Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life

The Striker's Story

McTERZA

I would not call her common. Not that I would be afraid to, though most of the boys were more or less afraid of Mrs. Mullenix, but simply that it wouldn't be right – not in my opinion.

She kept a short order house, let that be admitted at once, but her husband was long a West End engineer. Denis Mullenix went into the Peace with Hailey and Ed Peeto and Durden the night of the big June water on the West End. The company didn't treat her just right. I was a strong company man, although I went out with the boys. But I say, and I've always said, the company did not treat Mrs. Mullenix just right.

A widow, and penniless, she bought the eating-house at McCloud with the few hundreds they gave her.

There were five young Mullenixes, and they were, every one, star children, from Sinkers, who was foxy, to Kate, who was not merely fine, she was royal. Twenty, and straight, and true, with a complexion like sunrise and hair like a sunset. Kate kept the cottage going, and Mrs. Mullenix ruled personally in the eating-house and in the short order annex. Any one that has tasted a steak grilled swell in Chicago or in Denver, and tasted one broiled plain by Mrs. Mullenix in McCloud, half a block from the depot, can easily understand why the boys behaved well. As for her coffee, believe it or not, we owe most of our world-famous West End runs, not so much to the Baldwin Locomotive Works, renowned as they are, nor to Mr. George Westinghouse, prince of inventors though we rank him – but to the coffee drawn by Mrs. Mary Mullenix; honor where honor is due.

Mrs. Mullenix's coffee for many years made the boys hot: what now makes them hot is that she can't be persuaded to draw it for anybody except McTerza, and they claim that's the way he holds the Yellow Mail with the 808; but all the same McTerza is fast stuff, coffee or no coffee.

They were none of them boisterous men, those Reading engineers who took our jobs after the strike; but McTerza was an oyster, except that he couldn't be swallowed.

McTerza didn't give up very much to anybody; not even to his own chums, Foley and Sinclair. The fact is he was diffident, owing, maybe, to a hesitation in his speech. It was funny, the bit of a halt, but not so odd as his disposition, which approached that of a grizzly. He had impudence and indifference and quiet – plenty of each.

There was one place up street that was, in special and particular, headquarters for the bad men in our crowd – for we had some – Gatling's billiard hall. Foley himself never had the nerve to tackle Gatling's. But one night, all alone and come from nobody knew where, the hall stuffed with striking men who had tasted blood that very day – McTerza walked into Gatling's.

It was like a yearling strolling into a cañon full of wolves. They were so surprised at first they couldn't bite, but pretty soon they got McTerza up against a mirror and began pasting pool balls at him.

When Ed Banks arrived it was as bad as a rapid-fire gun, and he carried McTerza out the side door like a warm tapioca pudding. When the fellow got round again, though, he was just as careless as ever.

It was pretty generally understood that in the strike the short order house was with us. Mrs. Mullenix had reason to feel bitter toward the company, and it became speedily known that Mrs. Mullenix's was not a healthy place for the men who took our engines; their money was not wanted. In fact, none of the new men ever tried to get service there except McTerza. McTerza one morning dropped into the short order house.

"Coffee," said he; he always cut things short because he was afraid he would get hung up between stations in remarks. Mrs. Mullenix, sick, had to manage as she could. Kate was looking after things that day at the restaurant, and she was alone. She looked at McTerza chillingly. Kate had more than enough instinct to tell a Reading man from the Brotherhood type. She turned in silence, and she poured a cup of coffee, but from the night tank: it was the grossest indignity that could be perpetrated on a man in the short order management. She set it with little of civility and less of sugar before McTerza, and pushing her girdle down, coldly walked front, half perched on a stool, and looked listlessly out the window.

"Cool," ventured McTerza as he stirred a lump of sugar hopefully into his purchase. Kate made no comment on the observation; the thing appeared self-evident.

"Could I have a little c-c-condensed milk?" inquired McTerza presently. "This sc-sc-scream looks pretty rich," he added, stirring thoughtfully as he spoke at the pot of mustard, which was the only liquid in sight.

Kate Mullenix glared contemptuously at him, but she passed out a jug of cream – and it was cream. From the defiance on her face as she resumed her attitude she appeared to expect a protest about the cold coffee. None came. McTerza drank the stuff very slowly, blowing it carefully the while as if it was burning him up. It vexed Kate.

