Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life

Then there was only the westbound freight, Fifty-five, to make up with the Fort Rawlins stuff and the Cherry Creek steel, which was "rush," and a few cars of ties flung on behind on general principles. It was quick work now – sorting and moving the bridge steel – half an hour for an hour's work, with the north wind waking at the clatter and sweeping a bank of cloud and sand across the valley. Shockley and Chris and the goat crew put at it like black ants. There was releasing and setting and kicking and splitting, and once in a while a flying switch, dead against the rubrics; and at last the whole train of steel was in line, clean as the links of a sprocket, and ready to run in on the house-track for the caboose.

For that run Chris set the east house-track switch, crossed the track, and swung a great circle with his lamp for the back. To get over to the switch again, he started to recross the track. In the dark, his ankle turned on a lump of coal; he recovered lightly, but the misstep sent his other foot wide, and with a bit of a jolt Rubedo's new shoe slipped into the frog.

Up the track he heard a roll of stormy coughs from the engine gathering push to shove the string of flats down. They were coming towards him, over the spot where he stood, on his signal; and he quietly tried to loosen his heel.

The engine's drivers let go, and she roared a steaming oath, and Chris could hear it; but he was glad, for his heel would not work quietly out of the frog; it stuck. Then the engineer, unruffled, pulled at his sand lever, and his engine snorted again and her driver tires bit, and slowly she sent the long train of steel down on Chris's switch; he heard the frosty flanges grinding on the face of the rails as he tried to loosen his foot.

Coolly, first, like a confident man in a quicksand; soon, with alarm running into fright. But there was time enough; the head car was four or five lengths above the switch and coming very, very slowly, heavy-like, and squeaking stiffly under its load, yet coming; and he wrenched harder, but his foot stuck. Then he yelled for Shockley. Shockley had gone over to open the caboose switch; Shockley couldn't hear, and he knew it. And he yelled again.

The sweat broke over him as he turned and twisted. The grip of the frog seemed to stifle him; half the time was gone; the near truck wheels screeched two car-lengths away: and the switchman played his last card. Time and time again Shockley had told him what to do if that moment came in the night; had told him to throw his lamp in the air like a rocket. But Chris had forgotten all that till the flat dropped heavily on the tongue in front of him; then he threw his lamp like a rocket high into the night.

No help came. He raised his arms frantically above his head, and his cries cut the wind. Desperate at last, he threw himself flat to lie outside the rail, to save all but a foot; but the frog held him, and crying horribly he struggled back to his feet, only to sink again half crazy to the ground. As his senses left him he was hardly aware of a stinging pain in his foot, of a wrench at his leg, an instant arm round his back, and his yard master's voice in his ear.

"Jump!" screamed Shockley.

Chris, scrambling frantically on the deadly rails, unable to jump, felt himself picked from the ground, heard a choke in the throat at his ear, and he was flung like a drawbar through the dark. Shockley had passed a knife blade from vamp to sole, slit the Russian's clumsy shoe, jerked his foot from it, and thrown him bodily into the clear.

Chris staggered panting to his feet. Already the steel was moving slowly over the switch; he heard the sullen pounding of the trucks on the contact; a lantern, burning yet, lay on its side near the stand – it was Shockley's lamp. Chris looked wildly around for his yard master; called out; called Shockley's name; listened. No scream, no groan, no cry, no answer; no sound, but just the steady pounding of the wheels over the contact. The little switchman screamed again in a frenzy, and turning, raced stumbling up the track to the cab. He swung into it, and by signs made the engineer shut off. He tried to talk, and only stammered a lingo of switch-pidgin and the name of Shockley. They couldn't understand it all, but they shut off with faces pinched and sallow, threw open the furnace door, and grabbing their lanterns ran back. The fireman on his knees held his lamp out under the flat that spanned the contact; he drew shrinking back, and rising, started on the run for the depot to rouse Callahan.

It was Callahan who pulled the pin a moment later, Chris shivering like a rabbit at his side. It was Callahan who gave the slow pull-ahead order that cut the train in two at the frog, and Callahan who stepped wavering from the gap that opened behind the receding flat – back from something between the rails – back to put his hands blindly out for the target-rod, and unsteadily upon it. He heard Shockley breathing.

