shoved out his hand to Spirlaw it was different--after that it was _all_ Keating as far as the road boss was concerned.
Queer the way things go. Keating looked about the last man on earth you would expect to find rubbing elbows with an iron-fisted foreman whose tongue was rougher than a barbed-wire fence; the last man to hold his own with a slave-driven gang of ugly Polacks. He seemed too quiet, too shy, too utterly unfit, physically, for that sort of thing. The blood was all out of the boy--he got rid of it faster than he could make it. But his training stood him in good stead, and, within his limitations, he took hold like an old hand. That was what caught Spirlaw. He did what he was told, and he did what he could--did a little more than he could at times, which would lay him up for a bad two or three days of it.
“Good man,” Spirlaw scribbled across the bottom of a report one day--a day that was about equally divided between barking his knuckles on a Polack’s head and feeding cracked ice to Keating in his bunk. Cracked ice? No, it wasn’t on the regular camp bill of fare--but the company supplied it for all that. Spirlaw, with supreme contempt for the dispatchers and their schedules and their train sheets, held up Number Twelve and the porter of the Pullman for a goodly share of the commodity possessed by that colored gentleman. That’s what Spirlaw thought of Keating.
For the first few weeks after he struck the camp Keating didn’t have very much to say about himself, or anything else for that matter; but after he got a little nearer to Spirlaw and the mutual liking grew stronger, he began to open up at nights when he and the road boss sat outside the door of the construction shanty and watched the sun lose itself behind the mighty peaks, creep again with a wondrous golden-tinted glow between a rift in the range, and finally sink with ensuing twilight out of sight. Keating could talk then.
“Don’t see what you ever took up engineerin’ for,” remarked Spirlaw one evening. “It’s about the roughest kind of a life I know of, an’ you------”
“I know, I know,” Keating smiled. “You think I’m not strong enough for it. Why, another year out here in the West and I’ll be like a horse.”
“Sure, you will,” agreed Spirlaw, hastily. “I didn’t mean just that.” Then he sucked his briar hard.
Spirlaw wasn’t much up on therapeutics, he knew more about blasting rock, but down in his heart there wasn’t much doubt about another year in the West for the boy, and another and another, _all of them_--only they would be over the Great Divide that one only crosses once when it is crossed forever. Six months, four, three,--just months, not years, was what he read in Keating’s face. “What I meant,” he amended, “was that you don’t have to. From what you’ve said, I figur’ your folks back there would be willin’ to stake you in most any line you picked out, h’m?”