to ask you for it that day, only I thought you’d think it mighty funny,
refuse, and well--well, get to looking it over on your own hook. Will
you give it here for a minute?”

Carleton handed it over silently.

Dahleen took it, pulled off the lower half that served as drinking cup,
laid his finger on the inside rim, and returned it to the super.

Carleton moved nearer to the light--then his face paled. _It was
Coogan’s flask!_ The inscription, a little dulled, in fine engraving,
was still plain enough. “To Chick from Jim, on the occasion of his
wedding.” Carleton’s hand was trembling as he set it down.

“My God!” he said hoarsely. “It was Coogan who was drunk that night--not
you.”

“I figured that’s the way you’d read it, you or any other railroad man,”
 said Dahleen. “It was him or me and one of us drunk, in the eyes of any
of the boys on the road, from the minute that flask showed up. There
was only one thing would have made you believe different, and I couldn’t
tell you--then. I’d have taken the same stand you did. But you’re
wrong.. Coogan wasn’t drunk that night--he never touched a drop. I
wouldn’t be telling you this now, if he had, would I?”

“Sit down,” said Carleton.

Dahleen took the chair beside the desk, and resting his feet on the
window-sill stared out at the lights twinkling below him.

“Yes, I gave him the flask,” he said slowly, as though picking up the
thread of a story, “for a wedding present. The day he came back to his
run after the little woman and the baby died he had it in his pocket,
and he handed it to me. ‘_I’m afraid of it, Jimmy_,’ he said. That was
all, just that--only he _looked_ at me. Then he got down out of the cab
to oil round, me still holding it in my hand for the words kind of hit
me--they meant a whole lot. Well, before he came back, I lifted up my
seat and chucked it down in the box underneath. I don’t want to make
a long story of this. You know how he took to brooding. Sometimes he
wouldn’t say a word from one end of the run to the other. And once in a
while he seemed to act a little queer. I didn’t think much of it and
I didn’t say anything to anybody, figuring it would wear off. When we
pulled out of Big Cloud the night of the wreck I didn’t see anything out
of the ordinary about him, I’d kind of got used to him by then and if
there was any difference I didn’t notice it. He never said a word all
the way out until we hit the summit of the Devil’s Slide and started
down. I had the fire-box door open and was throwing coal when he says so
sudden as almost to make me drop my shovel:

“‘Jimmy, do you know what night this is?’”

“‘Sure,’ says I, never thinking, ‘it’s Thursday.’

“He laughed kind of softlike to himself.

“‘It’s my wedding night, Jimmy,’ he says. ‘My wedding night, and we’re
going to celebrate.’

“The light from the fire-box was full on his face, and he had the
queerest look you ever saw on a man. He was white and his eyes were
staring and he was pushing his hand through his hair and rocking in his
seat. I was scart. I thought for a minute he was going to faint, then
I remembered that whisky and jumped for my side of the cab, opened the
seat and snatched it up. I went back to him with it in my hand. I don’t
think he ever saw it--I know he didn’t. He was laughing that soft laugh
again, kind of as though he was crooning, and he reached out his hand
and pushed me away.

“‘We’re going to celebrate, Jimmy,’ says he again. ‘We’re going to
celebrate. It’s my wedding night.’

“I felt the speed quicken a bit, we were on the Slide then, you know,
and I saw his fingers tightening on the throttle. Then it got me, and
my heart went into my mouth--Chick was clean off his head. I slipped
the flask into my pocket, and tried to coax his hands away from the
throttle.

“‘Let me take her a spell, Chick,’ says I, thinking my best chance was
to humor him.

“He threw me off like I was a plaything. Then I tried to pull him away
and he smashed me one between the eyes and sent me to the floor. All the
time we was going faster and faster. I tackled him again, but I might as
well have been a baby, and then--then--well, that wound in his head came
from a long-handled union-wrench I grabbed out of the tool box. He went
down like a felled ox--but it was too late. Before I could reach a lever
we were in splinters.”

Dahleen stopped. Carleton never stirred, he was leaning forward, his
elbows on his desk, his chin in his hands, his face strained, eyes
intently fastened on the other.

Dahleen fumbled a second with his watch chain, twisting it around his
fingers, then he went on:

“While I laid in the hospital I turned the thing over in my mind pretty
often, long before the doctors thought I knew my own name again, and I
figured that, if it was ever known, old Coogan was down and out for fair
even if when he got better his head turned out all right again, because
he wouldn’t be ever trusted in a cab under any circumstances, you
understand? If he didn’t come out straight why that ended it, of course;
but I had it in my mind that it was only what they call a temporary
aberration. I couldn’t queer him if that was all, could I? So I said to
myself, ‘Jimmy, all you know is that the “air” wouldn’t work.’ That’s
what I told you that day; and then you sprang that flask on me. You
were right, I _had_ forgotten it. Whisky in the cab on the night of an
accident is pretty near an open and shut game. It was him or me, and I
couldn’t tell you the story then without doing Coogan cold, but Coogan’s
gone now and it can’t hurt him. That’s all.”

The tick of the clock on the wall, the click of the sounder from the
dispatcher’s room next door were the only sounds for a long minute, then
Carleton’s chair scraped and he stood up and put out his hand.

“Dahleen,” he said huskily, “I’d give a good deal to be as white a man
as you are.”

Dahleen shook his head.

“Any one would have done it for Coogan,” he said.

VIII--THE BLOOD OF KINGS

There never was, and there isn’t now, anything elusive about the Hill
Division, unless you get to talking about the mileage--when you strike
the mileage you strike deep water, and the way of it is this. Most
things that are big and vital and enduring develop with the years to
their own maturity, and with maturity comes perfection--as nearly as
anything is perfect. When the last rail that proclaimed man’s mastery of
the Rockies and the Sierras an accomplished fact was spiked to the ties
with much ceremony and more eclat, to say nothing of the somewhat
wobbly and uncertain blows with which the silk-hatted,
very-important-national-personage performed this crowning act, while the
rough-and-readys whose toil and sweat and grime and blood had bought the
miles the orators were eulogizing, being no longer of the elect, looked
on from a respectful distance--when all this was done the Hill Division,
even then, was no more than the rough draft of a masterpiece.

In the years that followed came the pruning and the changes, the
smoothing and the toning down--tunnels bored through the mountain-sides
lessened the grades and lopped off winding miles around projecting
spurs; trestles with long embankment approaches added their quota to
this much-to-be-desired result; while in the foothills, instead of
circling around and around, to the right and the left and the left and
the right of an endless procession of buttes, the buttes themselves came
to be bisected with mathematical precision. All told, many miles, very
many miles, have been wiped out in this fashion--the elusive part of
it is that, measured in the dollars and cents paid by the tourists for
transportation and the shippers and consignees for freight hauls, the
line is just as long as ever it was! And it would appear that a good
deal of money had been spent with nothing to show for it; but then
against this is the fact that the directors down East were never rated
as imminent or near-imminent subjects for a lunacy commission. The
mileage is elusive--let it go at that.

For the rest, the right of way from Big Cloud, the divisional point,
just East of the mighty blue-blurred, snow-capped range that towers
to the skyline North and South--from there to the rolling, undulating
country that reaches West from the base of the Sierras, the Hill
Division is, without question, the most marvelous piece of track ever
conceived by man, and it stands a perpetual and enduring monument to the
brains and the genius, ay, and the manhood, too, of those who built it.

Such is the Hill Division. You who know the Rockies know it for the
grandeur of its scenery, know it for the glory of its conquest over
obstacles seemingly insurmountable; but there is another side that you
may not know, a side that the maps and plans and blueprints and the
railroad folders and the windows of the observation cars, big as they
are, do not show--and that side is the human side. It is full of tears
and laughter, full of sorrow and joy, of dangers and death and mistakes
and triumph--its history would fill many pages, but it is a history that
will never be written, for the generals and the rank and file of its
army have fought their battles without the blare of trumpets, have done
their work and their duty as they saw it, simply and with few words,
without thought of personal profit and, much less, of fame. They tell
their own stories amongst themselves, and they hold in honor those
entitled thereto--which is a meed beyond any recognition of governments
or kings or principalities, because it is the tribute of man to man,
without glamor and without pretense. If you are a man as they measure
men, they will tell you the stories, too; and, if you care to smoke,
they will offer you their black plugs with the heart-shaped tin tags
that their favorite manufacturer imbeds therein and, further, they will
hand you their clasp knives with which to slice it. If you are wise you
will understand that you are honored above most men, and you will be
becomingly humble and will listen. But if this, through circumstance and
misfortune, has never been your lot, then, here and there, inadequately
and meagerly, you may run across, in print, a stray breath from the Hill
Division--this is a case in print--the story of “King” Gilleen.

Gilleen was a man you would never pass in a crowd without turning your
head to look at him a second time, not even in a big crowd, for nature
had dealt with Gilleen generously--or otherwise--whichever way it
pleases you best to consider it. He had red hair of a shade that might
be classified as brilliant, but which Regan, the master mechanic,
described in metaphor. Said Regan: “You could see that head a mile away
on the other side of a curve in a blizzard at night when he pokes it out
of the cab window. You’ll never get Gilleen on the carpet because his
headlight’s out, what?” Certainly, at any rate, Gilleen’s hair was
undeniably red. He had blue eyes, and a very small nose which, for
all that, was, next to his hair, the most prominent feature he
possessed--small noses with a slight up-cant to the tip _are_
pronounced, mere size to the contrary. His face was freckled and so were
his hands; also, he was no small chunk of a man, not so very tall, but
the shoulders on him were something to envy if you were friendly with
him, or to respect if you were not. That was Gilleen, all except the
fact that he admitted with emphasis to the blood of some wild Irish
race of kings coursing through his veins. This last point was never
established--every one took Gilleen’s word for it, that is every one but
Regan, who was Irish himself and, more pertinent still, Gilleen’s direct
superior. On this point Regan, who was never averse to doing it, could
get a rise out of Gilleen quicker than the bite of a hungry trout.

“By Christmas,” Gilleen would sputter on such occasions, “I’ll have
you know I’m no liar, an’ if ‘twere not for the missus an’ the six
kids”--here Gilleen would always stop to count, owing to a possible
arrival since the last clash, realizing that any slip would be
instantly and mercilessly turned against him by the grinning master
mechanic--“if’twere not for them, Regan, you listen to me, I’d bash your
face an’ then ram the measly job you give me down your throat, I would
that!”

“Well,” Regan would return, “when you get to sitting on a dinky, gilded
throne, sunk to the crown-sheet in the bogs though it will be, I’d ask
no more nor as much from your hands as you get from mine--which is more
than your deserts. Who but me would do as much for you? You ought to
be back wiping. I’ve thought some seriously of it, h’m? Six, is it
now?--well, it’s a grand race!”

Whereupon Gilleen would say hot words and say them fervently, while he
shook his fist at the master mechanic.

“I’ll show you some day, Regan,” was his final word. “I’ll show you what
kind of a race it is, an’ don’t you forget it!”

All of which is neither very interesting nor in any degree witty--it
simply shows where Gilleen’s nickname came from. Everybody on the
division called him “King”--not to his face, they do now, but they
didn’t then. Queer the way a little thing like that acts on a man
sometimes. Gilleen was well enough liked in a way, but no one ever
really took him seriously in anything. Associate a man with a joke and
henceforward and forever after, usually, the two are inseparable. He may
have aspirations, ambitions, what you will, but he is given no credit
for having them--with Gilleen it was that way. Just Gilleen, “King”
 Gilleen--and a grin.

The Lord only knows what possessed Gilleen to adhere with such
stout-hearted loyalty to his ancestors--you may put an interrogation
mark after that last word, if you like--it began with perhaps no more
than a boyish boast when his official connection with the system was no
further advanced than to the degree of holding down the job of assistant
boiler-washer in the roundhouse. The more they guyed him the more
stubbornly he stuck--it was a matter worth fighting for, and Gilleen
fought. He threw pounds, reach, and other advantages to the winds and
took on anybody and everybody. By the time he had moved up to firing
he had fought all who cared to fight, who were not a few; and when,
following that in the due course of promotion, he got his engine, he had
by blows, not argument, established his assertion outwardly at least. At
a safe distance the division, remembering broken noses and missing teeth
and no longer denying him his royal blood, gave him his way, smiled
tolerantly in self-solace and called him “nutty.”

Regan, of course, still guyed--but Regan was master mechanic. Not that
he did it by virtue of the immunity his official position afforded him,
he never gave that a thought. He did it because he was Regan, and Regan
was built that way. He could no more forego the chance of a laugh or an
inward chuckle than he could forego the act of breathing--and live. A
joke was a joke, just fun with him, that was all.

But with Gilleen it was different. Being unable to use his fists as was
his wont, and being possessed of no other safety-valve, the pressure
mounted steadily until it registered a point on his mental gauge that
spoke eloquently of trouble to come.

And so matters stood when, following a rather dull summer, the fall
business opened with a rush and a roar. Things moved with a jump, and
the rails hummed under a constant stream of traffic east and west.
Here, at least, was no joke--a rush on the Hill Division, single-track,
through the mountains, never was. A month of it, and every one from
car-tink to superintendent began to show the effects of the strain.
It was double up everywhere, extra duty, extra tricks. The dispatchers
caught their share of it and their eyes grew red and heavy under the
lamps at night, and the heads of the day-men ached as they figured a
series of meeting points that had no beginning and no end; but, bad as
it was for the men on the keys, it was worse for some of those in the
cabs. Schedulers went to smash. Perishables and flyers were given the
best of it--the rights of the rest were the sidings. It was a case of
crawl along, sneak from one to the other, with layout after layout,
until the ordinary length of a day’s duty lapped over into fifteen-hour
stretches and sometimes to twenty-four. Sleep, what they could get of
it, the engine crews snatched bolt upright in their seats while they
waited for Number One’s headlight to shoot streaming out of the East,
or nodded until roused by the roar and thunder of a flying freight, cars
and cars of it crammed with first-class ratings, streaking East, as it
hurtled by with insolent disregard for every mortal thing on earth.