Some carried the headlight back, and some tore the door off a box car, and they got him on. They carried him unevenly, stumbling, over to the depot. They laid him on Callahan's mattress in the waiting room, and the men stood all about him; but the only sound was his breathing, and inside under the lamp the receiver, clicking, clicking, clicking, of Bucks and the company surgeon coming on a special ahead of Fifty-nine.

They twisted tourniquets into his quivering flesh, and with the light dying in his eyes they put whiskey to his lips. But he turned his head and spit it from his mouth. Then he looked from face to face about him – to the engineer and to the fireman, and to little Chris and to Callahan, and his lips moved.

Chris bent over him, but try as he would he could not catch the words. And Callahan listened and watched and waited.

"Block – block – " said Shockley's lips. And Callahan wiped them slowly and bent close again and put his ear over them. "Block – block – the – frogs."

And Shockley died.

They lifted the mattress into the baggage room; Callahan drew over it a crumpled sheet. A lantern left, burned on the checking desk, but the men, except Chris, went their ways. Chris hung irresolute around the open door.

The special pulled in, and with the shoes wringing fire from her heels as she slowed, Bucks and a man following close sprang from the step of the coach. Callahan met them; shook his head.

Twenty minutes later Fifty-nine whistled for the yard; but in the yard all was dark and still. One man got off Fifty-nine that night. Carrying his little valise in his hand, he walked in and out of the depot, hanging on the edges of the grouping men, who still talked of the accident. After hearing, he walked alone into the baggage room, and with his valise in his hand drew back the edge of the sheet and, standing, looked. Afterward he paused at the door, and spoke to a man that was fixing a lantern.

"What was his name?"

"Shockley."

"Shockley?"

"Yes."

"Yard master here?"

"Yes. Know him?"

"Me? No. I guess not." He walked away with his valise, and drew his coat collar up in the wind that swept the platform. "I guess I don't want him," he muttered to himself. "I guess they don't want him; not now." And he went back to the man and asked when a train left again for Chicago. He had a warrant for Shockley; but Shockley's warrant had been served.

After the others had gone, Bucks and Callahan and the surgeon talked together in the waiting room, and Chris hanging by, blear-eyed and helpless, looked from one to the other: showed his foot when Callahan pointed, and sat patient while the surgeon stitched the slit where Shockley's blade had touched the bone. Then he stood again and listened. While any one talked Chris would listen; silent and helpless, just listening. And when Bucks had gone up stairs, and the surgeon had gone up stairs, and Callahan, tired and sick, had gone up stairs, and only the operator sat under his lamp at the table, Chris stood back in the gloom in front of the stove and poked stealthily at the fire. When it blazed he dropped big chunks of smutty coal in on it, and wiped his frost-bitten nose with the back of his dirty hand, and looked toward the baggage room door and listened – listened for a cry, or a sound, or for that fearful, fearful breathing, such breathing as he had not been hearing before. But no cry, no sound, no stertorous breath came out of the darkness, and from under the lamp in front of the operator only the sounder clicked, always talking, talking, talking – talking queer things to Russian ears.

So Chris drew his cap a little lower, for so he always began, pulled mechanically from his pocket a time-table, tore off a strip, and holding it carefully open, sprinkled a few clippings of tobacco upon it, and rolled his cigarette. He tucked it between his lips; it was company for the silence, and he could more easily stop the listening. But he did not light; only pulled his cap again a little lower, buttoned close his reefer, looked at his bandaged foot, picked up his lamp, and started home.

It was dark, and the wind from the north was bitter, but he made a great detour into the teeth of it – around by the coal chutes, a long way round, a long way from the frog of the east house-track switch; and the cold stung his face as he limped heavily on. At last by the ice house he turned south, and reaching the face of the bench paused a moment, hesitating, on the side of the earthen stairs; it was very dark. After a bit he walked slowly down and pushed open the door of his dugout. It was dark inside, and cold; the fire was out. The children were asleep; the woman was asleep.

He sat down in a chair and put out his lamp. There was no Christmas that night in Little Russia.

The Wiper's Story

HOW McGRATH GOT AN ENGINE

This came about through there being whiskers on the rails. It may not be generally understood that whiskers grow on steel rails; curious as it seems, they do. Moreover, on steel rails they are dangerous, and, at times, exceedingly dangerous.

