The Octopus : A Story of California

At last everything had been bought, all arrangements made, Hilma’s trunks packed with her new dresses, and the tickets to Bonneville bought.

“We’ll go by the Overland, by Jingo,” declared Annixter across the table to his wife, at their last meal in the hotel where they had been stopping; “no way trains or locals for us, hey?”

“But we reach Bonneville at SUCH an hour,” protested Hilma. “Five in the morning!”

“Never mind,” he declared, “we’ll go home in PULLMAN’S, Hilma. I’m not going to have any of those slobs in Bonneville say I didn’t know how to do the thing in style, and we’ll have Vacca meet us with the team. No, sir, it is Pullman’s or nothing. When it comes to buying furniture, I don’t shine, perhaps, but I know what’s due my wife.”

He was obdurate, and late one afternoon the couple boarded the Transcontinental (the crack Overland Flyer of the Pacific and Southwestern) at the Oakland mole. Only Hilma’s parents were there to say good-bye. Annixter knew that Magnus and Osterman were in the city, but he had laid his plans to elude them. Magnus, he could trust to be dignified, but that goat Osterman, one could never tell what he would do next. He did not propose to start his journey home in a shower of rice. Annixter marched down the line of cars, his hands encumbered with wicker telescope baskets, satchels, and valises, his tickets in his mouth, his hat on wrong side foremost, Hilma and her parents hurrying on behind him, trying to keep up. Annixter was in a turmoil of nerves lest something should go wrong; catching a train was always for him a little crisis. He rushed ahead so furiously that when he had found his Pullman he had lost his party. He set down his valises to mark the place and charged back along the platform, waving his arms.

“Come on,” he cried, when, at length, he espied the others. “We’ve no more time.”

He shouldered and urged them forward to where he had set his valises, only to find one of them gone. Instantly he raised an outcry. Aha, a fine way to treat passengers! There was P. and S. W. management for you. He would, by the Lord, he would—but the porter appeared in the vestibule of the car to placate him. He had already taken his valises inside.

Annixter would not permit Hilma’s parents to board the car, declaring that the train might pull out any moment. So he and his wife, following the porter down the narrow passage by the stateroom, took their places and, raising the window, leaned out to say good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Tree. These latter would not return to Quien Sabe. Old man Tree had found a business chance awaiting him in the matter of supplying his relative’s hotel with dairy products. But Bonneville was not too far from San Francisco; the separation was by no means final.

The porters began taking up the steps that stood by the vestibule of each sleeping-car.

“Well, have a good time, daughter,” observed her father; “and come up to see us whenever you can.”

From beyond the enclosure of the depot’s reverberating roof came the measured clang of a bell.

“I guess we’re off,” cried Annixter. “Good-bye, Mrs. Tree.”

“Remember your promise, Hilma,” her mother hastened to exclaim, “to write every Sunday afternoon.”

There came a prolonged creaking and groan of straining wood and iron work, all along the length of the train. They all began to cry their good-byes at once. The train stirred, moved forward, and gathering slow headway, rolled slowly out into the sunlight. Hilma leaned out of the window and as long as she could keep her mother in sight waved her handkerchief. Then at length she sat back in her seat and looked at her husband.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” echoed Annixter, “happy?” for the tears rose in her eyes.

She nodded energetically, smiling at him bravely.

“You look a little pale,” he declared, frowning uneasily; “feel well?”

“Pretty well.”

Promptly he was seized with uneasiness. “But not ALL well, hey? Is that it?”

It was true that Hilma had felt a faint tremour of seasickness on the ferry-boat coming from the city to the Oakland mole. No doubt a little nausea yet remained with her. But Annixter refused to accept this explanation. He was distressed beyond expression.

“Now you’re going to be sick,” he cried anxiously.

“No, no,” she protested, “not a bit.”

“But you said you didn’t feel very well. Where is it you feel sick?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sick. Oh, dear me, why will you bother?”

“Headache?”

“Not the least.”

“You feel tired, then. That’s it. No wonder, the way rushed you ‘round to-day.”

“Dear, I’m NOT tired, and I’m NOT sick, and I’m all RIGHT.”

“No, no; I can tell. I think we’d best have the berth made up and you lie down.”

“That would be perfectly ridiculous.”

“Well, where is it you feel sick? Show me; put your hand on the place. Want to eat something?”

