Part 13

But Regan's cup, brimming as he held it to be, was not yet full. It was a pretty swell train, the Directors' Special, that the crowd sent off with a burst of cheering that lasted until the markers were lost to view around a butte; a pretty swell train, about the swellest that had ever decorated the train sheet of the Hill Division--two sleepers, a diner and observation, mostly mahogany, and the baggage car a good enough imitation to fit into the color scheme without outraging even the most esthetic taste, and the 1608 on the front end, gold-leafed, and shining like a mirror from polished steel and brass. As far as looks went there wasn't a thing the matter with it, not a thing; it would have pulled a grin of pride out of a Polack section hand--which is pulling some. And there wasn't anything the matter with the send-off, either, that was propitious enough to satisfy anybody; but, for all that, barring the first hour or so out of Big Cloud, trouble and the Directors' Special that afternoon were as near akin as twin brothers. Nothing went right; everything went wrong--except the 1608, that ran as smooth as a full-jewelled watch, when old Dan, for the mix-up behind him, could run her at all. The coupling on the diner broke--that started it. When they got that fixed, something else happened; and then the forward truck of the baggage car developed a virulent attack of hot box.

The special had the track swept for her clean to the Western foothills, and rights through. But she didn't need them. Her progress was a crawl. The directors, in spite of their dollar-ante and the roof of the observation car for the limit, began to lose interest in their game.

"What is this new toy we've bought?" inquired one of them plaintively. "A funeral procession?"

Even H. Herrington Campbell began to show emotion--he shifted his cigar stub at intervals from one corner of his mouth to the other. Regan was hot--both ways--inside and out; hotter a whole lot than the hot box he took his coat off to, and helped old Pete Chartrand and the train crew slosh buckets of water over every time the Directors' Special stopped, which was frequently.

It wasn't old Pete's fault. It wasn't anybody's fault. It was just blamed hard luck, and it lasted through the whole blamed afternoon. And by the time they pulled into Elk River, where Regan had wired for another car, and had transferred the baggage, the Directors' Special, as far as temper went, was as touchy as a man with a bad case of gout. As they coupled on the new car, Regan spoke to old Dan in the cab--spoke from his heart.

"We're two hours late, Dan--h'm? For the love of Mike, let her out and do something. That bunch back there's getting so damned polite to me you'd think the words would melt in their mouths--what?"

Old Dan puckered his face into a reassuring smile under the peak of his greasy cap.

"I guess we're all right now we've got rid of that car," he said. "You leave it to me. You leave it to me, Regan."

Pete Chartrand, savage as though the whole matter were a personal and direct affront, reached up with a new tissue to the cab window.

"Two hours and ten minutes late!" he snapped out. "Nice, ain't it! Directors' Special, all the swells, we're doing ourselves proud! Oh, hell!"

"Keep your shirt on, Pete," said Regan, somewhat inconsistently. "Losing your hair over it won't do any good. You're not to blame, are you? Well then, forget it!"

Two hours and ten minutes late! Bad enough; but, in itself, nothing disastrous. It wasn't the first time in railroading that schedules had gone aglimmering. Only there was more to it than that. There were not a few other trains, fast freights, passengers, locals and work trains, whose movements and the movements of the Directors' Special were intimately connected one with the other. Two hours and ten minutes was sufficient, a whole lot more than sufficient, to play havoc with a despatcher's carefully planned meeting points over a hundred miles of right of way, and all afternoon Donkin had been chewing his lips over his train sheet back in the despatcher's office at Big Cloud, until the Directors' Special, officially Special 117, had become a nightmare to him. Orders, counter orders, cancellations, new orders had followed each other all afternoon--and now a new batch went out, as the rehabilitated Special went out of Elk River, and Bob Donkin, with a sigh of relief at the prospect of clear sailing ahead, pushed the hair out of his eyes and relaxed a little as he began to give back the "completes."