Do not infer that all steel rails grow whiskers; nor is it, as one might suppose, only the old rails that sport them. The youngest rail on the curve may boast as stout a beard as the oldest rail on the tangent, and one just as gray. They flourish, too, in spite of orders; for while whiskers are permitted on engineers and tolerated on conductors, they are never encouraged on rails. Nature, however, provides the whiskers, regardless of discipline, and, what is more, shaves them herself.

Their culture depends on conditions. Some months grow better whiskers than others: September is famous for whiskers, while July grows very few. Whiskers will grow on steel rails in the air of a single night; but not every night air will produce whiskers. It takes a high, frosty air, one that stays out late, to make whiskers. Take, for example, the night air of the Black Hills; it is known everywhere among steel rails as a beard tonic. The day's moisture, falling as the sun drops beyond the hills is drawn into feathery, jewelled crystals of frost on the chilly steel, as a glass of ice-water beads in summer shade; and these dewy stalagmites rise in a dainty profusion, until when day peeps into the cañons the track looks like a pair of long white streamers winding up and down the levels. But beware that track. It is a very dangerous track, and its possibilities lie where Samson's lay – in the whiskers.

So it lies in early morning, as pretty a death-trap as any flower that ever lured a fly; only, this pitfall waits for engines and trains and men – and sometimes gets them.

It waits there on the mountain grades, in an ambush really deadly for an unwary train, until the sun, which is particularly lazy in the fall, peeping over into the cuts, smiles, at length, on the bearded steel as if it were too funny, and the whiskers vanish into thin air.

A smooth-faced rail presents no especial dangers; and if trainmen in the Hills had their way, they would never turn a wheel until the sun had done barbering. But despatchers not having to do with them take no account of whiskers. They make only the schedules, and the whiskers make the trouble. To lessen their dangers, engineers always start, up hill or down, with a tankful of sand, and they sand the whiskers. It is rough barbering, but it helps the driver-tires grit a bit into the face of the rail, and in that way hang on. In this emergency a tankful of sand is better than all the air Westinghouse ever stored.

Aloysius McGrath was a little sweeper; but he was an aspiring one, for even a sweeper may aspire, and in point of fact most of them do aspire. Aloysius worked in the roundhouse at the head of the Wind River pass on the West End Mountains. It is an amazingly rough country; and as for grades, it takes your breath merely to look down the levels. Three per cent, four per cent, five per cent – it is really frightful! But Aloysius was used to heavy falls; he had begun working for the company as a sweeper under Johnnie Horigan, and no engineer would have thought of running a grade to compare with Johnnie's headers.

Horigan was the first boss Aloysius ever had. Now Aloysius, if caught just right, is a very pretty name, but Johnnie Horigan could make nothing whatever of it, so he called Aloysius, Cooney, as he said, for short – Cooney McGrath – and, by the way, if you will call that McGraw, we shall be started right. As for Horigan, he may be called anything; at least it is certain that on the West End he has been called everything.

Johnnie was ordinarily boss sweeper. He had suffered numerous promotions – several times to wiper, and once to hostler; but his tendency to celebrate these occasions usually cost him his job, and he reverted to sweeping. If he had not been such an inoffensive, sawed-off little old nubbin he wouldn't have been tolerated on the pay rolls; but he had been with the company so long and discharged so often that foremen grew tired of trying to get rid of him, and in spite of his very regular habits, he was hanging on somewhere all the time.

When Johnnie was gone, using the word in at least two senses, Aloysius Cooney McGrath became, ipso facto, boss sweeper. It happened first one Sunday morning, just after pay day, when Johnnie applied to the foreman for permission to go to church. Permission was granted, and Johnnie started for church; but it is doubtful whether he ever found it. At all events, at the end of three weeks he turned up again at the roundhouse, considerably the worse for his attempt to locate the house of prayer – which he had tried to find only after he had been kicked out of every other place in town.