"How much?" asked McTerza humbly, as he swallowed the last drop before it froze to the spoon, and fished for a dime to square his account.

"Twenty-five cents." He started slightly but reached again into his pocket and without a word produced a quarter. Kate swept it into the drawer with the royal indifference of a circus faker and resumed her stool.

"C-c-could I get another c-c-cup?" asked McTerza patiently. It looked like a defiance; however she boldly poured a second cup of the cold coffee, and McTerza tackled it.

After an interval of silence he spoke again. "Do you sell tickets on c-coffee here?" She looked at him with a questioning insolence. "I mean, c-could a fellow buy a chance – or get into a raffle – on the h-h-h-hot tank?" asked McTerza, throwing a sad glance on the live coffee urn, which steamed cozily beside its silent companion.

"That tank is empty," snapped Kate Mullenix recklessly, for in spite of herself she was getting confused.

"If it is," suggested McTerza, peering gravely underneath at the jet of gas that blazed merrily, "you ought to draw your fire: you're liable to b-b-burn your c-c-crown-sheet."

"What's the matter?" demanded Kate angrily; "is your coffee cold?"

"Oh, no," he responded, shaking his head and waiting for the surprising disclaimer to sink in. "Not exactly cold. It's just dead."

"We don't serve Reading men here," retorted Kate defiantly.

"Oh, yes, you do," responded McTerza, brightening at once. "You serve them like t-t-tramps." Then after a pause: "Could I get a cigar?"

"Yes."

"How much is that kind?"

"Fifty cents," snapped Kate, glancing into the street for some friendly striker to appear.

"I want a good one."

"That's a good one."

"Fifty cents a b-b-box?"

"Fifty cents apiece."

"Give me a small one, please."

He put down a dollar bill as he took the cigar. She threw a half back on the case. At that moment in walked two of our boys, Curtis Rucker and Ben Nicholson. McTerza had a great chance to walk out, but he didn't improve it. Rucker and Ben were Reds, both of them. Ben, in fact, was an old terror at best. Curtis Rucker was a blackish, quick young fellow, fine as silk in a cab, but a devil in a strike, and what was more, a great admirer of Kate Mullenix, and the minx knew it. As McTerza bit off the end of his cigar and reached for the gas-lighter he noticed that her face lighted wonderfully.

With a smile the newcomers called for coffee, and with a smile they got it. McTerza, smoking quietly at the cigar-case, watched the steaming liquid pour from the empty tank. It was a dispiriting revelation, but he only puffed leisurely on. When Kate glanced his way, as she presently did, disdainfully, McTerza raised his finger, and pointed to the change she had thrown at him.

"What is it, sir?"

"Mistake."

The strikers pricked up their ears.

"There isn't any mistake, sir. I told you the cigars were fifty cents each," replied Kate Mullenix. Rucker pushed back his coffee, and sliding off his stool walked forward.

"Change isn't right," persisted McTerza, looking at Kate Mullenix.

"Why not?"

"You forgot to take out twenty-five cents more for that last cup of c-c-coffee," stammered the Reading man. Kate took up the coin and handed a quarter back from the register.

"That's right," put in Rucker promptly, "make the scabs p-p-pay for what they g-g-get. They're sp-p-p-pending our money." The hesitating Reading man appeared for the first time aware of an enemy; interested for the first time in the abuse that had been continually heaped on him since he came to town: it appeared at last to reach him. He returned Rucker's glare.

"You call me a scab, do you?" he said at last and with the stutter all out. "I belong to a labor order that counts thousands to your hundreds. Your scabs came in and took our throttles on the Reading – why shouldn't we pull your latches out here? Your strike is beat, my buck, and Reading men beat it. You had better look for a job on a threshing machine."

Rucker jumped for McTerza, and they mixed like clouds in a cyclone. For a minute it was a whirlwind, and nothing could be made of it; but when they could be seen McTerza had the best man in our camp pinned under a table with his throat in one hand like the latch of a throttle. Nicholson at the same moment raising an oak stool smashed it over McTerza's head. The fellow went flat as a dead man, but he must have pulled up quick, for when Neighbor, rushing in, whirled Nicholson into the street, the Reading man already had his feet, and a corner to work from. Reed, the trainmaster, was right behind the big master mechanic. Rucker was up, but saw he was outnumbered.