It wasn't Donkin's fault; there was never so much as a hint that it was. The day man at Mitre Peak--forgot. That's all--but it's a hard word, the hardest there is in railroading. There was a lot of traffic moving that afternoon, and with sections, regulars, and extras all trying to dodge Special 117, they were crowding each other pretty hard--and the day man at Mitre Peak forgot.

It was edging dusk as old Pete Chartrand, from the Elk River platform, lifted a finger to old Dan MacCaffery in the cab, and old Dan, with a sort of grim smile at the knowledge that the honor of the Hill Division, what there was left of it as far as Special 117 was concerned, was up to him, opened out the 1608 to take the "rights" they'd given him afresh for all there was in it.

From Elk River to Mitre Peak, where the right of way crosses the Divide, it is a fairly stiff climb--from Mitre Peak to Eagle Pass, at the canyon bed, it is an equally emphatic drop; and the track in its gyrations around the base of the towering, jutting peaks, where it clings as a fly clings to a wall, is an endless succession of short tangents and shorter curves. The Rockies, as has been said, had been harnessed, but they had never been tamed--nor never will be. Silent, brooding always, there seems a sullen patience about them, as though they were waiting warily--to strike. There are stretches, many of them, where no more than a hundred yards will blot utterly one train from the sight of another; where the thundering reverberations of the one, flung echoing back and forth from peak to peak, drown utterly the sounds of the other. And west of Mitre Peak it is like this--and the operator at Mitre Peak forgot the holding order for Extra Freight No. 69.

It came quick, quick as the winking of an eye, sudden as the crack of doom. Extra Freight No. 69 was running west, too, in the same direction as the Directors' Special; only Extra No. 69 was a heavy train and she was feeling her way down the grade like a snail, while the Directors' Special, with the spur and prod of her own delinquency and misbehavior, was hitting up the fastest clip that old Dan, who knew every inch of the road with his eyes shut, dared to give within the limits of safety on that particular piece of track.

It came quick. Ten yards clear on the right of way, then a gray wall of rock, a short, right-angled dive of the track around it--and, as the pilot of the 1608 swung the curve, old Dan's heart for an instant stopped its beat--three red lights focussed themselves before his eyes, the tail lights on the caboose of Extra No. 69. There was a yell from little Billy Dawes, his fireman.

"My God, Dan, we're into her!" Dawes yelled. "We're into her!"

Cool old veteran, one of the best that ever pulled a throttle in any cab, there was a queer smile on old Dan MacCaffery's lips. He needed no telling that disaster he could not avert, could only in a measure mitigate, perhaps, was upon them; but even as he checked, checked hard, and checked again, the thought of others was uppermost in his mind--the train crew of the freight, some of them, anyway, in the caboose. Dawes was beside him now, almost at his elbow, as nervy and as full of grit as the engineer he'd shovelled for for five years and thought more of than he did of any other man on earth--and for the fraction of a second old Dan MacCaffery looked into the other's eyes.

"Give the boys in the caboose a chance for their lives, Billy, in case they ain't seen or heard us," he shouted in his fireman's ear. "Hold that whistle lever down."

Twenty yards, fifteen between them--the 1608 in the reverse bucking like a maddened bronco, old Dan working with all the craft he knew at his levers--ten yards--and two men, scurrying like rats from a sinking ship, leaped from the tail of the caboose to the right of way.

"Jump!" The word came like a half sob from old Dan. There was nothing more that any man could do. And he followed his fireman through the gangway.

It made a mess--a nasty mess. From the standpoint of traffic, as nasty a mess as the Hill Division had ever faced. The rear of the freight went to matchwood, the 1608, the baggage and two Pullmans turned turtle, derailing the remaining cars behind; but, by a miracle, it seemed, there wasn't any one seriously hurt.

Scared? Yes--pretty badly. The directors, a shaken, white-lipped crowd, poured out of the observation car to the track side. There was no cigar in H. Herrington Campbell's mouth.

It was dark by then, but the wreckage caught fire and flung a yellow glow far across the canyon, and in a shadowy way lighted up the immediate surroundings. Train crews and engine crews of both trains hurried here and there, torches and lanterns began to splutter and wink, hoarse shouts began to echo back and forth, adding their quota to a weird medley of escaping steam and crackling flame.