Aloysius had improved the interval by sweeping the roundhouse as it never had been swept before; and when Johnnie Horigan returned, morally disfigured, Aloysius McGrath was already promoted to be wiper over his old superior. Johnnie was in no wise envious. His only move was to turn the misfortune to account for an ulterior purpose, and he congratulated the boy, affecting that he had stayed away to let them see what stuff the young fellow was made of. This put him in a position to negotiate a small loan from his protégé– a position of which he never neglected the possibilities. It was out of the question to be mad very long at Johnnie, though one might be very often. After a time Aloysius got to firing: then he wanted an engine. But he fired many months, and there came no promotion. The trouble was, there were no new crews added to the engine service. Nobody got killed; nobody quit; nobody died. One, two, and three years without a break, and little Aloysius had become a bigger Aloysius, and was still firing; he became also discouraged, for then the force was cut down and he was put back wiping.

"Never y' mind, never y' mind, Cooney," old Johnnie would say. "It'll come all right. You'll get y'r ingin' yet. Lind me a couple till pay-a-day, Cooney, will you? I'll wahrant y' y'r ingin' yet, Cooney." Which little assurance always cost Aloysius two dollars till pay day, and no end of trouble getting it back; for when he attempted collection, Johnnie took a very dark view of the lad's future, alluding vaguely to people who were hard-hearted and ungrateful to their best friends. And though Aloysius paid slight attention to the old sweeper's vaporings, he really was in the end the means of the boy's getting his engine.

After three years of panic and hard times on the mountain division, the mines began to reopen, new spurs were laid out, construction crews were put on, and a new activity was everywhere apparent. But to fill the cup of Aloysius' woe, the new crews were all sent up from McCloud. That they were older men in the order of promotion was cold comfort – Aloysius felt crowded out. He went very blue, and the next time Johnnie applied for a loan Aloysius rebuffed him unfeelingly; this in turn depressed John.

"Never mind, never mind, Cooney. I'll not be speakin' t' Neighbor agin t' set y' up. If y' like wipin', stick to ut. I'll not be troublin' Neighbor agin." Johnnie professed a great pull with the master mechanic.

That Aloysius might feel still more the sting of his coldness, Johnnie for some days paid much court to the new firemen and engine runners. Nothing about the house was too good for them, and as the crafty sweeper never overlooked an opportunity, he was in debt before the end of the week to most of the brotherhood.

But the memorable morning for Aloysius came shortly thereafter. It was one of those keen October mornings that bite so in the Hills. The construction train, Extra 240 West, had started about five o'clock from the head of the pass with a load of steel for the track layers, and stopped for a bite of breakfast at Wind River. Above the roundhouse there is a switchback. When the train pulled in, the crew got off for some hot coffee. Johnnie Horigan was around playing good fellow, and he climbed into the cab to run the train through the switchback while the crews were at the eating house. It was irregular to leave the engine, but they did, and as for Johnnie Horigan, he was regularly irregular. There were sixteen cars of steel in the string, besides a cabooseful of laborers. The backing up the leg of the nipper was easy. After the switch was newly set, Johnnie pulled down the lower leg; and that, considering the whiskers, was too easy.

When he pulled past the eating house on the down grade, he was going so lively with his flats that he was away before the crew could get out of the lunch room. In just one minute everybody in Wind River was in trouble: the crew, because their train was disappearing down the cañon; the eating house man, because nobody paid him for his coffee; and Johnnie Horigan, because he found it impossible to stop. He had dumped the sand, he had applied the air, he had reversed the engine – by all the rules laid down in the instruction car she ought to stop. But she didn't stop, and – this was the embarrassing feature – she was headed down a hill twenty miles long, with curves to weary a boa-constrictor. John hung his head wildly over the drivers, looked back at the yelling crew, contemplated the load that was pushing him down the grade and his head began to swim. There appeared but one thing more to do: that was to make a noise; and as he neared the roundhouse he whistled like the wind. Aloysius O'Cooney McGrath, at the alarm, darted out of the house like a fox. As he reached the door he saw the construction train coming, and Johnnie Horigan in the gangway looking for a soft place to light.

The wiper chartered the situation in a mental second. The train was running away, and Horigan was leaving it to its fate. From any point of view it was a tough proposition, but tough propositions come rarely to ambitious railroad men, and Aloysius was starving for any sort of a proposition that would help him out of the waste. The laborers in the caboose, already bewildered, were craning anxiously from the windows. Horigan, opposite the roundhouse, jumped in a sprawl; the engine was shot past Aloysius; boarding was out of the question.