"Hurt, Mac?" asked Reed, running toward the Reading man. The blow had certainly dazed him; his eyes rolled seasick for a minute, then he stared straight ahead.

"Look out," he muttered, pointing over Reed's shoulder at Kate Mullenix, "she's going to faint." The trainmaster turned, but Kate was over before her brother Sinkers could reach her as he ran in. Rucker moved towards the door. As he passed McTerza he sputtered villanously, but Neighbor's huge bulk was between the two men.

"Never mind," retorted McTerza; "next time I get you I'll ram a billiard c-c-c-cue down your throat."

It was the first intimation our fighting men had that the Reading fellow could do business, and the affair caused McTerza to be inspected with some interest from behind screens and cracker boxes as he sauntered up and down the street. When the boys asked him what he was going to do about his treatment in the short order house he seemed indifferent; but the indifference, as our boys were beginning to find out, covered live coals; for when he was pressed he threw the gauntlet at the whole lodge of us, by saying that before he got through he would close the short order house up. That threat made him a marked man. The Reading men were hated; McTerza was slated for the very worst of it. Everybody on both sides understood that – except McTerza himself. He never understood anything, for that matter, till it was on him, and he dropped back into his indifference and recklessness almost at once. He even tried the short order house again. That time Mrs. Mullenix herself was in the saddle. There were things in life which even McTerza didn't hanker after tackling more than once, and one was a second interview with Mrs. Mullenix. But the fellow must have made an impression on even the redoubtable Mrs. Mary, for she privately asked Neighbor, as one might of an honorable adversary, for peace' sake to keep that man away from her restaurant; so McTerza was banned. He took his revenge by sauntering in and out of Gatling's, until Gatling himself went gray-headed with the fear that another riot would be brought on his place.

Oddly enough, McTerza had one friend in the Mullenix family. On the strike question, like many other McCloud families, the house of Mullenix was divided against itself. All held for the engineers except the youngest member, Sinkers. Sinkers was telegraph messenger, and was strictly a company man in spite of everything. He naturally saw a great deal of the new men, but Sinkers never took the slightest interest in McTerza till he handled Rucker; after that Sinkers cultivated him. Sinkers would listen just as long as McTerza would stutter, and they became fast friends long before the yard riots.

The day the carload of detectives was imported the fight was on. Scattering collisions breaking here and there into open fights showed the feeling, but it wasn't till Little Russia went out that things looked rocky for the company property at McCloud. Little Russia had become a pretty big Russia at the time of the strike. The Russians, planted at Benkleton you might say by Shockley, had spread up and down the line like tumbleweeds, and their first cousins, the Polacks, worked the company coal mines. At McCloud they were as hard a crowd after dark as you would find on the steppes. The Polacks, four hundred of them, struck while the engineers were out, and the fat went into the fire with a flash.

The night of the trouble took even us by surprise, and the company was wholly unprepared. The engineers in the worst of the heat were accused of the rioting, but we had no more to do with it than homesteaders. Our boys are Americans, and we don't fight with torches and kerosene. We don't have to; they're not our weapons. The company imported the Polacks, let them settle their own accounts with them, said our fellows, and I called it right. Admitting that some of our Reds got out to mix in it, we couldn't in sense be held for that.

It was Neighbor, the craftiest old fox on the staff of the division, who told the depot people in the afternoon that something was coming, and thinking back afterward of the bunches of the low-browed fellows dotting the bench and the bottoms in front of their dugouts, lowering at the guards who patrolled the railroad yards, it was strange no one else saw it. They had been out three weeks, and after no end of gabbling turned silent. Men that talk are not so dangerous; it's when they quit talking.

Neighbor was a man of a thousand to act on his apprehension. All the afternoon he had the switch engines shunting cars about the roundhouse; the minute the arc lights went on the result could be seen. The old man had long lines of furniture vans, box cars, gondolas, and dead Pullmans strung around the big house like parapets. Whatever anybody else thought, Neighbor was ready. Even old John Boxer, his head blacksmith, who operated an amateur battery for salutes and celebrations, had his gun overhauled: the roundhouse was looking for trouble.

It was barely eight o'clock that night when a group of us on Main Street saw the depot lights go out, and pretty soon telephone messages began coming in to Gatling's from the company plant up the river for the sheriff; the Polacks were wrecking the dynamos. The arc lights covering the yards were on a different circuit, but it didn't take the whiskered fellows long to find that out. Half an hour later the city plant was attacked; no one was looking for trouble there, and the great system of arcs lighting the yard for miles died like fireflies. We knew then, everybody knew, that the Polacks meant business.