Maybe Gilleen got a little more of it than any one else on the
throttles, maybe he did--or maybe he didn’t. Gilleen thought he did
anyhow, and naturally he put it down to Regan’s account. Regan was head
of the motive power department of the Hill Division--there was no one
else _to_ put it down to. It was Regan or imagination. Gilleen, not
being strong on imagination, did not debate the question--he let it go
at Regan.

In from one run, shot out on another--that was Gilleen’s schedule. The
little woman in the little house uptown off Main street got to be mostly
a memory to Gilleen, and as for the six brick-headed scions of his
kingly race he came to wonder if they really existed at all.

Things boomed and hummed on the Hill Division, and while everybody on
it snarled and swore and nagged at each other, as weary, worn-out,
dropping-with-fatigue men will do, the smiles broadened on the lips and
spread over the faces of the directors down East, as they rubbed their
palms beneficently, expectantly, scenting extra dividends and soaring
stock.

It was noon one day when Gilleen, with a trailing string of slewing
freights behind him, pulled into the Big Cloud yards, uncoupled, backed
down the spur, crossed the’table, and ran into the roundhouse. As he
swung from the gangway, Regan came hurrying in through the engine doors
of Gilleen’s pit from the direction of headquarters, and walked up to
the engineer.

“Gilleen,” said he briskly, “you’ll have to take out Special
Eighty-three. 1603’s ready with a full head on pit two.”

“What’s that?” snapped Gilleen. “Take out a special _now?_ You know
damn well I’m just in from a run. I’m tired. You’ll rub it in once too
often, Regan.”

“We’re all tired, aren’t we?” returned the master mechanic tartly. “Do
you think you’re the only one? As for rubbing it in, you’d better draw
your fire, my bucko. There’s no rubbing in being done except in your
eye! Anyhow, that’s enough talk. Special Eighty-three’s carded on rush
orders from down East, and she’s been in here an hour now.”

“Well, why didn’t you let the crew that brought her in keep goin’ then?”
 snarled Gilleen. It was a fool question and he knew it; but, as he had
said, he was tired, and his temper, never angelic, was now pretty well
on edge.

Regan glared at him a moment angrily. Regan, too, was tired and
irritable, harassed beyond the limit that most men are harassed. The
demand upon the motive power department for men and engines had kept him
up more than one night trying to figure out a problem that was well-nigh
impossible.

“Let ‘em go on!” he snorted. “You know well enough I haven’t anything
on the Prairie Division men. You know that--what d’ye say it for, h’m?
You’re the first man in--and you go out first.”

“It strikes me I’m _generally_ the first man in these days,” retorted
Gilleen angrily; “an’ I’m sick of gettin’ the short end of it. I guess I
won’t go out this time.”

It took a breathing spell before the master mechanic could explode
adequately.

“You call yourself a railroad man!” he flung out furiously. “What are
you whining about? Every man’s got his shoulder to the wheel and pushing
without talk. We haven’t got any room here for quitters. I guess that
blood of yours you’re so pinhead-brained proud----”

Regan did not finish. With a bellow of rage the red-haired engineer
went at the other like a charging bull, and the master mechanic promptly
measured his length on the roundhouse floor from a wallop on the head
that made him see stars.

Regan scrambled to his feet. His heart was the heart of a fighter, even
if his build was not. Straight at Gilleen he flew, and the passes
and lunges and jabs he made--while the engineer played on the master
mechanic’s paunch like a kettle-drum and delivered a second wallop
on the head as a plaster for the first--are historic only for their
infinitesimal coefficient of effectiveness. It is unquestionably certain
that the master mechanic then and there would have proceeded to make up
for some of his lost sleep, at least, if Gilleen’s fireman and a wiper
or two hadn’t got in between the two men just when they did.

Gilleen was boiling mad.

“Well,” he bawled, “got anything more to say about quittin’ or that
other thing? I guess I won’t go out this time, what?”

Regan was equally mad. And as he felt tenderly of his forehead, where
a lump was rapidly approximating the formation of a goose egg, he grew
madder still.

“You won’t go out, won’t you?” he roared. “Well _I_ guess you will;
and, what’s more, you’ll go out _now_--and get your time! I fire you,
understand?”

“You bet!’” said “King” Gilleen--and that’s all he said. He looked at
the master mechanic for a minute, but didn’t _say_ anything more--just
laughed and walked out of the roundhouse.

Naturally enough, the story got up and down the division, and everybody
talked about it. With their rough and impartial justice they put both
men in the wrong, but mostly Gilleen for insubordination. The affront
Gilleen had suffered was not so big and momentous, a long way from being
the vital thing in their eyes that it was in his. Gilleen was just nutty
on that point, that was all there was to that. Regan’s judgment had
been bad and the moment he had seized for his thrust and fling was by no
manner of means a psychological one; but, for all that, Gilleen had no
business to strike the master mechanic. He had got what was coming to
him--that was the verdict. He was out and out for good. It was pretty
generally conceded that it would be a long while before he pulled a
throttle on the Hill Division again.

What sympathy the engineer got, for he got some, wasn’t on his own
account. It was on account of his family--not the ancestral end of it,
however. Six kids and a wife do not leave much change out of a paycheck
even when it’s padded by overtime; six kids and a wife with no pay-check
is pretty stiff running.

Gilleen was too hot under the collar to give a thought to that when he
marched out of the roundhouse that noon; but it wasn’t many hours, after
he had put in a few to make up for the sleep he hadn’t had during the
preceding weeks, that the problem was up to him for consideration with a
vote for adjournment for once ruled out as not in order.

Mrs. Gilleen may or may not have shared her spouse’s opinions on the
subject of his illustrious descent--if she did she never put on any
“airs” about it. Washing and dressing and cooking was about all one
woman could manage for a household as big as hers. That’s what she
said anyway, whenever any one asked her about it. And one glance at the
red-headed brood that filled the front yard and swung on the front gate,
whose hinges creaked in loud and bitter protest, was enough to preclude
any dispute on that score. Just a little bit of a woman she was
physically; but bigger practically than the whole corps of leading
lights in social and domestic economy--which, come to think of it, is
damning Mrs. Gilleen with faint praise, whereas too much couldn’t be
said for her. However, let that go. Mrs. Gilleen _was_ practical, and
she had the matter up to the engineer almost before he had the sleep
washed out of his eyes. No nagging, no reproach, nothing of that
kind--Mrs. Gilleen wasn’t that sort of a woman. “King,” or not, Gilleen
might have been, Katie Gilleen was a _queen_, not in looks perhaps, but
a queen--that’s flat. A fine woman is the finest thing in the world, and
if that were said a little more often than it is maybe things generally
wouldn’t be any the worse for it--which is not a plank in the platform
of the Suffragettes, though it may sound like it.

“Michael,” said she, “you rowed with Mr. Regan, and he fired you. Will
he take you back?”

Gilleen lowered the towel to his chin to catch the dripping water
from his hair--he had just buried his head in the washbowl the minute
before--and looked at his wife.

“I wouldn’t _ask_ him, Kate,” he said shortly.

Mrs. Gilleen was proud, too--but for all that she sighed.

“What will you do, then, Michael?” she asked.

“I dunno yet, little woman. Some of the others will give me a job, I
guess. Mabbe I’ll try the train crews. I’ll hit ‘em up for something,
anyway.”

“But there’s ever so much less money in that”--Mrs. Gilleen’s tones were
judicial, not plaintive.

“I know it,” returned Gilleen; “but it’ll tide us over an’ keep the
steam up till we get a chance to pull out for somewheres where a man
can get an engine without a grinning fool of a master mechanic to
doublecross him with the worst of it every chance he gets.”

“I hope it will all come out right,” said Mrs. Gilleen, a little
wistfully.

“It will,” Gilleen assured her. “Don’t you worry. I’ll get after a job
right away as soon as I’ve had a bite.”

It came easier even than Gilleen had figured it would--such as
it was--and it was about the last job Gilleen had thought of as a
possibility. Things have a peculiar way of working themselves out
sometimes, and, curiously enough, by means which, on the surface, are,
more often than not, apparently trivial and inconsequent. Certainly,
if Gilleen, on his way to the station that morning, had not run into
Gleason, the yard-master, why then--but he did.

“Call-boys kind of scarce around your diggin’s since yesterday, ain’t
they, Gilleen?” was Gleason’s greeting.

“Yes,” said Gilleen. “I’m out.”

“See you’re headin’ for the station,” remarked Gleason tentatively.
“Goin’ down to patch it up?”

“No!” answered Gilleen with a hard ring in his voice--the “no” was
emphatic.

Gleason stared at the engineer for a minute, then took a bite from his
plug, and the motion of his head might have been a nod of understanding
or merely a wrench or two to free his teeth from the black-strap in
which they were imbedded.

“No,” said Gilleen again; “I’m not. I’m goin’ down for another job.”

“What kind of a job?” inquired Gleason.

“Any kind from any one that will put me on--except Regan.”

Gleason thought of his choked yards--the rush had in no way overlooked
him. Men, men that knew a draw-bar and a switch-handle from a hunk of
cheese, were as scarce in his department as they were in any of the
others.

“Yards?” he queried--and blinked.

“D’ye mean it?” demanded Gilleen, taking him up short.

“Sure, I mean it.”

“You’re on,” said Gilleen. “Night switchman,” amplified the yard-master.
“You can begin to-night.”

“All right, I’ll be on deck,” agreed Gilleen; “an’ thanks, Gleason. I’m
much obliged to you.”

“Humph!” grunted Gleason. “‘Tain’t much of a stake compared with an
engine, but it’s yours, an’ welcome.”

It was quite true. Comparatively, it wasn’t much of a stake, and even
the first night of it was enough to throw the comparison into strong and
bitter relief. If anything would have put a finishing touch on Gilleen’s
feelings anent the master mechanic it was that first night on yard
switching, that and, of course, the nights that followed. It wasn’t
so much the work, though that was hard enough, and, being green, the
engineer made about twice as much for himself as there was any need
of, it was a not-to-be-denied tendency of his eyes to stray toward the
roundhouse every time a gleaming headlight showed on the turn-table. If
Gilleen had never known before how much he loved an engine he knew it
in those dark hours while he swung a lantern from the roofs of a freight
string, or hopped the foot-board of the switcher. Up and down the yards
from dusk till dawn, to the accompaniment of the wheezing, grunting,
coughing, foreshortened apology for a shunter, the clash of brake-beams,
the bump and rattle, staccato, diminuendo, as a line of box-cars
grumbled into motion, didn’t take on any roseate hues from the angle
Gilleen looked at it; nor did an occasional ten-wheeler, out or in,
sailing grandly past him with impudent airs help any, either. Gilleen’s
language became as freckled as his face and hands and as fiery as his
head. Even that grand old Irish race from which he sprang, that wild
and untamed breed of kingly sires paled into insignificance--Gilleen
was more occupied with Regan. What he thought he said, and said it aloud
without making any bones about it--said it through his teeth, with his
fists clenched.

Perhaps it was just as well Gilleen was on nights, for, ordinarily,
the master mechanic had nothing to bring him around the yards, shops or
roundhouse after sundown--Regan’s evenings being spent with Carle-ton,
the super, a pipe and a game of pedro upstairs over the station in the
superintendent’s office next door to the dispatcher’s room--just as well
for both their sakes; for Regan’s physically; for Gilleen’s because,
little fond of his job as he was, there, were certain necessities that
even little Mrs. Gilleen with all her practicability and economy could
not supply without money. Anyway, the days went by and the two men did
not meet, though Gilleen’s orations got around to Regan’s ears fast
enough. The master mechanic only laughed when he heard them.

“Gilleen,” said he, “is like the parrot that said ‘sic ‘em!’ and said it
once too often. He talks too much. If he’d kept his mouth shut I’d have
given him his run back, after a lay off to teach him manners. As it is,
if he likes switching let him keep at it. Mabbe by the time he’s tired
the throne of his ancestors ‘ll be ready for him, what?”

All this was enough to spell ructions in the air, and, ordinarily, the
division to a man would have hung mildly expectant on the result of the
final showdown. But the Hill Division just then wasn’t hankering for
anything more to liven it up--it was getting all of that sort of thing
it wanted and a little besides. Attending strictly to business was about
all it could do, a trifle beyond what it could do, and everything else
was apart--the boom showed more signs of increasing than it did of being
on the wane. There wasn’t any let-up anywhere--things sizzled.

It never rains but it pours, they say; and that’s one adage, at least,
that the railroad men of Big Cloud, and the town itself for that
matter, will swear by to this day. There are a few things that Big Cloud
remembers vividly and with astounding minuteness for detail, but the
night the shops went up tops them all.

When it was all over they decided that a slumbering forge-fire in the
blacksmith shop was at the bottom of it--not that any one really knew,
or knows now, but they put it down to that because it sounded reasonable
and because there wasn’t anything else _to_ put it down to. However,
whether that was the cause or whether it wasn’t, on one point there was
no possible opening for an argument--and that was the effect and the
result.

If you knew Big Cloud in the old days, you know where the shops were
and what they looked like; if you didn’t, it won’t take a minute to tell
you. You could see them from the station platform across the tracks far
up at the west end of the yards; and they looked more like a succession
of barns nailed on to each other than anything else, except for the
roofs which were low and flat--the buildings being all one-storied. What
with the quarters of the boiler-makers, the carpenters, the machinists
and the fitters, the old shops straggled out over a goodly length of
ground, and a grimy, ramshackle, dirty, blackened, Godforsaken looking
structure it was. To-day, thanks to that fire and the Big Strike when it
came along, there’s a modern affair of structural steel--and the rest is
but a memory. However----

Night in the mountains in the Fall comes early, and by nine o’clock on
the night the fire broke out it had shut down pitch dark. Nothing showed
in the yards but the twinkling switch lights, the waving lamps of the
men, and an occasional gleam from the shunter’s headlight when it shot
away from the end of a boxcar. Across the tracks the station lights
were like fireflies, and there was a glimmer or two showing from the
roundhouse. Apart from the fact that a pretty strong west wind was
brushing the yards, if you could count that as anything apart, there
was nothing out of the ordinary, everything was going on as usual, when,
suddenly without warning, a wicked fang of flame shot skyward, then
another higher than the first. It was answered by a yell from the
yardmen, caught up in the roundhouse, and then the switcher’s whistle
shrieked the alarm. A minute more, and everything with steam enough to
lift a valve joined in. Dark forms began to run in the direction of the
shops, and then the bell in the little English chapel uptown took a hand
in the clamor. The alarm was unanimous enough and general enough when it
came, there was never any doubt about that, but the fire must have got
a pretty stiff start before it broke through the windows to fling its
first challenge at the railroad men.