But on the siding stood a couple of flats, empty; and with his hair straight on centres, the little wiper ran for them and mounted the nearest. The steel train was jumping. Aloysius, bunching his muscle, ran the length of the two flats for a head, and, from the far corner, threw himself across the gap, like a bat, on a load of the runaway steel. Scrambling to his feet, he motioned and yelled to the hoboes, who were pouring frantic out on the hind flat of the string, to set brakes; then he made ahead for the engine.

It was a race with the odds all wrong, for with every yard Aloysius gained, the train gained a dozen. By the time he reached the tender, breathless, and slid down the coal into the deserted cab, the train was heading into Little Horn gap, and every Italian aboard, yelling for life. Aloysius jumped into the levers, poked his head through the window, and looked at the drivers. They were in the back motion, and in front of them the sand was streaming wide open. The first thing he did was to shut half it off – the fight could not be won by wasting ammunition. Over and over again he jerked at the air. It was refusing its work. Where so many a hunted runner has turned for salvation there was none for Aloysius. He opened and closed, threw on and threw off; it was all one, and all useless. The situation was as simple as it was frightful. Even if they didn't leave the track, they were certain to smash into Number Sixteen, the up-passenger, which must meet them somewhere on the hill.

Aloysius's fingers closed slowly on the sand lever. There was nothing on earth for it but sand, merely sand; and even the wiper's was oozing with the stream that poured from the tank on the whiskered rails. He shut off a bit more, thinking of the terrific curves below, and mentally calculated – or tried to – how long his steam would last to reverse the drivers – how he could shovel coal and sand the curves at the same time – and how much slewing the Italians at the tail of the kite could stand without landing on the rocks.

The pace was giddy and worse. When his brain was whirling fastest, a man put a hand on his shoulder. Aloysius started as if Davy Jones had tapped him, and between bounces looked, scared, around. He looked into a face he didn't know from Adam's, but there was sand in the eyes that met his.

"What can I do?"

Aloysius saw the man's lips move, and, without taking his hands from the levers, bent his head to catch the words.

"What can I do?" shouted the man at his elbow.

"Give me steam – steam," cried the wiper, looking straight ahead.

It was the foreman of the steel gang from the caboose. Aloysius, through the backs of his eyes, saw him grab the shovel and make a pass at the tender. Doing so, he nearly took a header through the gangway, but he hung to the shovel and braced himself better.

With the next attempt he got a shovelful into the cab, but in the delivery passed it well up Aloysius's neck. There were neither words nor grins, but just another shovelful of coal a minute after; and the track-layer, in spite of the dizzy lurching, shot it where it belonged – into the furnace. Feeling that if one shovelful could be landed, more could, Aloysius's own steam rose. As they headed madly around the Cinnamon bend the dial began to climb in spite of the obstacles; and the wiper, considering there were two, and the steam and the sand to fight the thing out, opened his valve and dusted the whiskers on the curve with something more than a gleam of hope.

If there was confusion on the runaway train, there was terror and more below it. As the spectre flitted past Pringle station, five miles down the valley, the agent caught a glimpse of the sallow face of the wiper at the cab window, and saw the drivers whirling backward. He rushed to his key and called the Medicine Bend despatcher. With a tattoo like a drum-roll the despatcher in turn called Soda Springs, ten miles below Pringle, where Number Sixteen, the up-passenger, was then due. He rattled on with his heart in his fingers, and answer came on the instant. Then an order flashed into Soda Springs:

To No. 16.

Take Soda Springs siding quick. Extra 240 West has lost control of the train. Di.

There never was such a bubbling at Soda Springs as that bubbling. The operator tore up the platform like a hawk in a chicken yard. Men never scattered so quick as when Number Sixteen began screaming and wheezing and backing for the clear. Above the town, Aloysius, eyes white to the sockets, shooting the curves like a meteor, watched his lessening stream of sand pour into the frost on the track. As they whipped over bridges and fills the caboose reeled like a dying top – fear froze every soul on board. To leave the track now meant a scatter that would break West End records.