With elaborate minuteness, he cross-questioned her, refusing to let the subject drop, protesting that she had dark circles under her eyes; that she had grown thinner.

“Wonder if there’s a doctor on board,” he murmured, looking uncertainly about the car. “Let me see your tongue. I know—a little whiskey is what you want, that and some pru–”

“No, no, NO,” she exclaimed. “I’m as well as I ever was in all my life. Look at me. Now, tell me, do l look likee a sick lady?”

He scrutinised her face distressfully.

“Now, don’t I look the picture of health?” she challenged.

“In a way you do,” he began, “and then again–”

Hilma beat a tattoo with her heels upon the floor, shutting her fists, the thumbs tucked inside. She closed her eyes, shaking her head energetically.

“I won’t listen, I won’t listen, I won’t listen,” she cried.

“But, just the same–”

“Gibble—gibble—gibble,” she mocked. “I won’t Listen, I won’t listen.” She put a hand over his mouth. “Look, here’s the dining-car waiter, and the first call for supper, and your wife is hungry.”

They went forward and had supper in the diner, while the long train, now out upon the main line, settled itself to its pace, the prolonged, even gallop that it would hold for the better part of the week, spinning out the miles as a cotton spinner spins thread.

It was already dark when Antioch was left behind. Abruptly the sunset appeared to wheel in the sky and readjusted itself to the right of the track behind Mount Diablo, here visible almost to its base. The train had turned southward. Neroly was passed, then Brentwood, then Byron. In the gathering dusk, mountains began to build themselves up on either hand, far off, blocking the horizon. The train shot forward, roaring. Between the mountains the land lay level, cut up into farms, ranches. These continually grew larger; growing wheat began to appear, billowing in the wind of the train’s passage. The mountains grew higher, the land richer, and by the time the moon rose, the train was well into the northernmost limits of the valley of the San Joaquin.

Annixter had engaged an entire section, and after he and his wife went to bed had the porter close the upper berth. Hilma sat up in bed to say her prayers, both hands over her face, and then kissing Annixter good-night, went to sleep with the directness of a little child, holding his hand in both her own.

Annixter, who never could sleep on the train, dozed and tossed and fretted for hours, consulting his watch and time-table whenever there was a stop; twice he rose to get a drink of ice water, and between whiles was forever sitting up in the narrow berth, stretching himself and yawning, murmuring with uncertain relevance:

“Oh, Lord! Oh-h-h LORD!”

There were some dozen other passengers in the car—a lady with three children, a group of school-teachers, a couple of drummers, a stout gentleman with whiskers, and a well-dressed young man in a plaid travelling cap, whom Annixter had observed before supper time reading Daudet’s “Tartarin” in the French.

But by nine o’clock, all these people were in their berths. Occasionally, above the rhythmic rumble of the wheels, Annixter could hear one of the lady’s children fidgeting and complaining. The stout gentleman snored monotonously in two notes, one a rasping bass, the other a prolonged treble. At intervals, a brakeman or the passenger conductor pushed down the aisle, between the curtains, his red and white lamp over his arm. Looking out into the car Annixter saw in an end section where the berths had not been made up, the porter, in his white duck coat, dozing, his mouth wide open, his head on his shoulder.

The hours passed. Midnight came and went. Annixter, checking off the stations, noted their passage of Modesto, Merced, and Madeira. Then, after another broken nap, he lost count. He wondered where they were. Had they reached Fresno yet? Raising the window curtain, he made a shade with both hands on either side of his face and looked out. The night was thick, dark, clouded over. A fine rain was falling, leaving horizontal streaks on the glass of the outside window. Only the faintest grey blur indicated the sky. Everything else was impenetrable blackness.

“I think sure we must have passed Fresno,” he muttered. He looked at his watch. It was about half-past three. “If we have passed Fresno,” he said to himself, “I’d better wake the little girl pretty soon. She’ll need about an hour to dress. Better find out for sure.”

He drew on his trousers and shoes, got into his coat, and stepped out into the aisle. In the seat that had been occupied by the porter, the Pullman conductor, his cash box and car-schedules before him, was checking up his berths, a blue pencil behind his ear.

“What’s the next stop, Captain?” inquired Annixter, coming up. “Have we reached Fresno yet?”

“Just passed it,” the other responded, looking at Annixter over his spectacles.