Gilleen and the rest of the yard crew were on the run for the scene when
Gleason’s voice, bawling over the din, halted them.

“Clean out three, four an’ five, an’ get ‘em down to the bottom of the
yards, an’ look lively!” he yelled. “Leave that string of gondolas on
six till the last. Jump now, boys! Eat ‘em up!”

Oil-spattered floors and oil-smeared walls are a feeding ground for a
fire than which there is no better. The flame tongues leaped higher and
higher throwing a lurid glare down the yards, and throwing, too, as the
wind caught them up and whirled them in gusts, a driving rain of sparks
that threatened the long, dark lines of rolling stock, for the most
part choked to the doors with freight--freight enough to total a sum in
claim-checks that would blanch the cheeks of the most florid director on
the board of the Transcontinental.

With Gleason in command, Gilleen and his mates went at their work heads
down. There wasn’t anything fancy or artistic about the way they banged
those cars to safety--there wasn’t time to be fussy. Behind them the
south end of the shops was already a blazing mass. The little switcher
took hold of first one string then another, shook it angrily for a
minute as her exhaust roared into a quick crackle of reports and the
drivers spun around like pin-wheels making the steel fly fire, then with
a cough and a grunt and a final push she would snap the cars away from
her, and the string would go sailing down the yard to bump and pound to
a stop, with an echoing crash, into whatever might be at the other end.
There was a car or two the next morning with front-ends and rear-ends
and both ends at once, that looked as though they had been in a cyclone;
and there was a claim-voucher or two put through for a consignment of
nursing bottles and a sewing machine--not that the two necessarily go
together, but no matter, they did then. Anyway, the record the yardmen
made that night is the record today, and in no more than ten minutes
there wasn’t a car within three hundred yards of the shops.

But while the yard crew worked others were not idle. Regan and Carleton,
both of them, had caught the first flash from the windows of the super’s
room, and they were down the stairs, across the yards and into the
game from the start. Joined by the nightmen and the hostlers and the
wide-eyed call-boys they tackled the blaze. By the time they had dragged
and coupled the fifty-foot hose lengths, it took five lengths, along
the tracks from the roundhouse, the needle on the stationary’s gauge,
luckily not yet quite dead from the day’s work and whose fire-box
Clarihue, the turner, now crammed with oil-soaked packing, began to
climb, and they got an uncertain, weakly stream playing--uncertain, but
a stream. After that, things went with a rush--both ways--the fire and
the fight.

From the gambling hells and the saloons, from the streets and their
homes came the population of Big Cloud, the Polacks, the Russians, the
railroad men, the good and the bad whites, the half-breeds--and the
local fire brigade. Two more streams they ran from the roundhouse and
that was the limit--the rest of the hose was liquid rubber somewhere
under the blaze.

Regan, with a bitter, hard look on his face for the shops were Regan’s,
was everywhere at once, and what man could do he did; but, inch by inch,
the flames were getting the better of him. The yards were as bright
as day now, and the heat was driving the circle of fighters back,
stubbornly as they fought to hold their ground. It looked like a grand
slam for the fire with the four aces in one hand. Twice Regan had
been on the point of ordering the men to the roof, and twice he held
back--once he had even ordered a ladder planted, only to order it away
again. The building was only wood, and old, and the roof was none
too strong at best; but now, under and supported by the roof of the
fitting-shop, put in a month before in lieu of the old system of jacking
and blocking by hand, making the risk a hundredfold greater, were the
heavy steel girders and hydraulic traveling cranes that whipped the big
moguls like jack-straws from their wheels preparatory to stripping them
to their bare boiler-shells. Regan shook his head--it was asking a man
to take his life in his hands. For the moment he stood a little apart in
front of the crowd and just behind the nozzle end of one of the streams.
Again he measured the chances, and again he shook his head.

“I can’t ask a man to do it,” he muttered; “but we ought to have a
stream up there, it’s----”

“Why don’t you take it there yourself, then?”--the words came sharp and
quick from his elbow, stinging hot like the cut of a whip-lash. It was
“King” Gilleen, red-haired, blue-blooded, freckled-skinned Gilleen.

The master mechanic whirled like a shot, and for a minute the two
men stared into each other’s eyes, stared as the leaping flames sent
flickering shadows across the grim, set features of them both, stared
at each other face to face for the first time since that noon in the
roundhouse days before.

“Why don’t you take it there yourself, then?” said Gilleen again, and
his laugh rang hard and cold. “_You_ ain’t a quitter, are you? There’s
nothin’ wrong with _your_ blood, is there? If you’re not afraid--come
on!”--as he spoke he stepped forward, pushed the men from the
nozzle--and looked back at the master mechanic.

Regan’s lips were like a thin, white line.

Gilleen laughed out again, and it carried over the roar and the crackle
of the flames, the snapping timbers, the hiss and spit of the water, the
voices of the crowd.

“Put up the ladder!”--it was Regan’s voice, deadly cold. “Lash a short
end around that nozzle, an’ stand by to pass it up”--he was at the
foot of the ladder almost before they got it in position, and the next
instant began to climb.

Like a flash, Gilleen, surrendering the fire-hose temporarily, sprang
after him--and up.

It wasn’t far--the shops were low, just one story high--and both men
were on the roof in a minute. Gilleen caught the coiled rope they slung
him from below, and together he and the master mechanic hauled up the
writhing, spluttering hose.

A shower of sparks and a swirling cloud of smoke enveloped them as
they stood upright and began to advance. It cleared away leaving them
silhouetted against the leaping wall of flame a few yards in front of
them--and a cheer went up from the throats of the crowd below.

Not a word passed between the two men. Foot by foot they moved forward,
laying the hose in a line behind them to lessen the weight and the
side-pull, that at first had called forth all their strength to direct
the play of the stream; foot by foot they went forward, closer and
closer, perilously close, to the blistering, scorching, seething
mass--for neither of them would be the first to hold back.

High into the heavens streamed the great yellow-red forks of angry
flame, and over all, like a gigantic canopy, rolled dense volumes of
gray-black smoke. Came at the two men spurting, fiery tongues, stabbing
at them, robbing them of their breath, mocking at their puny might.

Another step forward and Regan reeled back, one hand went to his
face--and the nozzle almost wrenched itself from the engineer’s grasp.

“It’s a grand race!” laughed Gilleen, but the laugh was more of a
gasping cough, and the cough came from cracked and swollen lips. “It’s a
grand race, Regan; an’ the blood----”

With a choking sob, Regan steadied himself and seized hold of the nozzle
again.

They held where they were now--it was the fire, not they, that was
creeping forward, pitilessly, inevitably, licking greedily at the tarred
roof until it grew soft beneath their feet and the bubbles puffed up and
formed and broke.

A cry of warning came from below, and with it came the ominous rending
groan of yielding timbers. It came again, the cry, and rang in Gilleen’s
ears almost without sense. He could scarcely see, his eyes were scorched
and blinded, his lungs were full of the stinging smoke, choking full.
Beside him Regan hung, dropping weak. “Get back, for God’s sake, get
back! “--it was Carleton’s voice. “Do you hear!” shouted the super
frantically. “Get back! The roof is sagging! Run for----”

Like the roar of a giant blast, as a park of artillery belches forth in
deafening thunder, there came a terrific crash and, fearful in its echo,
a cry of horror rose from those below. Where there had been roof a foot
in front of the men was now--nothingness.

Gilleen, with a shout, as he felt the edge crumple under him, flung
himself backward and as he leaped he snatched at Regan. His fingers
brushed the master mechanic’s sleeve, hooked, slipped--and he struck on
his back a full yard away. He reeled to his feet like a drunken man, and
dug at his eyes with his fists. Over the broken edge of the shattered
roof, hanging into the black below, was the dangling hose--but Regan
was gone. Weak, spent, exhausted, the master mechanic, unequal to the
exertion of Gilleen’s leap, had pitched downward, clutching desperately,
feebly, vainly, as he went. Regan was gone, and twenty feet, somewhere,
below--he lay.

Gilleen staggered forward. It was the far end of the beams that had
given away and the six or seven yards of the roof that had fallen still
separated him from the heart of the blaze. The advancing flames lighted
up a scene of wreck and ruin below in the fitting-shop--girders and
steel Ts and cranes and tackles, splotches of roofing, shattered
timbers, lay aver the black looming shapes of the monster engine-shells
blocked on the pit.

“Regan!” he called; and again: “Regan! _Regan!_”

Above the roaring crackle of the fire, above the surging, pounding
noises that beat mercilessly at his eardrums, faint, so faint it seemed
like fancy, a low moan answered him. Once more it came and upon Gilleen
surged new-born strength and life. He began to drag at the hose with
all his might, dropping it foot by fool over the jagged edge of the roof
until it reached well down to the snarled and tangled wreckage below.
And then a mighty yell went up from a hundred throats--and again and
again:

“Gilleen! King Gilleen! King! _King!_”

There was no gibe now--just a bursting cheer from the full hearts of
men. “King!” they roared, and the shout swelled, but Gilleen never heard
them as they crowned him. King he was at last in the eyes of all men,
a king that knows no blood nor race nor throne nor retinue--Gilleen was
lowering himself down the hose.

It was a question of minutes. The fire was sweeping in a mad wave across
the intervening space. The engineer’s feet touched something solid and
he let go his hold of the hose--and stumbled, lost his balance, and
pitched forward striking on his head with a blow that dazed and stunned
him. Mechanically he understood that what he had taken for flooring
was a workbench. He got to his feet again, the blood streaming from
his forehead, and shouted. This time there was no answer. Staggering,
falling, tripping, stumbling, he began to search frantically amid the
debris. The air was thick with the smothering smoke, hot, stifling,
drying up his lungs. He began to moan, crying the name of the master
mechanic over and over again, crying it as a man cries out in delirium.
Bits of oil-soaked waste and wads of packing, catching from the glowing
cinders, were blazing around his feet, the onrush of the flames swept
a blighting wave upon him that sent him reeling back, scorching,
blistering the naked skin of his face and hands. Again he fell. A great
sheet of fire leapt high behind him, held for an instant, and then the
dull red glow settled around him again--but in that instant, just a
little to the right, pinned under a scanling, half hidden by a snarled
knot of roof and girders, was the master mechanic’s form.

On his knees, groping with his hands, Gilleen reached him, and began to
tear furiously, savagely, madly, at the timber that lay across Regan’s
chest. He moved it little by little, every inch tasking his weakening
muscles to the utmost. Blackness was before him, he could no longer see,
he could no longer breathe, hot, nauseating fumes strangled him and
sent the blood bursting from his nostrils. He tried to lift Regan’s
shoulders--and sank down beside the master mechanic instead. Feebly he
raised his head--there came the splintering crash of glass, a rushing
stream tore through a window, hissed against the boiler-shell above him,
and, glancing off, lashed a cold spray of water into his face.

The window! Three yards to the window! He was up again, and pulling at
the dead weight of the master mechanic. Just three yards! He cried like
a child as he struggled, and the tears ran down his cheeks in streams. A
foot, two feet, three--_two more yards to go_. Axes were swinging now in
front of him, shouts reached him. Half the distance was covered--but he
had gone to his knees. Everything around was hot, it was all fire and
hell and madness. A yard and a half--only a yard and a half. Alone he
could make it easily enough and maybe Regan was dead anyhow, alone and
there was safety and life, alone--then he laughed. “It’s a grand race,
Regan, a grand race,” he sobbed hysterically, and his grip tightened on
the master mechanic, and he won another foot and another and another.
A black form wavered before him, he felt an arm reach out and grasp
him--then he tottered, swayed, and dropped inert, unconscious.

They got him out, and they got Regan out, and they got the fire out by
the time there wasn’t much left to burn; and, after a week or two, both
men got out of the hospital. That’s about all there is to it, except
that Gilleen’s red head now decorates the swellest cab on the division,
and that he never fought for his title after that night--he never had
to; though, if you feel like questioning it, you can still get plenty of
fight, for all that--any of the boys will accommodate you any time.

Regan isn’t an artist as a pugilist, but even so it is unwise to take
risks--unscientific men by lucky flukes have handed knockouts to their
betters.

“If Gilleen says so that’s enough, whether it’s so or not, what?” Regan
will fling at you. “It’s pretty _good_ blood, ain’t it, no matter what
kind it is? Well then--h’m?”

IX--MARLEY

There are some men they remember on the Hill Division--Marley is one of
them; and his story goes back to the days before the fire wiped out what
the strike had left of the old rambling shops at the western end of the
Big Cloud yards, back to the time when “Royal” Carleton was young in
the superintendency of the division, when Tommy Regan, squat, fat and
paunchy was master mechanic, and Harvey, was division engineer, and
Spence was chief dispatcher, when the Big Fellows, as they were called,
wrestled with the rough of it, shaking the steel down into a permanent
right of way, shackling the Rockies, welding the West and the East.

Marley was not a “Big Fellow” in either sense of the word.

Officially, when he started in, he wasn’t anything--that is, anything in
particular. Sort of general assistant, assistant section hand, assistant
boiler washer, assistant anything you like to everybody--Marley’s
duties, if nothing else, were multifarious.