Regan, from a hasty consultation with old Dan MacCaffery and old Pete Chartrand, that sent the two men on the jump to carry out his orders, turned--to face H. Herrington Campbell.

"Nobody hurt, sir--thank God!" puffed the fat little master mechanic, in honest relief.

H. Herrington Campbell's eyes were on the retreating forms of the engineer and conductor.

"Oh, indeed!" he said coldly. "And the whole affair is hardly worth mentioning, I take it--quite a common occurrence. You've got some pretty old men handling your trains out here, haven't you?"

Regan's face went hard.

"They're pretty good men," he said shortly. "And there's no blame coming to them for this, Mr. Campbell, if that's what you mean."

H. Herrington Campbell's fingers went tentatively to his vest pocket for a cigar, extracted the broken remains of one--the relic of his own collision with the back of a car seat where the smash had hurled him--and threw it away with an icy smile.

"Blame?" expostulated H. Herrington Campbell ironically. "I don't want to blame any one; I'm looking for some one to congratulate--on the worst run division and the most pitiful exemplification of near-railroading I've had any experience with in twenty years--Mr. Regan."

For a full minute Regan did not speak. He couldn't. And then the words came away with a roar from the bluff little master mechanic.

"By glory!" he exploded. "We don't take that kind of talk out here even from general managers--we don't have to! That's straight enough, ain't it? Well, I'll give you some more of it, now I've started. I don't like you. I don't like that pained look on your face. I've been filling up on you all morning, and you don't digest well. We don't stand for anything as raw as that from any man on earth. And you needn't hunt around for any greased words, as far as I'm concerned, to do your firing with--you can have my resignation as master mechanic of the worst run division you've seen in twenty years right now, if you want it--h'm?"

H. Herrington Campbell was gallingly preoccupied.

"How long are we stalled here for--the rest of the night?" he inquired irrelevantly.

Regan stared at him a moment--still apoplectic.

"I've ordered them to run the forward end of the freight to Eagle Pass, and take you down," he said, choking a little. "There's a couple of flats left whole that you can pile yourselves and your baggage on, and down there they'll make up a new train for you."

"Oh, very good," said H. Herrington Campbell curtly.

And ten minutes later, the Directors' Special, metamorphosed into a string of box cars with two flats trailing on the rear, on which the newly elected board of the Transcontinental sat, some on their baggage, and some with their legs hanging over the sides, pulled away from the wreck and headed down the grade for Eagle Pass. Funny, the transition from the luxurious leather upholstery of the observation to an angry, chattering mob of magnates, clinging to each others' necks as they jounced on the flooring of an old flat? Well perhaps--it depends on how you look at it. Regan looked at it--and Regan grinned for the pure savagery that was in him.

"But I guess," said Regan to himself, as he watched them go, "I guess mabbe I'll be looking for that job on the Penn after all--h'm?"

Everybody talked about the Directors' Special run--naturally. And, naturally, everybody wondered what was going to come from it. It was an open secret that Regan had handed one to the general manager without any candy coating on the pill, and the Hill Division sort of looked to see the master mechanic's head fall and Regan go. But Regan did not go; and, for that matter, nothing else happened--for a while.

Carleton came back and got the rights of it from Regan--and said nothing to Regan about his reply to H. Herrington Campbell's letter, in which he had stated that if they were looking for a new master mechanic there would be a division superintendency vacant at the same time. The day man at Mitre Peak quit railroading--without waiting for an investigation. Old Dan MacCaffery and Billy Dawes went back to their regular run with the 304. And the division generally settled down again to its daily routine--and from the perspective of distance, if the truth be told, got to grinning reminiscently at the run the Big Bugs had had for their money.

Only the grin came too soon.

A week or so passed, pay day came and went--and the day after that a general order from the East hit the Hill Division like a landslide.

Carleton slit the innocent-looking official manila open with his paper knife, chucked the envelope in the wastebasket, read the communication, read it again with gathering brows--and sent for Regan. He handed the form to the master mechanic without a word, as the latter entered the office.