“What’s the next stop?”

“Goshen. We will be there in about forty-five minutes.”

“Fair black night, isn’t it?”

“Black as a pocket. Let’s see, you’re the party in upper and lower 9.”

Annixter caught at the back of the nearest seat, just in time to prevent a fall, and the conductor’s cash box was shunted off the surface of the plush seat and came clanking to the floor. The Pintsch lights overhead vibrated with blinding rapidity in the long, sliding jar that ran through the train from end to end, and the momentum of its speed suddenly decreasing, all but pitched the conductor from his seat. A hideous ear-splitting rasp made itself heard from the clamped-down Westinghouse gear underneath, and Annixter knew that the wheels had ceased to revolve and that the train was sliding forward upon the motionless flanges.

“Hello, hello,” he exclaimed, “what’s all up now?”

“Emergency brakes,” declared the conductor, catching up his cash box and thrusting his papers and tickets into it. “Nothing much; probably a cow on the track.”

He disappeared, carrying his lantern with him.

But the other passengers, all but the stout gentleman, were awake; heads were thrust from out the curtains, and Annixter, hurrying back to Hilma, was assailed by all manner of questions.

“What was that?”

“Anything wrong?”

“What’s up, anyways?”

Hilma was just waking as Annixter pushed the curtain aside.

“Oh, I was so frightened. What’s the matter, dear?” she exclaimed.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Only the emergency brakes. Just a cow on the track, I guess. Don’t get scared. It isn’t anything.”

But with a final shriek of the Westinghouse appliance, the train came to a definite halt.

At once the silence was absolute. The ears, still numb with the long-continued roar of wheels and clashing iron, at first refused to register correctly the smaller noises of the surroundings. Voices came from the other end of the car, strange and unfamiliar, as though heard at a great distance across the water. The stillness of the night outside was so profound that the rain, dripping from the car roof upon the road-bed underneath, was as distinct as the ticking of a clock.

“Well, we’ve sure stopped,” observed one of the drummers.

“What is it?” asked Hilma again. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?”

“Sure,” said Annixter. Outside, underneath their window, they heard the sound of hurried footsteps crushing into the clinkers by the side of the ties. They passed on, and Annixter heard some one in the distance shout:

“Yes, on the other side.”

Then the door at the end of their car opened and a brakeman with a red beard ran down the aisle and out upon the platform in front. The forward door closed. Everything was quiet again. In the stillness the fat gentleman’s snores made themselves heard once more.

The minutes passed; nothing stirred. There was no sound but the dripping rain. The line of cars lay immobilised and inert under the night. One of the drummers, having stepped outside on the platform for a look around, returned, saying:

“There sure isn’t any station anywheres about and no siding. Bet you they have had an accident of some kind.”

“Ask the porter.”

“I did. He don’t know.”

“Maybe they stopped to take on wood or water, or something.”

“Well, they wouldn’t use the emergency brakes for that, would they? Why, this train stopped almost in her own length. Pretty near slung me out the berth. Those were the emergency brakes. I heard some one say so.”

From far out towards the front of the train, near the locomotive, came the sharp, incisive report of a revolver; then two more almost simultaneously; then, after a long interval, a fourth.

“Say, that’s SHOOTING. By God, boys, they’re shooting. Say, this is a hold-up.”

Instantly a white-hot excitement flared from end to end of the car. Incredibly sinister, heard thus in the night, and in the rain, mysterious, fearful, those four pistol shots started confusion from out the sense of security like a frightened rabbit hunted from her burrow. Wide-eyed, the passengers of the car looked into each other’s faces. It had come to them at last, this, they had so often read about. Now they were to see the real thing, now they were to face actuality, face this danger of the night, leaping in from out the blackness of the roadside, masked, armed, ready to kill. They were facing it now. They were held up.

Hilma said nothing, only catching Annixter’s hand, looking squarely into his eyes.

“Steady, little girl,” he said. “They can’t hurt you. I won’t leave you. By the Lord,” he suddenly exclaimed, his excitement getting the better of him for a moment. “By the Lord, it’s a hold-up.”

The school-teachers were in the aisle of the car, in night gown, wrapper, and dressing sack, huddled together like sheep, holding on to each other, looking to the men, silently appealing for protection. Two of them were weeping, white to the lips.