Not a man was in sight when the blaze sputtered blue, red, and black out; but in five minutes a dozen torches were moving up on the in-freight house like coyotes. We could hear the crash of the big oak doors clear down on Main Street. There, again, the company was weak; they hadn't a picket out at either of the freight houses. There wasn't so much as a sneeze till they beat the doors in; then there was a cry; the women were taking a hand, and it was a loot with a big L. The plunder maddened them like brandy. Neighbor, who feared not the Polacks nor the devil, made a sortie with a dozen men from his stockade, for that was what the roundhouse defenses looked like, to try to save the building. It wasn't in men to do it. The gutting was done and the kerosene burning yellow before he was half-way across, and the mob, running then in a wavering black line from the flames that licked the high windows, were making for the storehouse. The fellows were certainly up to everything good, for in plundering the freight house first they gave their women the chance to lay in supplies for months. Neighbor saw in a minute there was nothing left for him to protect at the east end, and before he could cut off the constantly lengthening line of rioters, they were between him and the long storehouse. It must have made the old man weep blood, and it was there that the first shooting occurred.

A squad of the detectives reënforcing Neighbor's little following, ran in on the flank of the rioters as the master mechanic caught up with their rear. They wheeled, on his command to disperse, and met it with a cloud of stones and coupling pins. The detectives opened with their Winchesters, and a yell went up that took me back to the Haymarket. Their answer was the torch to the storehouse and a charge on the imported guards that shook their front like a whirlwind. The detectives ran for Neighbor's breastworks, with the miners hot behind, and a hail of deadly missiles on their backs. One went down at the turn-table, and it didn't look as if his life was worth a piece of waste. But the fellow, raising on one arm, began picking off the Polacks closest with a revolver. They scattered like turkeys, and he staggered across the table before they could damage him any worse. Half a dozen of us stood in the cupola of the fire-engine house, with the thing laid below like a panorama.

Far as the blazing freight house lit the yards, we could see the rioters swarming in from the bottoms. The railroad officials gathered up stairs in the passenger depot waited helpless for the moment when the fury of the mob should turn on the unprotected building. The entire records of the division, the despatchers' offices, the headquarters of the whole West End were under that roof, with nothing to stand between it and the torches.

Awkwardly as the rioters had maneuvered, they seemed then to be getting into better shape for mischief. They were quicker at expedients, and two intensely active leaders rose out of the crowds. Following the shouts of the pair, which we could just hear, a great body of the strikers dashed up the yard.

"By the Gods!" cried Andy Cameron at my elbow, "they're going for the oil-house!"

Before the words were out we could hear the dull stroke of the picks sinking into the cleated doors. Buckets were passed in and out from the house tanks. Jacketed cans of turpentine and varnish were hustled down the line to men drunk with riot; in a moment twenty cars were ablaze. To top the frenzy they fired the oil-house itself. Destruction crazed the entire population of the bottoms. The burning cars threw the front of the big brick depot up into the sky. As the reflection struck back from the plate-glass windows, the mob split into two great waves, and one headed for the passenger depot. They crossed the coal spurs brandishing torches and sledges and bars. We could see them plain as block signals. Every implement that ever figured in a yard showed in their line, but their leader, a youngish fellow, swung a long, tapering stake. As the foremost Polack climbed up on the last string of flats that separated them from the depot, the storage tanks in the oil-house took fire. The roof jumped from the wall-plates like one vast trap-door, and the liquid yellow spurted flaming a hundred feet up into the black. A splitting yell greeted the burst, and the Polacks, with added fury, raced towards the long depot. I made out then the man with the club. It was Rucker.

The staff of the superintendent, and the force of despatchers, a handful of men all told, gathered at the upper windows and opened fire with revolvers. It was just enough to infuriate the rioters. And it appeared certain that the house would be burned under the defenders' feet, for the broad platform was bare from end to end. Not a ghost of a barricade, not a truck, not a shutter stood between the depot and the torch, and nobody thought of a man until Cameron with the quicker eyes cried:

"For God's sake! There's McTerza!"

Such as pay-day there he was, walking down the platform towards the depot, and humping alongside – Sinkers.