Regan read it--read it again, as his chief had--and two hectic spots grew bright on his cheeks. It was brief, curt, cold--for the good of the service, safety, and operating efficiency, it stated. In a word, on and after the first of the month the services of employees over the age of sixty years would no longer be required. Those were early days in railroading; not a word about pensions, not a word about half-pay; just sixty years and--out!

The paper crackled in Regan's clenched fists; Carleton was beating a tattoo on his teeth with the mouthpiece of his pipe--there wasn't another sound in the office for a moment. Then Regan spoke--and his voice broke a little.

"It's a damned shame!" he said, through his teeth. "It's that skunk Campbell."

"How many men does it affect?" asked Carleton, looking through the window.

"I don't know," said the little master mechanic bitterly; "but I know one that it'll hit harder than all the rest put together--and that's old Dan MacCaffery."

There was hurt in the super's gray eyes, as he looked at the big-hearted little master mechanic's working face.

"I was thinking of old Dan myself," he said, in his low, quiet way.

"He hasn't a cent!" stormed Regan. "Not a cent--not a thing on earth to fall back on. Think of it! Him and that little old missus of his, God bless her sweet old face, that have been scrimping all these years to pay back what that blasted kid robbed out of the bank. It ain't right, Carleton--it ain't right--it's hell, that's what it is! Sixty years! There ain't a better man ever pulled a latch in a cab, there ain't a better one pulling one anywhere to-day than old Dan MacCaffery. And--and I kind of feel as though I were to blame for this, in a way."

"To blame?" repeated Carleton.

"I put him on that run, and Riley put old Pete Chartrand on. It kind of stuck them under Campbell's nose. The two of them together, the two oldest men--and the blamedest luck that ever happened on a run! H'm?"

Carleton shook his head.

"I don't think it would have made any difference in the long run, Tommy. I told you there'd be changes as soon as the new board got settled in the saddle."

Regan tugged viciously at his scraggly brown mustache.

"Mabbe," he growled fiercely; "but Campbell's seen old Dan now, or I'd put one over on the pup--I would that! There ain't any birth register that I ever heard of out here in the mountains, and if Dan said he was fifty I'd take his word for it."

"Dan wouldn't say that," said Carleton quietly, "not even to hold his job."

"No, of course he wouldn't!" spluttered the fat little master mechanic, belligerently inconsistent. "Who said he would? And, anyway, it wouldn't do any good. Campbell asked him his age, and Dan told him. And--and--oh, what's the use! I know it, I know I'm only talking, Carleton."

Neither of them said anything for a minute; then Regan, pacing up and down the room, spoke again:

"It's a clean sweep, eh? Train crews, engine crews, everything--there ain't any other job for him. Over sixty is out everywhere. A white man--one of the whitest"--Regan sort of said it to himself--"old Dan MacCaffery. Who's to tell him?"

Carleton drew a match, with a long crackling noise, under the arm of his chair.

"Me?" said Regan, and his voice broke again. He stopped before the desk, and, leaning, over, stretched out his arm impulsively across it. "I'd rather have that arm cut off than tell him, Carleton," he said huskily. "I don't know what he'll say, I don't know what he'll do, but I know it will break his heart, and break Mrs. MacCaffery's heart--Carleton." He took another turn the length of the room and back again. "But I guess it had better be me," said the little master mechanic, more to himself than to Carleton. "I guess it had--I'd hate to think of his getting it so's it would hurt any more than it had to, h'm?"

And so Tommy Regan told old Dan MacCaffery--that afternoon--the day after pay day.

Regan didn't mean to exactly, not then--he was kind of putting it off, as it were--until next day--and fretting himself sick over it. But that afternoon old Dan, on his way down to the roundhouse--Dan took out the regular passenger local that left Big Cloud at 6.55 every evening, and to spend an hour ahead of running time with the 304 was as much a habit with Dan as breathing was--hunted Regan up in the latter's office just before the six o'clock whistle blew. For an instant Regan thought the engineer had somehow or other already heard the news, but a glance at Dan's face dispelled that idea as quickly as it had come. Dan was always smiling, but there was a smile on the wizened, puckered, honest old face now that seemed to bubble out all over it.