Physically, he was a queer card. He was built on plans that gave you the
impression Dame Nature had been doing a little something herself along
the lines of original research and experimentation--and wasn’t well
enough satisfied with the result to duplicate it! Anyway, as far as any
one ever knew, there wasn’t but one Marley produced. Maybe nature,
even, isn’t infallible; maybe she made a mistake, maybe she didn’t.
You couldn’t call him deformed--and yet you could! That’s Marley
exactly--when you get to describing him you get contradictory. It
must have been his neck. That lopped off two or three inches from his
stature--because he hadn’t any! But if that shortened him down to,
say, five feet five, which isn’t so short after all--there’s the
contradiction again, you see--the length of his arms at least was
something to marvel at, they made up for the neck. Regan used to say
Marley could stand on the floor of the roundhouse and clean out an
engine pit without leaning over. The master mechanic was more or less
gifted with imagination, but he wasn’t so far out, not more than a
couple of feet or so, at that. Marley’s hair, more than anything else
that comes handy by way of comparison, was like the stuff, in color and
texture, the fellows on the stage light and put in their mouths so as to
blow out smoke like a belching stack under forced draft--tow, they call
it. Eyes--no woman ever had any like them--big and round and wide, with
a peculiar violet tinge to them, and lids that had a trick of closing
down with a little hesitating flutter like a girl trying to flirt with
you.

But what’s the use! Marley, piecemeal, would never look like the
short-stepping, springy-walked, foreshortened, arms-flopping Marley with
the greasy black peaked cap pulled over his forehead, the greasy jumper
tucked into greasier overalls who sold his hybrid services to the
Transcontinental for the munificent sum of a dollar ten a day.

Marley’s arrival and introduction to Big Cloud was, like Marley himself,
decidedly out of the ordinary and by no manner of means commonplace.
Marley arrived “‘boing it” in a refrigerator car.

They ice the cars at Big Cloud and, luckily for Marley, the particular
one he had, in some unexplained way, managed to appropriate required a
little something more than icing. They pulled him out in about as flabby
a condition as a sack of flour. He didn’t say anything for himself
mainly because he was pretty nearly past ever saying anything for
himself or anybody else. The boys who found him cursed fluently because
he wasn’t a pleasant sight, and then carried him up Main Street on the
door of a box-car with the hazy notion that MacGuire’s Blazing Star
Saloon was the most fitting Mecca available.

Marley continued to play in luck. Mrs. Coogan, the mother of Chick
Coogan, that is, who went out in the Fall blizzard on the Devil’s Slide
some years before, spotted the procession as it passed her little shack,
halted it, made a hasty, but none the less comprehensive, examination,
amplified it by a few scathing remarks on discovering the proposed
destination, peremptorily ordered them into her bit of a cottage and
installed Marley therein.

He was pretty far gone, pretty far--and he hung on the ragged edge for
weeks. Nobody knows what Mrs. Coogan did for him except Marley himself;
but it was generally conceded that she did more than she could afford
for anybody, let alone doing it for a stray hobo.

Marley got well in time, of course, for, than old, motherly Mrs. Coogan
there was no better nurse, even if she had few comforts and dainties and
less money to buy them with; and then Marley got a job--or rather Mrs.
Coogan got one for him.

There wasn’t anything Mrs. Coogan could have asked for and not got that
was within their power to give her--she was Chick’s mother, and with
Carleton or Regan or any of the rest of them that was enough. But Mrs.
Coogan never asked anything for herself--she had the Coogan pride.

“The good Lord be praised,” she would say--Mrs. Coogan was sincerely
devout. “I’m able to worrk, so I am, an’ fwhy should I?”

Why should she? They smiled at her as men smile when something touches
them under the vest, and they want to say the proper thing--and can’t.
They smiled--and gave her their washing.

Mrs. Coogan tackled Regan on Marley’s behalf.

The master mechanic scratched his head in perplexity, but his reply was
prompt and hearty enough.

“Sure. Sure thing, Mrs. Coogan,” he said. “Send him down to me. I’ll
find him something to do.”

To Marley he talked a little differently.

“I ain’t quite sure I like the looks of you,” he flung out bluntly
enough, taking in the new man from head to toe. “There’s no job for you,
but I’ll give you a chance.”

Marley’s eyes came down in a flutter.

“Thanks, sir,” he mumbled nervously.

Tommy Regan wasn’t used to being “sir” ed--the Hill Division did its
business with few handles and it wasn’t long on the amenities.

“Humph!” he ejaculated with a snort, and a stream of black-strap laid
the dust on a good few inches of engine cinders. “You can hand any
thanks you’ve got coming over to Mother Coogan. And say”--the master
mechanic wriggled his fat forefinger under Marley’s nose--“thanks are
all right as far as they go, but I figure you owe her something over and
above that, what?”

A faint flush came into Marley’s cheeks and he darted a quick look
at Regan. His eyes were on the ground and his hands had suddenly
disappeared in his pockets before he answered.

“I’m going to board with her a spell,” he said in a slow way, as though
he was measuring every word before it was uttered.

“Are, eh?” grunted Regan, but the grunt carried a grudging note of
approval. “Well, maybe that’ll help some. You can report at noon,
Marley, and make yourself generally handy around. I reckon you’ll find
enough to do.”

“Thanks, sir,” said Marley again, as he turned away.

Regan, leaning on the turntable push-bar in front of the roundhouse,
followed with his eyes as the other crossed the tracks in the direction
of the town, then he spat profoundly again.

“Queerest looking specimen that ever blew into the mountains, and we’ve
had some before that were in a whole class by themselves at that,”
 he remarked, screwing up his eyebrows. “Makes you think of a blasted
gorilla the way he’s laid out, what? Well, we’ll give him a try anyway,”
 and, with a final glance in the direction of the retreating figure, the
master mechanic went into the roundhouse for his morning inspection of
the big moguls on the pits.

It took the division and Big Cloud some time to size up the new man, and
then just about when they thought they had they found they hadn’t.

Marley, if he was nothing else, was a contradictory specimen.

Mrs. Coogan said it was like the good Lord was kind of paying her
special attention, kind of giving her another son--“so quiet an’
accommodatin’ an’ handy to have around. A good bhoy was Marley--a foine
lad.” One hand would rest on her hip, and the other would smooth the
thin white hair over her ear with quick, nervous, little pats as she
talked, and the gray Irish eyes, a little dim now, would light up
happily. “Yes, ut’s more than I deserve; but I always knew the Lord wud
provide.’tain’t so easy to move the tubs around as it uster be. I guess
I knew it, but I wasn’t willin’ to admit it till I had somebody to do
it for me. Sivinty-wan I was last birthday.’tain’t old for a man, but a
woman--indade he’s a foine lad, an’ ‘tis myself that ses ut.”

Down at headquarters Mrs. Coogan’s praise went a long way, and after
Carleton and Regan and the others in the office got accustomed to seeing
him around they came to accept him in a passive, indifferent sort of a
way. He was a curious case, if you like, but inoffensive--they let it go
at that.

The men had their view-point. Marley didn’t talk much, didn’t draw out
the way a new hand was expected to in order to establish his footing
with the fraternity. Least of all did he make any overtures tending to
anything like an intimate relationship with any of his new associates.
Marley was never one of the group behind the storekeeper’s office that
had stolen out from the shops for a drag at their pipes and a breath of
air; never on the platform to exchange a word of banter with the crews
of the incoming trains; never amongst the wipers and hostlers in the
roundhouse who lounged in idle moments in the lee of a ten-wheeler with
an eye out across the yards against the possible intrusion of Regan or
some other embodiment of authority. He was civil enough and quick enough
to answer when he was spoken to, but his words were few--no more than a
simple negative or affirmative if he could help it. And when he himself
was in question there was not even that--Marley became dumb.

All this did not help him any--he wasn’t what you’d call exactly
popular! So, if he had little to say for himself, the men had plenty,
and the general opinion was that he was a surly brute that by no
possible chance was any credit to the Hill Division and by no manner of
means an acquisition to Big Cloud.

A few, very few, took a more charitable view, basing it on the shy,
slow flutter of Marley’s eyelids--they charged it up to an acute
sensitiveness of his grotesque and abnormal appearance. That isn’t the
way they put it, though.

“Looks like hell, an’ he knows it,” said they judicially. “Let the
beggar alone.”

It was good advice, whether their analysis was or wasn’t--Pete Boileau,
the baggage master, can vouch for that. As the time-worn saying has
it, it came like a bolt from the blue, and--but just a minute, we’re
overrunning our targets and that means trouble.

Things had gone along, as far as Marley was concerned, without anything
very startling or out of the way happening for quite a spell, and Regan,
who had stood closer to Chick Coogan than any other man on the division
before the young engineer died, had begun to look on Marley with a
little more interest--as a sort of _deus ex machina_ for Mrs. Coogan. It
seemed to afford the big-hearted master mechanic a good deal of relief.
He got to talking about it to Carleton one morning about a month after
Marley’s advent to the Hill Division.

“No, of course, I don’t know anything about him,” he said. “Nobody does,
I guess they don’t. But he minds his own business and does what he has
to do well enough, h’m? The old lady’s been getting a little feeble
lately--kind of wearing out, I guess she is. I was thinking Marley was
worth a little more than a dollar ten a day, what?”

They were sitting in the super’s office, and Carle-ton’s glance,
straying out through the window from where he sat at his desk, fastened
on Marley’s clumsy, ungainly figure hopping across the yard tracks
from the roundhouse toward the station platform. He smiled a little and
looked back at Regan.

“I guess so, Tommy--if it will do her any good. I wouldn’t bank on it,
though. He’s a queer card. Impresses you with the feeling that there’s
something you ought to know about him--and don’t. I’ve a notion,
somehow, I’ve seen him before.”

“Have you?” said Regan. “That’s funny. I’ve thought I had myself once or
twice, but I guess it’s imagination more than anything else. Anyway, he
seems to remember what Mrs. Coogan did for him. I dunno what she’d do
even now without the board money, little as it is, to help out. There’s
no use borrowing trouble I suppose, but later on I dunno what on earth
she’ll do. She’s prouder than a sceptered queen--and she won’t be able
to wash much longer, nor take a boarder either, what?”

Carleton sucked at his briar for a moment in silence. “We’ve all got
to face the possibility of the scrap heap some day, Tommy,” he said
soberly. “But it’s harder for a woman, I’ll admit--bitter hard.
Sometimes things don’t seem just right. If you want to give Marley a
small raise, go ahead.”

The master mechanic nodded his head.

“I think I will,” he announced. “He’s queer if you like, but that’s his
own business. Never a word out of him nor a bit of trouble since----”

Regan’s words stopped as though they had been chopped off with a knife.
Both men, as though actuated by a single impulse, had leaped to their
feet. Behind them their chairs toppled unheeded with a crash to the
floor, and for an instant, as their eyes met each other’s, the color
faded in their cheeks. It had come and gone like a flash--a wild, hoarse
scream of rage, a brute scream, horrid, blood curdling, like the jungle
howl of some maddened beast plunged in a savage, blind, all-possessing
paroxysm of fury.

Themselves again in a second, the master mechanic and superintendent
sprang to the window.

On the platform, up at the far end, the great form of Pete Boileau
rocked and swayed like a drunken man, and clinging to him, his
legs twined around the other’s knees, his arms locked around the
baggage-master’s body just above the elbows--was Marley!

Regan and Carleton gazed spellbound. There was something uncanny,
inhuman about the scene--like a rabid dog that had leaped, snarling, for
the throat hold.

Suddenly, Marley’s legs with a quick, wriggling slide, released their
hold, his whole form appeared to shrink, grow smaller, he seemed to
crouch on his knees at the other’s feet, then his body jerked itself
erect to its full stature with a movement swift as a loosed bowstring,
his arms flew up carrying a great burden, and over his shoulders, over
his head, a sprawling form hurtled through the air.

“Merciful God! He’s killed him!” gasped Carleton, dashing for the door.
“Come on, Tommy _Quick!_”

Both men were down the stairs in a space of time that Regan, at
least, chunky and fat, has never duplicated before or since. Carleton,
hard-faced and tightlipped, led the way, with the picture beating into
his brain of Boileau’s senseless form on the ground and the other above
tearing like a beast at its prey. He wrenched the door of the station
open, sprang out on to the platform, stopped involuntarily, and then ran
forward again.

The baggage-master’s form was on the ground lying in a curled-up,
huddled heap, and he was senseless all right--if he wasn’t something
more than that. But the rest of Carleton’s mental picture was wrong,
dead wrong. Right beside where the fight, if fight it could be called,
had taken place was a baggage truck, and over this, his head down, his
two great arms wound round his face, shoulders heaving in convulsive
sobs, Marley was crying like a broken-hearted child.

Take him any way you like, look at him any way you like, Marley,
whatever else he was, was a contradictory specimen.

Any other man with a skull a shade less tender than Boileau’s--it must
have been made of boiler plate--would never have drawn another pay
check. And even granting the boiler plate part of it, it was something
to wonder at. He had gone through the air like a rocket, and his head
had caught the full of it when he landed. How far? Carleton never said.
He measured it--twice. But he never gave out the figures of Boileau’s
aerial flight. Pete was a big man, six feet something, and heavy for his
height. The strength of four ordinary men concentrated in one pair of
arms might have done it perhaps; mathematically it wouldn’t figure out
any other way. Carleton never said. But what’s the use! The division did
some tall thinking over it--and Marley cried!

They picked up Pete Boileau and carried him into the station, and the
contents of a fire bucket over his head opened his eyes. But it was a
good fifteen minutes before he could talk, and by that time when
they got over their scare and thought of Marley the baggage truck was
deserted.

“What started it!” growled Boileau, repeating Carleton’s inquiry. “I’m
hanged if I know. I was jossing him a little--nothing to make anybody
sore. I was only funning anyhow, and laughing when I said it.”

“Said what?” demanded Regan, cutting in.

“Why, nothing much. He looked so queer hopping across the tracks like
a monkey on a stick that I just asked him why he didn’t cut out
railroading and hit up a museum for a job, and then before I knew it he
let out a screech and was on me like a blasted catamount.”