I guess everybody in both camps swore. Like a man in his sleep he was walking right in the teeth of the Polacks. If we had tried ourselves to pit him it couldn't have been done cleaner. His friends, for McTerza had them, must have shivered – but that was just McTerza; to be where he shouldn't, when he shouldn't. Even had there not been more pressing matters, nobody could have figured out where the fellow had come from with his convoy, or where he was going. He was there; that was all – he was there.

The despatchers yelled at him from above. The cry echoed back short from a hundred Polack throats, and they sent a splitter; it was plain they were mad for blood. Even that cry didn't greatly faze the fellow, but in the clatter of it all he caught another cry – a cry sent straight to McTerza's ear, and he turned at the voice and the word like a man stung. Rucker, leaping ahead and brandishing the truck-stake at the hated stutterer, yelled, "The scab!"

The Reading engineer halted like a baited bear.

Rucker's cry was enough – in that time and at that place it was enough. McTerza froze to the platform. There was more – and we knew it, all of us – more between those two men than scab and brotherhood, strike and riot, flood or fire: there was a woman. We knew it so well there was hardly a flutter anywhere, I take it, when men saw McTerza stooping, grasp Sinkers, shove him towards the depot, slip like a snake out of his pea-jacket, and turn to front the whole blooming mob. There wasn't any fluttering, I take it – and not very much breathing; only the scab, never a tremendous big man, swelled bigger in the eyes then straining his way than any man in McCloud has ever swelled before or since.

Mobs are queer. A minute before it was the depot, now it was the scab – kill him.

The scab stood. Rucker stumbled across a rail in his fury, and went sprawling, but the scab stood. The line wavered like tumbleweeds. They didn't understand a man fronting forty. Then Ben Nicholson – I recognized his whiskers – began blazing at him with a pistol. Yet the scab stood and halted the Polack line. They hesitated, they stopped to yell; but the scab stood.

"Stone him!" shouted Ben Nicholson. McTerza backed warily across the platform. The Polacks wavered; the instinct of danger unsettled them. Mobs are queer. A single man will head them quicker than a hundred guns. There is nothing so dangerous as one man.

McTerza saw the inevitable, the steady circling that must get him at last, and as the missiles flew at him from a score of miners he crouched with the rage of a cornered rat, one eye always on Rucker.

"Come in, you coyote!" yelled McTerza tauntingly. "Come in!" he cried, catching up a coupling pin that struck him and hurling it wickedly at his nearest assailant. Rucker, swinging his club, ran straight at his enemy.

"Kill the scab!" he cried and a dozen bristling savages, taking his lead, closed on the Reading man like a fan. From the windows above, the railroad men popped with their pistols; they might as well have thrown fire-crackers. McTerza, with a cattish spring, leaped through a rain of brickbats for Rucker.

The club in the striker's hands came around with sweep enough to drop a steer. Quick as a sounder key McTerza's head bobbed, and he went in and under on Rucker's jaw with his left hand. The man's head twisted with the terrific impact like a Chinese doll's. Down he went, McTerza, hungry, at his throat; and on top of McTerza the Polacks, with knives and hatchets and with Cossack barks, and they closed over him like water over a stone.

Nobody ever looked to see him pull out, yet he wormed his way through them corkscrew fashion, while they hacked at one another, and sprang out behind his assailants with Rucker's club. In his hands it cut through guards and arms and knives like toothpicks. Rucker was smothering under toppling Polacks. But others ran in like rats. They fought McTerza from side to side of the platform. They charged him and flanked him – once they surrounded him – but his stanchion swung every way at once. Swarm as they would, they could not get a knife or a pick into him, and it looked as if he would clear the whole platform, when his dancing eye caught a rioter at the baggage room door mercilessly clubbing poor little Sinkers. The boy lay in a pitiful heap no better than a dying mouse. McTerza, cutting his way through the circle about him, made a swath straight for the kid, and before the brute over him could run he brought the truck-stake with a full-arm sweep flat across his back. The man's spine doubled like a jack-knife, and he sunk wriggling. McTerza made but the one pass at him; he never got up again. Catching Sinkers on his free arm, the Reading man ran along the depot front, pulling him at his side and pounding at the doors. But every door was barred, and none dared open. He was clean outside the breastworks, and as he trotted warily along, dragging the insensible boy, they cursed and chased and struck him like a hunted dog.