"Regan," said old Dan, bursting with happy excitement, "I just had to drop in and tell you on the way over to the roundhouse, and the missus, she says, 'You tell Mr. Regan, Dan; he'll be rightdown glad.'"

Regan got up out of his chair. There seemed a sense of disaster coming somehow that set him to breathing heavily.

"Sure, Dan--sure," he said weakly. "What is it?"

"Well," said Dan, "you know that--that trouble the boy got into back--back----'

"Yes, I know," said Regan hastily.

"Well," said Dan, "it's taken a long time, a good many years, but yesterday, you know, was pay day; and to-day, Regan, we, the missus and me, Regan, sent the last of that money East, interest and all, the last cent of it, cleaned it all up. Say, Regan, I feel like I was walking on air, and you'd ought to have seen the missus sitting up there in the cottage and smiling through the tears. 'Oh, Dan!' she says, and then she gets up and puts her two hands on my shoulders, and I felt blamed near like crying myself. 'We can start in now, Dan, to save up for old age,' she says, smiling. Say, Regan, ain't it--ain't it fine? We're going to start in now and save up for old age."

Regan didn't say a word. It came with a rush, choking him up in his throat, and something misty in front of his eyes so he couldn't see--and he turned his back, searching for his hat on the peg behind his desk. He jammed his hat on his head, and jerked it low down over his forehead.

"Ain't you--glad?" said old Dan, a sort of puzzled hurt in his eyes.

"I'll walk over a bit of the way to the roundhouse with you, Dan," said Regan gruffly. "Come on."

They stepped out of the shops, and across a spur--old Dan, still puzzled, striding along beside the master mechanic.

"What's the matter, Regan?" he asked reproachfully. "I thought you'd be----"

And then Regan stopped--and his hand fell in a tight grip on the other's shoulder.

"I got to tell you, Dan," he blurted out. "But I don't need to tell you what I think of it. It's a damned shame! The new crowd that's running this road don't want anybody helping 'em to do it after the first of the month that's over sixty years of age. You're--you're out."

Old Dan didn't seem to get it for a minute; then a whiteness kind of crept around his lips, and his eyes, from Regan, seemed to circuit in a queer, wistful way about the yards, and fix finally on the roundhouse in front of him; and then he lifted his peaked cap, in the way he had of doing, and scratched near his ear where the hair was. He hit Regan pretty hard with what he said.

"Regan," he said, "there's two weeks yet to the end of the month. Don't tell her, Regan, and don't you let the boys tell her--there's two weeks she don't need to worry. I'd kind of like to have her have them two weeks."

Regan nodded--there weren't any words that would come, and he couldn't have spoken them if there had.

"Yes," said old Dan, sort of whispering to himself, "I'd kind of like to have her have them two weeks."

Regan cleared his throat, pulled at his mustache, swore under his breath, and cleared his throat again.

"What'll you do, Dan--afterwards?"

Old Dan straightened up, looked at Regan--and smiled.

"I dunno," he said, shaking his head and smiling. "I dunno; but it'll be all right. We'll get along somehow." His eyes shifted to the roundhouse again. "I guess I'd better be getting over to the 304," he said--and turned abruptly away.

Regan watched him go, watched the overalled figure with a slight shoulder stoop cross the turntable, watched until the other disappeared inside the roundhouse doors; and then he turned and walked slowly across the tracks and uptown toward his boarding house. "Don't tell her"--the words kept reiterating themselves insistently--"don't let the boys tell her."

"I guess they won't," said Regan, muttering fiercely to himself. "I guess they won't."

Nor did they. The division and Big Cloud kept the secret for those two weeks--and they kept it for long after that. The little old lady in the lace cap never knew--they ranked her high, those pioneering women kind of hers in that little mountain town, those rough-and-ready toilers who had been her husband's mates--she never knew.