“Serves you right,” said the master mechanic gruffly. “I guess you
won’t nag him again, I guess you won’t. And none of the other men won’t
neither if they’ve had any notion that way.”

“He’s a wicked little devil,” snarled Boileau. “And the strength of
him”--the baggage-master shivered--“he ain’t human. He’ll kill somebody
yet, that’s what he’ll do!”

Pete’s summing up was a popular one--the men promptly ticketed and
carded Marley as per Boileau’s bill of lading. There wasn’t any more
doubt about him, no discussions, no anything. They knew Marley at
last, and they liked him less than ever; but, also, they imbibed a very
wholesome respect for the welfare of their own skins. A man with arms
whose strength is the strength of derrick booms is to be approached with
some degree of caution.

Marley himself said nothing. Carleton and Regan got him on the carpet
and tried to get his version of the story, but for all they got out of
him they might as well have saved their time.

A pathetic enough looking figure, in a way, he was, as he stood in the
superb office the afternoon of the fight. The shoulders were drooping
giving the arms an even longer appearance than usual, no color in his
face, the violet eyes almost black, with a dead, hunted look in them.
Sorrow, remorse, dread--neither Regan nor Carleton knew. They couldn’t
understand him--then. Marley offered no explanation, volunteered
nothing. Boileau’s story was right--that was all.

“You might have killed the man,” said Carleton sternly, at the end of an
unsatisfactory twenty minutes.

“You can thank your Maker you haven’t his blood on your hands--it’s a
miracle you haven’t. Don’t you know your own strength? We can’t have
that sort of thing around here.”

Marley’s face seemed to grow even whiter than before and he shivered a
little, though the afternoon was dripping wet with the heat and the
thermometer was sizzling well up in the nineties--he shivered but his
lips were hard shut and he didn’t say a word.

Carleton, for once in his life when it came to handling men, didn’t seem
to be altogether sure of himself. An ordinary fight was one thing, and,
generally speaking, strictly the men’s own business; but everything
about Marley, from his arrival at Big Cloud to the sudden beastlike
ferocity he had displayed that morning, put a little different
complexion on the matter. A puzzled look settled on the super’s face as
he glanced from Marley to the master mechanic, while his fingers drummed
a tattoo on the edge of his desk.

“You had some provocation, Marley,” he said slowly, “I don’t want you to
think I’m not taking that into consideration--but not enough to work
up any such deviltry as you exhibited. You’ll never get on with the men
here after this. They’ll make things pretty hard for you. I think you’d
better go--for your own sake.”

There was dead silence in the super’s room for a half minute, then
Regan, who had been sitting with his chair tilted back and his feet
up on the window-sill, dropped the chair legs to the floor and swung
around.

“I put Logan up firing yesterday,” said he. “There’s a night job wiping
in the roundhouse. What do you say about it, Carleton?”

It was Marley who answered.

“_Yes!_” he said fiercely.

Carleton jabbed at the bowl of his pipe with his forefinger and his
eyebrows went up at Marley’s sudden animation. Marley’s eyes met his
with a single quick glance, and then the eyelids fluttered down covering
them. There was something in the look that caught the super, something
he couldn’t define. There was a plea, but there was something more--like
a pledge, almost, it seemed.

“All right,” he said shortly; then, nodding at Mar-ley in dismissal: “I
hope you will remember what I’ve said. You may go.”

Marley hesitated as though about to speak and changed his mind,
evidently, for he turned, walked straight to the door and out, then his
boots creaked down the stairs.

“He’ll be away from the men there, all except a few,” said the master
mechanic, as though picking up the thread of a discussion. “And as for
them, I’ll see there’s no trouble. There’s Mrs. Coogan now that----”

“Yes, Tommy”--Carleton smiled a little--“I didn’t put your interest all
down to love for Marley.”

“What gets me,” muttered Regan screwing up his eyes, as his teeth met in
the plug he had dragged with some labor from his hip pocket, “what gets
me is the way he went to crying afterward. Like a kid, he was. It was
the blamedest thing I ever saw, what?”

“I don’t think he’s responsible for himself when he gets like that,”
 replied Carleton. “That’s exactly what I am afraid of. It comes over
him in a flash, making a very demon of him, and then the relaxation the
other way is just as uncontrollable. I don’t suppose he can help it,
he’s made that way. It wouldn’t make so much difference in an ordinary
man, but with strength like his”--Carleton blew a ring of smoke
ceilingwards--“you saw what he did to Boileau.”

“I ain’t likely to forget it,” said Regan. “But if he’s left alone I
guess he’ll be all right. Any man that’s fool enough to do anything else
now will do it with his eyes open, and it’s his own funeral.”

Those of the night crew in the roundhouse were evidently of the same
mind. They received him, it is true, with little evidence of cordiality,
but their aloofness was decidedly pronounced, and they looked askance at
the queer figure as it dodged in and out of the shadows cast by the big
mountain racers, or, at times, stood silently by one of the engine doors
under the dim light of an oil lamp staring out across the black of the
turntable to the twinkling switch lights in the yard. They didn’t like
him, but they had learned their lesson well; and, as the weeks slipped
away, they practised it--he was to be left alone.

One thing they grudgingly admitted--Marley could work, and did.
Clarihue, the night turner, was man enough to give another his due any
time, no matter what his own personal feelings might be, and there was
some talk, after a bit, between him and the master mechanic about Marley
getting the next spare run firing.

Clarihue even went so far as to hint at it as a possibility to Marley,
and for his pains got a surprise--he wasn’t used to seeing the chance of
promotion turned down. Marley had shaken his head and would have none
of it. He was satisfied where he was. That was all there was to that.
Clarihue drew back into his shell after that. Marley could wipe till his
hair was gray for all he cared.

So Marley wiped; but at Mrs. Coogan’s cottage, as the summer waned,
there wasn’t as much washing done as there had been, and the company
doctor got to dropping in too frequently to put his visits down to the
old-time occasional friendly calls for an afternoon chat. And then, one
day in the early fall, the washing stopped altogether, and the doctor’s
face was puckered and serious as he left the cottage and headed down
Main Street to the station. He entered Carleton’s office and, after a
few words between them, the super sent for Regan.

That evening Carleton’s private car was waiting on the siding when
Number Two, the Eastbound Limited, Chick Coogan’s old train, pulled in.

As the little yard switcher importantly coughed the super’s car on
to the rear Pullman, Regan, in his Sunday best, a store suit of black
twill, with boiled shirt and stiff collar, came out of the station with
Mrs. Coogan on his arm.

An incongruous pair they looked. The little old lady’s walk was in
painful contrast to the burly master mechanic’s stride--her short steps
had a painful, hesitating, uncertain waver to them. One hand gripped
tenaciously at Regan’s coat-sleeve, while the other held the faded,
old-fashioned shawl close about her thin, bent shoulders. She carried
her head drooped forward a little, hiding the face under the quaint poke
bonnet.

A moment later Carleton, too, emerged from the station and joined them.

The station hands and the loungers eyed the trio with curiosity, and
then stared in amazement as the two officials helped the old lady up
the steps of the private car--Mrs. Coogan was getting the best of it,
whatever it meant.

The three disappeared inside, but presently Regan and Carleton came out
again, and the super dropped to the station platform. He held out his
hand to the master mechanic as Frank Knowles, the conductor, lifted his
finger to Burke in the cab.

“Good-by, Tommy; and good luck,” he called, as the train began to move
out. “Don’t hurry, take all the time you need.”

“All right,” Regan shouted back. “Good-by.”

Carleton stood for a moment watching the tail lights grow dimmer until,
finally, they shot suddenly out of sight with the curve of the track,
then he turned to walk back along the platform--and stopped.

Crouched back against the wall of the freight house, deep in the
shadows, was Marley.

“Here you, Marley,” Carleton called.

Marley, evidently believing himself to have been unobserved, started
violently, and then came slowly forward.

“What are you hiding there for?” demanded the super.

“I wanted to see Mrs. Coogan off,” Marley answered a little defiantly.

The tone of the other’s voice did not please Carleton.

“You’ve a queer way of doing it then,” he snapped shortly.

Marley was twisting his hands, staring down the track.

“I said good-by before I came down to work,”--he spoke as though talking
to himself.

“Oh!” said Carleton, and looked at Marley sharply, “I suppose you know
what she went East for?”

“Yes,” said Marley gruffly. That was all--just “yes.” And with that he
turned abruptly and started across the tracks for the roundhouse.

Carleton, taken aback, watched him in angry amazement, then the scowl
that had settled on his face broke in a smile, and he shrugged his
shoulders.

“Guess Tommy is right,” he muttered, as he went on toward the office.
“Marley’s all in a class by himself. We’ve never had anything like him
in the mountains before.”

It was four days before Mrs. Coogan and the master mechanic came back.
Days during which Marley slipped into Dutchy’s lunch counter at deserted
moments for his meals, and, if that were possible, drew into himself
closer than ever.

The boys were curious about Mrs. Coogan, naturally; curious enough even
to question Marley. He had one answer, only one. “She’s sick, I guess,”
 he said. They got nothing more out of him than that.

One thing Marley did, though, that Clarihue, while he thought nothing of
it at the time, remembered well enough afterwards. He asked the turner
to give him a sheet of railroad paper and a manila, and in his spare
moments the night before Mrs. Coogan came back he labored, bent over
the little desk where the engine crews signed on and off, scratching
painstakingly with a pen. Clarihue caught a glimpse of the sheet in
passing before Marley hastily covered it up--just a glimpse, not enough
to read a single word, just enough to marvel a little at the wiper’s
hand. Marley was a pretty good penman.

Marley, of course, being on night duty slept daytimes, but the afternoon
Regan brought Mrs. Coogan back to the cottage he must have heard them
coming, for he was standing in the little sitting-room when they came
in.

Mrs. Coogan kind of hesitated on the threshold, then she called out
quickly in a faltering way:

“Marley, Marley, is that you?”

Marley was twisting his hands nervously. His eyes shot a rapid glance
from the old lady to the master mechanic, and then the eyelids fluttered
down.

“Sure,” he said, “it’s me.”

She stumbled toward him and burst into tears, crying as though her heart
would break.

“Marley, Marley,” she sobbed, “Don’t lave them do ut. Don’t lave them do
ut, there’s a good bhoy, Marley.”

Marley never moved, just licked his lips with his tongue and his face
grew whiter. Queer, the way he acted? Well, perhaps. Never a move to
catch the frail, tottering figure, never a word to soothe the pitiful
grief. He stood like a man listening as a judge pronounces his doom.
Oh, yes, queer, if you like. Marley, whatever else he was, was a
contradictory specimen.

It was Regan who caught the old lady in his arms, and led her gently
into her bedroom off the parlor.

“You mustn’t give way like that, Mrs. Coogan,” he said kindly. “Just
lie down for a spell and you’ll feel better. I’ll ask Mrs. Dahleen, next
door, to come in.”

It took the master mechanic several minutes to quiet her and persuade
her to do as he asked, but when he came out again Marley was still
standing, exactly as before, in the centre of the room. With a black
scowl on his face, Regan motioned the other outside, and, once on the
street, he laid the wiper low. Hard tongued was Regan when his temper
was aroused and he did not choose his words.

“What d’ye mean by treating her like that, you scrapings from the junk
heap, you!” he exploded. “You know well enough what she went away for,
and if you’ve any brains in that ugly head of yours you know well enough
what she’s come back to, without any printed instructions to help you
out. What are you playing at, eh? What do you mean? You’re not fit to
associate with a dog! And she the woman that spent about her all to save
your miserable carcass, you.

“You’d better stop!”--the words came like the warning hiss of a serpent
before it strikes. Marley’s face was livid, and his great gnarled hands
were creeping slowly upward above his waist line.

With a startled oath, Regan leaped quickly back: and then, separated by
a yard, the men stood eying each other in silence.

It was gone in a flash as it had come, for Marley, with a shudder,
dropped his hands limply to his sides, and the color crept slowly back
into his cheeks.

“There is no chance for her?”--no trace of the passionate outburst of an
instant before remained. The question came low, hesitating--more like an
assertion combined with a wistful appeal for contradiction.

It took Regan longer to recover himself, and it was a minute before he
answered. Then he shook his head.

“She’ll be stone blind in a month,” he said gruffly.

Marley’s eyes came up to the master mechanic’s--and dropped instantly
with their habitual little flutter.

“Ain’t no doubt, no chance of a mistake?” he ventured.

Again Regan shook his head.

“Not a chance. The best man we could find East made the examination.
We’re arranging to get her into an institute--a home for the blind
somewhere.”

“I thought you would”--Marley’s voice was monotonous. “That’s what she
was talking about, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Regan.

Marley wagged his head with a judicial air.

“That’ll kill her,” he remarked, as though stating a self-evident, but
commonplace, fact. “That’ll kill her.”

“I’m afraid it will,” the master mechanic admitted gravely. “But there’s
nothing else to do. It’s impossible for her to stay here. She’s got to
have some one to look after her, and she has no money. God knows I wish
we could, but we can’t see any other way than put her in some place like
that.”

“I thought you would if it turned out bad,” said Marley again, in dead
tones. “I figured it out that way when you were gone.” His hands were
traveling in an aimless fashion in and out of his pockets. Suddenly he
half pulled out an envelope, started, hastily shoved it back, and looked
at Regan. “I--I got a letter to post,” he muttered.

“Well, supposing you have,” said Regan a little savagely--Regan wasn’t
interested in letters just then,--“supposing you have, you needn’t----”

But Marley was well across the street.

The master mechanic gasped angrily, choked--and went into Mrs. Dahleen’s
cottage on his errand. It was wasted breath to talk to Marley anyhow.

It didn’t take long for the news to spread around Big Cloud, and for
three days they talked about Mrs. Coogan pretty constantly--after that
they talked about Marley.

The Westbound Limited schedules Big Cloud for 2: 05 in the afternoon,
and on the third day after Mrs. Coogan’s return Marley came down the
street about half-past one, and crossed the tracks to the shops. Regan
was in the fitting-shop when Marley walked in.

“I’d like to speak to you,” said Marley, going straight up to the master
mechanic.