“Oh, oh, oh, it’s terrible. Oh, if they only won’t hurt me.”

But the lady with the children looked out from her berth, smiled reassuringly, and said:

“I’m not a bit frightened. They won’t do anything to us if we keep quiet. I’ve my watch and jewelry all ready for them in my little black bag, see?”

She exhibited it to the passengers. Her children were all awake. They were quiet, looking about them with eager faces, interested and amused at this surprise. In his berth, the fat gentleman with whiskers snored profoundly.

“Say, I’m going out there,” suddenly declared one of the drummers, flourishing a pocket revolver.

His friend caught his arm.

“Don’t make a fool of yourself, Max,” he said.

“They won’t come near us,” observed the well-dressed young man; “they are after the Wells-Fargo box and the registered mail. You won’t do any good out there.”

But the other loudly protested. No; he was going out. He didn’t propose to be buncoed without a fight. He wasn’t any coward.

“Well, you don’t go, that’s all,” said his friend, angrily. “There’s women and children in this car. You ain’t going to draw the fire here.”

“Well, that’s to be thought of,” said the other, allowing himself to be pacified, but still holding his pistol.

“Don’t let him open that window,” cried Annixter sharply from his place by Hilma’s side, for the drummer had made as if to open the sash in one of the sections that had not been made up.

“Sure, that’s right,” said the others. “Don’t open any windows. Keep your head in. You’ll get us all shot if you aren’t careful.”

However, the drummer had got the window up and had leaned out before the others could interfere and draw him away.

“Say, by jove,” he shouted, as he turned back to the car, “our engine’s gone. We’re standing on a curve and you can see the end of the train. She’s gone, I tell you. Well, look for yourself.”

In spite of their precautions, one after another, his friends looked out. Sure enough, the train was without a locomotive.

“They’ve done it so we can’t get away,” vociferated the drummer with the pistol. “Now, by jiminy-Christmas, they’ll come through the cars and stand us up. They’ll be in here in a minute. LORD! WHAT WAS THAT?”

From far away up the track, apparently some half-mile ahead of the train, came the sound of a heavy explosion. The windows of the car vibrated with it.

“Shooting again.”

“That isn’t shooting,” exclaimed Annixter. “They’ve pulled the express and mail car on ahead with the engine and now they are dynamiting her open.”

“That must be it. Yes, sure, that’s just what they are doing.”

The forward door of the car opened and closed and the school-teachers shrieked and cowered. The drummer with the revolver faced about, his eyes bulging. However, it was only the train conductor, hatless, his lantern in his hand. He was soaked with rain. He appeared in the aisle.

“Is there a doctor in this car?” he asked.

Promptly the passengers surrounded him, voluble with questions. But he was in a bad temper.

“I don’t know anything more than you,” he shouted angrily. “It was a hold-up. I guess you know that, don’t you? Well, what more do you want to know? I ain’t got time to fool around. They cut off our express car and have cracked it open, and they shot one of our train crew, that’s all, and I want a doctor.”

“Did they shoot him—kill him, do you mean?”

“Is he hurt bad?”

“Did the men get away?”

“Oh, shut up, will you all?” exclaimed the conductor.

“What do I know? Is there a DOCTOR in this car, that’s what I want to know?”

The well-dressed young man stepped forward.

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Well, come along then,” returned the conductor, in a surly voice, “and the passengers in this car,” he added, turning back at the door and nodding his head menacingly, “will go back to bed and STAY there. It’s all over and there’s nothing to see.”

He went out, followed by the young doctor.

Then ensued an interminable period of silence. The entire train seemed deserted. Helpless, bereft of its engine, a huge, decapitated monster it lay, half-way around a curve, rained upon, abandoned.

There was more fear in this last condition of affairs, more terror in the idea of this prolonged line of sleepers, with their nickelled fittings, their plate glass, their upholstery, vestibules, and the like, loaded down with people, lost and forgotten in the night and the rain, than there had been when the actual danger threatened.

What was to become of them now? Who was there to help them? Their engine was gone; they were helpless. What next was to happen?

Nobody came near the car. Even the porter had disappeared. The wait seemed endless, and the persistent snoring of the whiskered gentleman rasped the nerves like the scrape of a file.

“Well, how long are we going to stick here now?” began one of the drummers. “Wonder if they hurt the engine with their dynamite?”