“Well?” grunted Regan, none too cordially.

“I’d like you to come over to Mr. Carleton’s office with me.”

There was something in Marley’s voice, feverish, impelling, something
in his face, that stopped the impatient question that sprang to Regan’s
lips. He looked at the ungainly, grotesque figure of the wiper for an
instant curiously, then without a word led the way out of the shops.

They traversed the yard in silence, climbed the stairs in the station,
and entered the super’s room. Marley closed the door and stood with his
back against it.

Carleton, at his desk, looked from one to the other in surprise.

“Hello,” said he. “What’s up?”

The master mechanic jerked his thumb at Marley, and appropriated a
chair.

“He wanted me to come over. I don’t know what for.”

Carleton turned inquiringly to the wiper.

“What is it?” he demanded.

Marley walked slowly across the room until he reached the super’s desk.
His face was drawn, and he wet his lips with the tip of his tongue.

“It’s about Mrs. Coogan,” he said jerkily. “Five thousand would be
enough, wouldn’t it?”

Carleton stared at the man as though he were mad, and Regan hitched his
chair suddenly forward.

“Will you swear to give it to her if I get it for you?”--Marley’s hand,
clenched, was on the desk, and he leaned his body far forward toward the
super. There was no flutter of the eyelids now, and his eyes stared into
Carleton’s without a flicker. “_Swear it!_” he cried fiercely.

Carleton drew back involuntarily.

“Marley,” he said soothingly, “you’re not yourself, you----”

“No, I’m not mad,” Marley broke in passionately. “I know what I’m
talking about. I know she’d die in one of them charity places. It’s up
to me. She treated me white--the only soul on God’s earth that ever did.
And maybe, maybe too, it’ll help square accounts. You’ll play fair and
swear she gets the money, won’t you?”

“I don’t understand,” said Carleton slowly; “but I’ll swear to give her
anything you have to give.” Marley nodded quickly.

“That’s all I want,” he said. “There ain’t much to understand.” He
fumbled in his pocket and brought out a newspaper clipping, a column
long, which he laid on the desk. “I guess you’ll get it all there.”
 The heavy “set” of the heading leaped up at Carleton. “$5,000
REWARD.” Below, halfway down the column, was the reproduction of a
photograph--Marley’s.

Regan was up from his chair, bending over the super’s shoulder.

“I thought I’d seen you somewhere before”--Carle-ton’s voice sounded
strained and hollow in his own ears. “It must have been the picture. I
remember now. You--you killed a man in Denver a year ago.”

“It’s all there,” said Marley, licking his lips again. “I never saw him
before. I killed him like I almost killed Boileau this summer. I didn’t
know till afterward that he was rich, not until the family hung out that
reward.”

Carleton did not speak. Regan reached viciously for his plug. Marley
stirred uneasily, and drew the back of his hand across his forehead. It
came away soggy wet. In the silence the chime of the Limited’s whistle
floated in through the open window, then, presently, the roar of the
train and the grinding shriek of the brake-shoes.

“My God,” said Carleton in a whisper, “you want me to give you up and
get the reward--for her!”

A queer smile flickered across Marley’s face. Heavy steps came running
up the stairs. There was a smart rap upon the door and a man stepped
quickly inside. For a second his eyes swept the little group. Then he
whirled like a flash, and the blue-black muzzle of a revolver held a
bead on Marley’s heart.

“Ah, Shorty,” he cried grimly, “we’ve got you at last, eh? Put out your
hands!”

Without protest, with the same queer smile on his face, Marley obeyed.
There was a little click of steel, and he dropped his locked wrists
before him.

“You’re Mr. Carleton, aren’t you?”--the newcomer had swung to the desk.

“Yes,” said Carleton numbly.

“I’m Hepburn of the Denver police,” went on the officer. “We appreciate
this, Mr. Carleton. Shorty here has been badly wanted for a long time.
We got your letter yesterday.”

Hepburn paused to reach into his pocket, and in the pause Carleton’s
eyes met Marley’s--and he understood. Marley had written the letter
himself and signed his, Carleton’s, name. And, too, it was clear enough
now, the telegram he had puzzled over the previous afternoon. It was
lying before him on his desk.

His eyes dropped to it. “Will be on hand on arrival of Limited, (signed)
Denver.”

“We can’t give you any receipt for him as you requested,” continued
Hepburn, drawing a paper out of his pocket; “but here’s an
acknowledgment that his capture is due to information furnished by you.
I guess that will answer the purpose. You won’t have any trouble getting
the reward.” He handed the paper to Carleton.

The super took it mechanically, and started as it crackled in his
fingers.

“Now,” said Hepburn briskly, “I don’t want to appear abrupt, but there’s
a local East at two-twenty. We’ll move along, Shorty. Good-by, Mr.
Carleton. Next time you’re in Denver look us up.” He took Marley’s arm
and moved toward the door.

“Don’t--tell her, Mr. Carleton”--there was a catch in Marley’s voice,
and the words came low.

Carleton did not answer. He was staring at the paper in his
hand--Marley’s price.

Regan had turned his back, with a hasty movement of his fist to his
eyes.

“Don’t tell her”--the plea came again from the doorway.

Carleton tried to speak and his voice broke, then he cleared his throat.

“She will never know, Marley,” he said huskily.

X--THE MAN! WHO DIDN’T COUNT

He was a little gray-haired hostler, wiper, sweeper, assistant night
man in the roundhouse at Big Cloud, anything you like, and this is the
story he told me one night, leaning against the blackened jamb of one
of the big doors, wiping his hands occasionally upon a hunk of greasy
waste.

They were a rough lot out in the mountains in the days when the Hill
Division was shaking her steel into something like a permanent right
of way--a pretty rough lot. The railroaders because they had to be; the
rest because they were just that way naturally. Miners and Indians made
up the citizenship mostly, and there’s no worse mixture. They’ve got the
redskins corralled on reserves now; but they hadn’t then, and it didn’t
take more than one bad word and one drop of bad whisky to set things in
lively motion.

There’s a few highfaluting poems, and some other things, about the noble
red man that works you up so when you read them that you get to wishing
the Almighty had seen fit to let you be a red man, too. Well, that’s all
right in its way because, after you’ve rubbed elbows with some of the
real thing, you realize that the world owes the poets a living just as
much as it does anybody else, and that what they say has to sound good;
so you just come to keep the cautionary signals up by instinct, and let
it go at that.

But, to give the poets their due, there’s one thing they never trip up
on, and that’s the Indian’s compound efficiency for smell. The Indian
can smell. When he sticks out his chest, faces southeast, and begins
to draw in the God-given mountain air, you’re free to bet that the
distilleries down Kentucky way are doing enough business to make regular
dividend checks a sure thing. That’s generally good whisky. Bad whisky,
in smell and otherwise, carries farther--and it’s only fifteen miles
from here to Coyote Bend!

Coyote Bend wasn’t even a pin prick on the engineers’ blue prints when
they mapped out the right of way, and there wasn’t any such place when
the steel was all spiked down until the day some wandering prospector
staked out a bunch of claims--and the news spread.

Gold in the Rockies? No; there’s never been much of it _found_, but
there’s an all-fired big superstition that the mother lode of the whole
country is tucked away here somewhere. That’s why, in two days, the
wilderness and a gurgling stream that trickled peacefully down through
a high-walled canon became Coyote Bend; and that’s why the local freight
began to make regular stops to dump off supplies alongside the track.
There was no station, of course, no agent, no nothing; the stuff was
just dumped, that’s all. The consignees picked out their goods if they
could read, or guessed at it if they couldn’t.

Maybe I ought to have told you this before; anyway, I’ll stick it in
now. There are three men that figure in this story, though one of
them doesn’t count for much. He was a young chap named Charlie Lee. A
graduate of an Eastern college he was, and all he had to his name was
his diploma and the clothes he stood in when he hit the West. He struck
the super for a job, and he got it--braking on the local freight. Hell
for a man like him, eh? Well, it was, in more ways than one! Anyway,
from that day to this it was the best job he ever held down long enough
to draw a second month’s pay check.

The other two were Matt Perley and Faro Clancy--“Breed” Clancy, they
called him behind his back.

Perley was a very good sort, pretty straight, pretty clean, measuring
by the standards out here in those days; a little bit of a sawed-off,
blond-haired, blueeyed man, full of grit inside, and an out-and-out
railroad man--only a freight conductor, conductor on the local, but he
knew his business; he’d have gone up, ‘way up, in time.

Clancy was a hellion, there’s no other name for him, and even that
doesn’t express it--no one word could. Indian one way, Irish the other.
He looked mostly Indian; the Irish came out in the brogue. Black,
swarthy, small eyes like needle points, coarse dry hair that straggled
down over his eyebrows, a hulking bony frame with the strength of a
wrecking crane--that’s Clancy, Breed Clancy.

Oh, yes, he was slick, slick as they’re made--with his hands. Faro,
stud poker, dice, anything--it was his business; that, and running
booze joints. Mining camps and brand-new boom towns were Clancy’s meat
mostly--after Perley drove him out of Big Cloud.

Don’t ask me. I don’t know what there was between them. That was before
my time. A woman probably--a woman’s generally blamed anyhow. Anyway,
one night Perley got the drop on Breed and marched him down the street
in front of his pistol and out of the town. After that, Clancy kept
away from Big Cloud. As I say, that part was before my time. I only
know there was bad blood between them; wicked bad blood on one side, as
you’ll see. Clancy disappeared from Big Cloud, and the two didn’t foul
each other again until Coyote Bend started.

Breed Clancy hit the Bend with the first inrush of the miners, and
before any of them had time to much more than get a pick into the ground
he was busy knocking together a bit of a shack he called a hotel, and
was ordering the furnishings--liquid furnishings, you understand--from
Big Cloud.

There were three barrels of it, the hardest kind of fire water that ever
went into the mountains waybilled to Clancy at Coyote Bend by the local,
on the first trip that Charlie Lee ever made with Matt Perley. I’m
getting back to Lee now, you see.

Well, it was about noon when they whistled for the Bend that day, and
Lee, riding the brake wheels on the front end, could see about a dozen
“blankets” squatting alongside the right of way about where the train
would stop. Grouped behind these were a number of stragglers from the
camp, among whom was a big fellow in a red shirt you could see farther
than a semaphore arm.

Now, I don’t say those Indians were attracted by the gold rush to Coyote
Bend. Coyote Bend, or any other place, old or new, stale or prosperous,
would get its share of the redskins. Where they came from or where they
went nobody knew. They’d drop in from nowhere, and, if they liked the
place, they’d grunt and settle down for a spell; if they didn’t like it,
they’d grunt, in benediction or otherwise, and leave.

I’m not saying they smelled the whisky in that train. I’m not saying
they knew Clancy was importing fire water, and they were just there to
feast their eyes on the barrels and meditate on what was inside. I’m not
saying anything at all about that, or what followed. There’s only one
man that perhaps might have explained it---I say “perhaps” because he
never did; and also, because he knew Indian nature as well as any white
man in the West. That was Perley.

Whether Perley even knew that Clancy was at the Bend or not, I don’t
know. I only know that he could have known it if he’d bothered to
read the waybills; and it was likewise on the cards that he might have
learned the day before, down at Big Cloud, that the whisky was going up
the following morning. I don’t know, and that’s straight. Sometimes I
think he did; sometimes I think he didn’t. I don’t know.

Anyway, Lee slid to the ground as the train stopped, and went back to
the car that held the consignment for the Bend. As he fumbled with the
door, he got a whiff of raw spirit that nearly knocked him over. And
then, right behind him, rose a chorus of appreciative “ughs!”

I told you an Indian could smell whisky, but I didn’t tell you why. It’s
his ruling passion. That’s straight. I’m not judging the Indian; the
taste was born in him. There are some white men just as bad. I’m not
judging them, either. Some drink for the same reason the Indian does,
some for others, and some--some men drink because they have to.

What was I saying? Oh, yes, Lee getting that whiff. Well, before he got
the door unfastened, the man in the red shirt had pushed through the
Indians and come up beside him.

“Me name’s Clancy,” said he. “Did yez bring up any stuff for me?”

“There’s three barrels for somebody,” replied Lee, and slid open the
door--and the next minute he had jumped back with a yell, colliding with
Clancy.

“Ugh!” ejaculated the apparition that confronted him.

“He’s drunk! Majestically drunk! An’ on _my_ stuff!” roared Clancy; and
then, turning fiercely on Lee: “Fwhat did ye let him in there for, eh?
Fwhat did ye let him in for, ye mealy-faced little----”

“Let him in nothing!” retorted Lee, getting back his grip on himself.
“Here, you, get out--and _quick!_”

The Indian blinked gravely, but never moved. He sat cross-legged on
the floor, exactly in the middle of the car between the doors, swaying
slightly backward and forward. Beside him, up-ended and broached, was
one of Clancy’s kegs. The car reeked with the smell of it, for of the
half kegful that had gushed out what hadn’t gone into the Indian had
gone on to the floor.

The half-breed was raving mad. I’ve a notion sometimes the man wasn’t
human at all. He had his hand on Lee’s throat when Perley came running
up from the rear end.

“What’s the row?” he began, and then he stopped. He was a cool devil was
Perley, and he never turned a hair as he stepped between the two men.
“Ah, Clancy, it’s you, is it, you copper-faced renegade?”--no loud talk,
no bluster, he didn’t raise his voice; but his insult, the worst he
could have laid his tongue to, cut like the sting of a lash.

Clancy swung around like a flash--and stared into the muzzle of
the conductor’s.45. His hands were clenching and unclenching as he
recognized Perley, and the cords in his neck swelled into knotty lumps.

“Ut’s your worrk, this job, is ut?” he snarled. “Some day, Perley, I’ll
show you.”

Queer, you say, he’d act like that--nothing to warrant it. Well, maybe.
I don’t know. I don’t know what was between them before; but I do know
the awful deviltry of Breed Clancy, and I know that Lee, leaning back
against the car, shivered at the look that passed between the two of
them.