“Oh, I know they will come through the car and rob us,” wailed the school-teachers.

The lady with the little children went back to bed, and Annixter, assured that the trouble was over, did likewise. But nobody slept. From berth to berth came the sound of suppressed voices talking it all over, formulating conjectures. Certain points seemed to be settled upon, no one knew how, as indisputable. The highwaymen had been four in number and had stopped the train by pulling the bell cord. A brakeman had attempted to interfere and had been shot. The robbers had been on the train all the way from San Francisco. The drummer named Max remembered to have seen four “suspicious-looking characters” in the smoking-car at Lathrop, and had intended to speak to the conductor about them. This drummer had been in a hold-up before, and told the story of it over and over again.

At last, after what seemed to have been an hour’s delay, and when the dawn had already begun to show in the east, the locomotive backed on to the train again with a reverberating jar that ran from car to car. At the jolting, the school-teachers screamed in chorus, and the whiskered gentleman stopped snoring and thrust his head from his curtains, blinking at the Pintsch lights. It appeared that he was an Englishman.

“I say,” he asked of the drummer named Max, “I say, my friend, what place is this?”

The others roared with derision.

“We were HELD UP, sir, that’s what we were. We were held up and you slept through it all. You missed the show of your life.”

The gentleman fixed the group with a prolonged gaze. He said never a word, but little by little he was convinced that the drummers told the truth. All at once he grew wrathful, his face purpling. He withdrew his head angrily, buttoning his curtains together in a fury. The cause of his rage was inexplicable, but they could hear him resettling himself upon his pillows with exasperated movements of his head and shoulders. In a few moments the deep bass and shrill treble of his snoring once more sounded through the car.

At last the train got under way again, with useless warning blasts of the engine’s whistle. In a few moments it was tearing away through the dawn at a wonderful speed, rocking around curves, roaring across culverts, making up time.

And all the rest of that strange night the passengers, sitting up in their unmade beds, in the swaying car, lighted by a strange mingling of pallid dawn and trembling Pintsch lights, rushing at break-neck speed through the misty rain, were oppressed by a vision of figures of terror, far behind them in the night they had left, masked, armed, galloping toward the mountains pistol in hand, the booty bound to the saddle bow, galloping, galloping on, sending a thrill of fear through all the country side.

The young doctor returned. He sat down in the smoking-room, lighting a cigarette, and Annixter and the drummers pressed around him to know the story of the whole affair.

“The man is dead,” he declared, “the brakeman. He was shot through the lungs twice. They think the fellow got away with about five thousand in gold coin.”

“The fellow? Wasn’t there four of them?”

“No; only one. And say, let me tell you, he had his nerve with him. It seems he was on the roof of the express car all the time, and going as fast as we were, he jumped from the roof of the car down on to the coal on the engine’s tender, and crawled over that and held up the men in the cab with his gun, took their guns from ‘em and made ‘em stop the train. Even ordered ‘em to use the emergency gear, seems he knew all about it. Then he went back and uncoupled the express car himself.

“While he was doing this, a brakeman—you remember that brakeman that came through here once or twice—had a red mustache.”

“THAT chap?” “Sure. Well, as soon as the train stopped, this brakeman guessed something was wrong and ran up, saw the fellow cutting off the express car and took a couple of shots at him, and the fireman says the fellow didn’t even take his hand off the coupling-pin; just turned around as cool as how-do-you-do and NAILED the brakeman right there. They weren’t five feet apart when they began shooting. The brakeman had come on him unexpected, had no idea he was so close.”

“And the express messenger, all this time?”

“Well, he did his best. Jumped out with his repeating shot-gun, but the fellow had him covered before he could turn round. Held him up and took his gun away from him. Say, you know I call that nerve, just the same. One man standing up a whole train-load, like that. Then, as soon as he’d cut the express car off, he made the engineer run her up the track about half a mile to a road crossing, WHERE HE HAD A HORSE TIED. What do you think of that? Didn’t he have it all figured out close? And when he got there, he dynamited the safe and got the Wells-Fargo box. He took five thousand in gold coin; the messenger says it was railroad money that the company were sending down to Bakersfield to pay off with. It was in a bag. He never touched the registered mail, nor a whole wad of greenbacks that were in the safe, but just took the coin, got on his horse, and lit out. The engineer says he went to the east’ard.”