Perley cut the half-breed short off. “Once,” said he contemptuously,
still quiet, not a tone raised, and his voice the more deadly for it,
“once, perhaps you’ll remember, I warned you to keep out of my road.
Lee, how’d that Indian get in the car?”

“I don’t know,” said Lee.

“Well, then, throw him out,” said Perley shortly, snapping his watch
with his free hand. “We can’t stay here all day.”

This little ruction between Perley and the half-breed has taken me
longer to tell it, I guess, than it did to happen. Anyway, it didn’t
cause the excitement you might think it would. The “blankets” were
too busy drinking in the smell of that whisky to let their hungry eyes
wander very far from anywhere but the open door of that car. And as for
the stragglers, by the time they’d caught on to the fact that there was
something on the boards besides that drunken Indian, Perley, with the
same cool contempt, had slipped his gun back in his pocket and was
boosting Lee into the car.

The Indian offered no opposition as Lee tackled him. He couldn’t--he
was beyond all that--he was so full of dead-eye it was oozing out by the
pores. He just sat there, and Lee slid him to the door just as he was,
still sitting, and dropped him out. He struck the ground with a thud,
rebounded a foot, rolled over, grunted, and lay like a log. There was
a guffaw from the camp stragglers, and a deep and envious chorus of
“Ughs!” from the “blankets.”

No, I’m not joking--it’s a long way from a joke, as you’ll see. They
_were_ envious. It acted like a red rag on a bull--the possibility of
attaining the condition, the state of heavenly bliss, that had been
reached by their red brother, do you understand?

Clancy wasn’t laughing. He stood where Perley had left him, sullen and
with twitching face. I don’t know, I think it was Perley’s sheer nerve
that kept the halfbreed from drawing and shooting the conductor when
his back was turned. I don’t know--brute beast cowed by the human mind,
perhaps. No one ever knew Breed Clancy. He had his yellow streak at
times, and then again the blood that was in him made him worse than a
frenzied madman. Yes, I guess it was a case of “brute” all right, for
there was no cowing him when the frenzy was on him.

Perley wasn’t laughing, either. He was opening and shutting his watch
impatiently. “Come on! Come on!” he cried at Lee. “Get those barrels
out. We’ve got to cross Number Two at the Creek. It’ll be the carpet for
ours if we hold her up.”

Lee grabbed the broached cask and edged it toward the doorway. The
contents slopped and sloshed inside as he moved it, and occasionally a
little of the stuff would spill out through the bunghole. Then, somehow,
just as he got it to the door, his hold slipped, out it went, bounded on
the edge of the ties, and then went down the embankment right into the
hands of those squatting “blankets.” They didn’t squat long; I don’t
need to tell you that. They were on it in a mob, and they got the
taste--they’d had the smell--and the fill was to come presently.

Clancy was cursing in streams; and no fouler-mouthed man than Clancy
ever lived. He tried once to get the Indians off the barrel, and the
stragglers backed him up half-heartedly. You might as well have tried
to move that mogul on the pit there behind you. He didn’t try but once,
then he fell back on cursing again, and Perley was the target for most
of it.

Perley? He never answered him, but his face grew harder and harder--and
his gun was in his hand again. “Throw out those other two barrels!” he
snapped at Lee.

“The redskins will get every last drop if I do,” objected Lee,
hesitating.

“Owner’s risk. We’ve no station here. Throw ‘em out!” repeated Perley,
grimmer than before, only this time loud enough for Clancy to hear him.

“Ye do,” roared the half-breed, “ye do, an’ I’ll worse than murdher ye
one of these----”

“Throw ‘em out!” said Perley quietly, waving the go-ahead signal to the
engine crew.

And out they went--down the embankment after the first.

Lee jumped to the ground and banged the door shut, just as the drawbars
began to snap tight along the train and the local jolted into motion.
He waited beside Perley to swing the caboose as it came up. And while he
waited he watched and grinned.

Funny? I don’t know; it depends on the way you look at it, depends on
what you call fun. Lee thought it was funny--then. The air was full of
curses, Indian yells, shouts, oaths; and there was one jumbled mess of
arms, and legs, and barrels. The Indians were after their _fill_, and
this time Clancy and the stragglers were in the game for keeps.

Up ahead the engine crew hung grinning out of the gangway. Behind, the
other brakeman was occupying a reserved seat on the top of the caboose.
A quarter of a mile away over by the camp, men, attracted by the
shouting, were beginning to run toward the track. Inconsistent kind of
a mix-up, eh?--Indians, miners, whisky barrels, and railroaders. I
don’t know; call it funny if you like, though perhaps you can size it up
better when I’m through.

By this time the caboose was up to where Perley and Lee were standing.
Perley motioned Lee aboard, and then swung on himself.

Just as he did so, Clancy’s red shirt loomed up out of the mêlée, his
arm lifted, and over the clack of the car trucks pounding the steel came
the tinkle of breaking glass from the shattered pane in the door--the
bullet had passed between the heads of the two men on the platform,
missing them by a hair’s breadth. Another shot followed the first,
another and another, dangerously close; splintering the woodwork around
them; and then Perley fired. The half-breed spun round like a top,
clapped his hand to his face and pitched over.

Then the curve of the track shut out the scene, but for five minutes
after they were out of sight they still got the whoops of the redskins,
the shouts and curses of the miners, and the crackle of guns like the
quick fire of a Gatling. You see it came to that before it was through,
and there was some blood spilled--a lot of it--and, not counting
Clancy’s, it wasn’t all “blanket” blood, either.

Clancy? I’m coming to him. No, he wasn’t killed--if he had been I’d
never be telling you this story.

It was two or three days before Lee and Perley got the details of what
happened. The redskins fought like fiends after the miners began to
fire on them and had killed one or two, and, though they were finally
subdued, the casualties, as I’ve said, weren’t all on their side by a
hanged sight.

But I was talking about Clancy. Well, that bullet of Perley’s caught him
on the cheek bone, glanced in, plowed through his left eye, and landed
up somewhere against the cartilage of his nose--a bullet will make queer
tracks sometimes, worse than surveyors by a heap. They got him down to
Big Cloud to a doctor’s, and before he was half cured he disappeared.
They had a sort of makeshift hospital here in those days, and when I say
“disappeared” I mean they found his bed empty one morning, that was all.

I told you I didn’t know whether Perley had any hand in putting that
Indian in the car, or the other redskins at the Bend. I don’t. I told
you I didn’t know what was between him and the half-breed before all
this happened. I don’t. Perley never said. But day after day as he and
Lee pounded up and down on the local through the mountains, he began to
grow silent and moody.

Lee, young Lee then, was the only one that could get anywhere near the
inside of his vest. He took to Lee, and Lee liked him; but even Lee
had his limits when it came to confidences. There was lots Perley never
opened his lips about. No, I don’t know as it makes much difference now.

Lee was the first of the two to hear that Faro Clancy was “loose.”

“It looks to me like a bad business,” he said, after telling Perley the
news.

Perley’s eyes just narrowed a little. “It looks more like a bad shot, a
rotten bad shot,” he answered evenly.

“That, if you like,” returned Lee; “but there’ll be more to follow.”

“One would think you _knew_ Clancy,” said Perley, cool as ever.

Lee was anxious. Call it presentiment or what you like, from that moment
the thing was on his nerves. Perley had been pretty good to him; had
made things a heap easier for the young fellow, green and raw as he was,
in a hundred different ways. Things like that mean something.

“Look here, Perley,” said he, “I’ve heard some talk, and I know there’s
something behind all this between you and that devil. I’m not asking for
confidences----”

Perley cut him short, and caught him almost angrily by the shoulder.
“Don’t meddle!” he snapped. “Let it drop. _You_ don’t count in this,
whatever happens. Your being at the Bend that day was an accident.
What’s between me and Clancy concerns ourselves. You don’t count. Unless
you’re looking for another run besides the local, just remember that and
don’t meddle.”

That was all. Lee never mentioned it to Perley again. Perley was right,
wasn’t he? I told you there were three men in this story, but that one
of them didn’t count. No, Lee didn’t count. Why should he?

What did he have to do with it? Perley was right, I leave it to you.

You’ve been over the division, and you know the Devil’s Slide just west
of the Gap from here. You know the grade--the worst in the mountains.
The trains crawl up at the pace a man could walk, because they can’t go
any faster; and they crawl down just as slowly, because they don’t dare
do anything else.

I’ve seen the passengers get off the observation and walk--so have you.
Done it yourself probably? I thought so. Extra engine on the rear end to
push or hold back, and one in the middle if the train’s heavy, to keep
it from breaking apart--lessens the drawbar pull, you know. They’re
tunneling now to do away with that particular grade, but that’s nothing
to do with this story, nor, for that matter, with the night, some six
weeks after that business at the Bend, when the local, eastbound, was
climbing the Devil’s Slide.

It was a dirty night outside the caboose. A storm had been racketing
through the mountains all afternoon, and by the time it got dark it was
a howling gale, raining hard enough to float the ties.

Lee’s place was on the front end, going up that bit of track, but he
wasn’t well that night, and the other brakeman was doing his snatch.
Touch of mountain fever, or something, nothing serious; just enough
to make him shiver and boil alternately over the little stove in the
caboose, sitting with his back to the door. Up above him in the cupola,
holding down the swivel chair where he could watch the train--that is,
see his engine fling up the sparks, for that’s about all he could see, I
guess--was Perley.

The car was swinging like a hammock with the heave and strain of the
big pusher coupled right behind it--it acts queer, that does. Every time
I’ve felt it I’ve always thought of a cat and a mouse. It’s like the
engine had the caboose by the scruff and was trying to shake the life
out of it.

You’ve felt it a little if you’ve ever been in the rear Pullman going
up--the difference is that a caboose hasn’t any springs to speak of, you
understand? Racket enough to raise the dead. You couldn’t hear yourself
think. Not so much from the noise of the train or the storm, but from
the booming roar of the trailer’s exhaust--like she was trying to cough
her boiler tubes out every time the valves slid.

Now, there’s just one more thing I want you to get. The engine crew of
a pusher naturally can’t see any track, road-bed, or anything of that
kind, and it isn’t their business to, either. All they watch is the
leader and the intermediate, if there is one. Their headlight plays
along over a few cars if it’s high enough, or loses itself on the top of
the door or the roof of the caboose if it isn’t, understand?

Lee didn’t hear anything. He was sitting bent over with his head between
his hands, and it was the current of air from the opening door that made
him twist around and look up, thinking it had blown open. I don’t
know as you’d call him a coward; maybe yes, maybe no; anyway, he was a
white-faced, terrified man that next instant, as he started up from his
chair. He never got to his feet. Instead, he shut up like a jackknife,
and went down to the floor with a blow over the head from a revolver
butt that knocked him senseless.

It all happened in a second, but in that second Lee got it with more
vividness than a thousand hours would have given him--the great, hulking
figure, the water trickling to the floor in little pools from the
dripping clothes, the sickly pallor of the face, the thin new skin of
the livid scar across the cheek, the sightless eye--Clancy.

Lee couldn’t have lain unconscious more than twenty minutes, perhaps
it was only fifteen, for it takes about forty minutes to climb the
four miles of the Slide, you see. Call it twenty, that allows for what
happened before and what happened after. When he came to his senses the
light in the bracket lamp was out; blown out by the draft, for the door
was open. A stray beam or two from the pusher’s headlight filled the
caboose with an uncertain, wavering light--from the jolt and swing, you
know, though Lee thought at first it was his head.

He tried to get up, but he couldn’t move. He was bound hand and foot,
laid out on the flat of his back--helpless. For a minute he was too
dazed to understand, then he remembered--Clancy. He stared up into the
cupola above him. The swivel chair was empty--Perley had gone.

The car trucks were beating a steady _clack, clack-clack_, as they
pounded the fishplates; from behind came the full, deep-chested thunder
of the trailer’s exhaust; around, the hundred noises of the creaking,
groaning, swaying car; without, the patter of rain, the wail of the
wind. But over it all, low though it was, came a sound that sent a chill
to Lee’s heart.

It was like a breathless moan, do you understand? That was the inhuman
part of it; it was breathless--there was no break--a sort of sobbing
monotone. It came from behind him. Lee shivered as he listened, and
then his heart began to pound as though it would burst. He was
afraid--_afraid_. Premonition, perhaps; I don’t know. He rolled himself
over on his side, and he saw----

How can I tell it! A figure was crouched against the side of the car in
a half-sitting posture, the face was red--red with the blood that
was flowing from the forehead. Lee shrieked aloud in terror. “Perley!
Perley!” Then he grew sick with the horror that was on him. Worse than
murder the half-breed had threatened--and he had kept his word. Perley
had been scalped!

Lee’s cry must have reached the poor wretch’s consciousness, for he
staggered to his feet, sweeping his eyes clear with both hands. Lee,
sick to the depths of his soul, the sweat breaking out in great, cold
drops upon his forehead, fought like a maniac with his bonds.

Perley never spoke, never paid any attention to Lee--he was past all
that--but his brain, at least, was still capable of coherent impression.
It must have been--to account for what he did. Right in front of him, as
he hung there tottering and swaying, was a broken bit of mirror tacked
up on the side of the car. He was staring into it.

His moaning stopped. The shock of his own awful horror must have
revolted, shaken his very being. His hand groped weakly, subconsciously
perhaps, for his pocket--his revolver--the end.

Again Lee shrieked as he struggled to free himself, and then, as Perley
fired, he burst out into a peal of wild, discordant laughter. His mind
was giving way. He began to gibber like a madman--that’s the way they
found him--with Perley’s body pitched full across his chest.

Don’t ask me. I told you Perley was a little, undersized, sawed-off man.
I don’t know, do I? The halfbreed, physically, could have handled him
like a baby, once he caught him unawares. That’s all I know.

They buried Perley down at Big Cloud; and they buried Clancy where the
posse dropped him, drilled full of holes. That’s the story.

Lee? Charlie Lee? Why, he doesn’t count, does he? He had nothing to do
with it. Well, if you’re interested in him I’ll tell you. His college
diploma never did him any good. Once he got better and out of the
hospital, he took to drinking periodically--_hard_. Between times
straight as a string, you understand, for six weeks say, then off again.
That was fifteen years ago, and he’s done it ever since. The doctors
said that blow on the head unsettled him, skull splinter, or something
like that; but medicine’s not an exact science. The doctors were wrong.
The trouble was deeper than the skull--it was in his soul. Lee drank
to save himself from the madhouse--I told you, didn’t I, that some men
drink because they have to?

Carleton, the super, and the men before Carleton, understood what the
doctors didn’t, so Lee’s working for the railroad yet. Not braking--he’s
not fit for that, but he keeps the job they gave him--and it’s kept for
him--when he gets back after his spells. I------there’s the foreman
shouting for me. Sorry, but I’ll have to go. “If you’re going out on
Number One she’s just coming down the gorge now. Good night, sir.”

I lost him in the shadows of the big mogul on the pit behind me. Then I
turned and walked slowly out of the roundhouse, over the turntable, and
across the tracks to the station platform. Number One’s mellow chime
floated down from the gorge, then the flare of the electric headlight,
and the rumble of the train. And in quick, fierce tempo, the beating,
drumming trucks caught up the name I had heard the foreman shout, and
rang it over and over again in my ears:

“Oh-you-Lee! Charlie-Lee! Lee! Charlie-Lee--Lee!”

XI--“WHERE’S HAGGERTY?”

“The Hill Division was proud enough over it, of course, for Carleton was
its old chief; but, none the less, it read General Order Number 38 with
dismay and misgiving.

“T. J. Hale,” the G. O. ran, “is hereby appointed Superintendent of
the Hill Division, with headquarters at Big Cloud, vice H. B. Carleton
promoted to General Manager of the System.”

“Now who in the double-blanked, blankety-blanked blazes is Hale?”
 demanded the roundhouse and the engine crews.

“Carleton was all to the good, h’m?--what!” growled the dispatchers.

The train crews swung their lanterns with a defiant air, and the
passenger conductors juggled their punches around their little fingers,
smiling a superior smile to themselves. Hale might be a good, man,
perhaps he was, but Carleton was--“Royal” Carleton. “I guess he’ll get
along all right with us, _but_ he don’t want to get fresh, that’s all.
Where’d he come from, h’m?”

That question, at first, no one seemed able to answer. The general
impression was that the Transcontinental had got him from some Eastern
road. Certainly he was a new man, bran new, to the System.

And then the renown of one Haggerty, who was braking on a passenger
local, became great, and, in consequence, the displeasure of the
Division increased.

Said Haggerty: “When I was on the Penn five years back, this fellow Hale
was assistant super. I knew him well. You wanter look out for him, you
can take my little word for that. He’s a holy terror, an’ that’s a fact.
Got any chewin’?”

Haggerty got his chewing, being an egregious liar; and Hale got a
damaged reputation for the same reason.

But Haggerty got more than his chewing--and he had not long to wait. On
the day that the new super was expected, Haggerty, on passenger local
Number Seven, got into Big Cloud about noon, and, taking advantage
of the ten-minute wait for refreshments, straddled a stool at the
lunch-counter. Between bites, he fired questions at Spence the
dispatcher, who was bolting his mid-day meal.

“Hale come yet?” he demanded.

“Haven’t seen him,” replied Spence.

“When d’ye expect him?” persisted Haggerty.

“I don’t know,” Spence answered.

“Oh, don’t be so blasted close!” snapped Haggerty. “You ain’t givin’
away any weighty secret if you let out what time his special ‘ll be
along, I suppose.”

“I haven’t heard of any special,” said Spence. “Say, Haggerty, they
tell me Hale’s an old friend of yours, h’m? No wonder you’re anxious.
I forgot about that. As soon as I get word about him, I’ll wire up the
line to you so’s you can jump your train, come back on a hand-car, and
be here on the platform to meet him.”

“You go to blazes!” retorted Haggerty, and scowled across the counter
at an inoffensive looking little fellow who had taken the liberty of
smiling at the dispatcher’s words.

At Haggerty’s look, the smile disappeared in a cup of coffee raised
hastily to the lips. “Huh!” snorted Haggerty, by way of driving home
to the other the audacity and temerity of his act, and likewise the
inadvisability of repeating it. Haggerty was galled. Once before that
morning he had been obliged to relegate this insignificant, squint,
eye-glassed individual, who had persisted in riding on the platform, to
a proper sense of submission. And the method employed had been no more
delicate a one than that of jerking the man bodily into the car by the
collar of his coat. “Huh!” he repeated, with rising inflexion.

“No, Haggerty,” went on Spence pleasantly, “Don’t you worry. I won’t
fail you. When the super steps off the train, and the first words he
says is, ‘Where’s Haggerty?’ and you’re not here to respond in kind I
can plainly see there’ll be doings. Oh, no, don’t you fret, I’ll not
throw you down on anything like that----‘twouldn’t be wise for us,
that’s got to live with him, to rile him up at the outset! No, it
certainly wouldn’t, what?”

“You go bite on a brake-shoe, you’re too sharp to be munchin’
doughnuts,” snarled Haggerty. And, swinging himself from his seat, he
went back to his train.

An hour later when he reached Elk River, the end of his run, he found a
telegram waiting for him from Spence. He sucked in his under lip as he
read it.

“You sly joker,” wired the dispatcher, “why didn’t you tell us that your
friend came up with you on Number Seven?”

Haggerty pushed his cap to the back of his head, and swore softly under
his breath. He began to go over in his mind the passengers that had been
aboard the train when they ran into Big Cloud. No one individual seemed
to stand out carded and waybilled as the new super.

Then an idea struck Haggerty, and he climbed into the rear coach where
Berkely, his conductor, was making up his report sheets.

“Say, Jim,” said Haggerty, “was there any passes into Big Cloud this
mornin’?”

Berkely looked up suspiciously. “You mind your own business, an’ you’ll
get along better!” he snapped.

“Oh, punk!” returned Haggerty. “My count’s the same as your’n, ain’t it?
What’s the matter with you, then? Honest, Jim, I wanter know. Was there
any passes?”

“No, there wasn’t,” grunted Berkely, cooling down a little.

“Well, then, you might have said so at first, instead of jumpin’ a
fellow for nothin’,” said Haggerty, and went out of the car to hang
meditatively over the handrail and spit reflectively at the ties.

“Now wouldn’t that sting you?” he demanded of the universe in general.
“Wouldn’t that sting you? Who ever heard of a new super comin’ on the
job ridin’ a local on a _ticket!_ An’ me askin’ when he was goin’ to
turn up. Oh, yes, it sure would sting you! That funny boy Spence ‘ll pass
this along an’--oh, punk! I ain’t sure it wouldn’t have been better if
I’d kept my mouth shut about knowin’ Hale, but who’d ever thought he’d
come up on _my_ train! How was I to know, h’m?” And during all that
afternoon’s layup at Elk River, Haggerty pondered the matter. He
continued to ponder it as they pulled out for the return trip in the
evening, and he was still pondering it when they whistled for Big Cloud.

There was no moon up that night, and it was pretty dark as they ran in.
Haggerty, with his lantern, was standing on the rear end. As the train
slowed itself to a halt, a man came tearing down the station platform at
a run.

“Where’s Haggerty?” he called breathlessly. “Where’s----”

“Here,” said Haggerty promptly, leaning out over the steps and showing
his light. “What d’ye want?”

“Oh, all right,” said the man. “I’ll be back--” and he disappeared in
the shadow of the station.

“He acts like he was nutty,” muttered Haggerty, and swung himself off
the steps.

But, though Haggerty waited, the man did not come back, and he had not
come back when the train began to roll out of the station, and Haggerty
was again on the rear platform of the car. Then, just as his hand
reached out to open the door, he stopped and started suddenly as though
he had been stung.

A voice came out of the darkness from the other side of the track over
by the roundhouse. “Where’s Haggerty?” it demanded anxiously.

Then Haggerty tumbled, and his face went red with rage. He leaned far
out over the rail, and, forgetful that the pantomime was lost in the
darkness, shook his clinched fist in the direction from whence the voice
had come.

“You go to he-ee-ll-lll!” he bawled, the exclamation shaken into
syllables by reason of the car wheels jolting over the siding switches
at that precise moment. And then, his senses being very acute, from
where the light shone in the dispatcher’s window he-thought he heard,
above the momentarily increasing rattle of the train, a laugh--a laugh
that produced anything but a quieting effect on his already outraged
sensibilities.

Now Haggerty was not the nature of those who can pass lightly over a
joke at their own expense, especially if that joke be too prolonged and
carries with it a hint of underlying venom. Therefore, as the “one on
Haggerty” spread over the division, and scarcely an hour of the day
passed that the cry “Where’s Haggerty?” did not reach his ears, he
began to sulk and treasure up his injury. The division was rubbing it in
pretty hard. But the curious part of it all was that his bitterness
was not directed against himself who was the direct cause of his
discomfiture, nor against Spence who was the indirect cause, but against
Hale, who was no cause at all.

Just once had Haggerty seen the superintendent. Hale was pointed out to
him on the platform at Big Cloud, and Haggerty had ducked hastily back
inside his train. Hale was the inoffensive little fellow he had treated
with such scant courtesy at the lunch-counter, the insignificant,
squint-eye-glassed individual he had hauled from the car platform by
the coat collar! When Haggerty’s mingled feelings of perturbation and
amazement permitted him any speech at all, it was rather incoherent.

“_That_--the runt!” he gasped, and subsided into an empty seat.

And in this inelegant, but pithy, summing up of the capacity and
dimensions of the new official the division was with him to the last
section hand. Him--a railroad man! The Hill Division remembered
“Royal” Carleton and was ashamed, and it rankled for the shame that it
considered had been put upon it. Out of it all, Haggerty was the only
thing of saving grace! So upon Haggerty they loosened, behind the
humor, some of their bitterness. Haggerty became the safety valve of the
division.

A month had gone by and Hale had lived well up to what his appearance
had led them to expect. He might have been an automaton for all the
signs of life that emanated from his office. Just routine, the routine
business, routine, that was all. The disquiet and unrest that brooded
over the division became contempt--the kind of contempt that made the
car-tinks put on airs, and in their heart of hearts figure themselves
better railroad men than he who sat over them in supreme authority.

Even Haggerty no longer ducked out of sight when circumstances required
that he should breathe the same air as his superior. Haggerty had
acquired a swagger; also, he now voiced his opinion, his cordially
poor opinion, of Mr. Hale without restraint and with no check upon his
tongue.

And then Haggerty got a shock. It was imparted by Spence.

“Got it from Hale’s clerk last night,” said the dispatcher. “He’s going
to run an inspection special over the division, and he’s picked out the
fag end of all things for the crew. He picked you first, Haggerty.”

“Aw, forget it!” growled Haggerty, with a scowl.

“I think there’s something behind it, though,” Spence went on, his voice
modulated confidentially. “Between you and me, Haggerty, the inspection
trip is a bluff.”

Haggerty pricked up his ears. “How’s that?” he demanded.

“Well,” said Spence serenely, backing to a safe distance, “I think he’s
hurt at the way you’ve cut him since he’s been here. He’s pining for
your company, and----”

Haggerty sprang to his feet from the baggage truck on which he had been
seated, and shook his fist frantically at the fast retreating figure. He
was still gesticulating fiercely and muttering savagely to himself when
the window in the dispatcher’s room overhead opened softly, and Spence
stuck out his head.

“Hey, there, Haggerty,” he called, “quit practising that deaf and dumb
alphabet. You haven’t got any time to waste. You want to run along and
get the missus to press out a pair of panties, and iron a boiled shirt
for you. You’ll get your orders in the morning.”

“Come down for one minute,” choked Haggerty, his rage fanned to a white
heat by the knowledge of his own impotence, for Spence, as he well knew,
was safely entrenched behind locked doors. “Just one minute, an’ I’ll
make your face look like it had never been born. I will that!”

“Haggerty,” said Spence in an injured tone, as the window closed, “you
are disgruntled.”

But Haggerty was to be still more disgruntled, for the next morning,
true to Spence’s words, he found himself assigned to Inspection Special
Number Eighty-nine. Haggerty was not happy; but he boarded the forward
car, as they pulled out for the mountains with the mental resolution
that he would keep out of the super’s way.

Resolutions, however, like many other things, are sometimes rudely
upset in the face of conditions that are not taken into account in the
reckoning. They had been running at a forty-mile clip, and were about
into the yard at Coyote Bend, when Haggerty nearly went to the floor as
the “air” came on with a sudden rush, and the train came jerking to a
halt like a bucking bronco. The whistle was going like mad for the block
ahead. Haggerty grabbed his red flag, dropped to the ground, and ran
back past the super’s car to take his distance.

Up ahead, he could see the tail end of a freight disappearing around the
bend, crawling into safety on the siding. Nothing very interesting about
that, somebody would get Tokio for laying out the Special, he supposed.
Maybe the freight had had a breakdown, and was off schedule making the
Bend. Personally, Haggerty did not care. It made very little difference
to him. He picked up a handful of stones, and began to plug them at the
nearest telegraph pole. Suddenly he changed the direction of his shots,
and let fly with all his might at a gopher he had spotted squatting in
front of his hole.

“Holy Mac!” he ejaculated in unbounded astonishment. “I believe I hit
the cuss!”--and he went back to see.

Just as he got down the embankment, the Special began to whistle for
her flag, “one--two--three--four,” and Haggerty, scrambling to the track
again, began to run. But fast as he ran, he had only covered about half
the distance when the train began to move. It was, therefore, a very
breathless and panting Haggerty who just managed to grab the rail of the
rear car--the super’s car!

There was nothing for it but to pass through and Haggerty, with his
acquired swagger, started. The super was alone in the rear compartment,
seated at a table, a mass of papers before him. Haggerty was
industriously rolling up his flag as he passed along.

“Haggerty!”

Haggerty stopped and swung around at the sound of his name.