Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life

It was then that Bullhead began to sit up all day, after working all night, to get a single smile from the direction of the pie rack. He hung, utterly miserable, around the lunch room all day, while Nellie made impersonal remarks about the colorless life of a mere operator as compared with life in the cab of a ten-wheeler. She admired the engineer, Nellie – was there ever a doughnut girl who didn't? And when One or Two rose smoking out of the alkali east or the alkali west, and the mogul engine checked its gray string of sleepers at the Junction platform, and Bat Mullen climbed down to oil 'round – as he always did – there were the liveliest kind of heels behind the counter.

Such were the moments when Bullhead sat in the lunch room, unnoticed, somewhat back where the flies were bad, and helped himself aimlessly to the sizzling maple syrup – Nellie rustling back and forth for Engineer Mullen, who ran in for a quick cup, and consulted, after each swallow, a dazzling open-faced gold watch, thin as a double eagle; for Bat at twenty-one was pulling the fast trains and carried the best. And with Bullhead feeding on flannel cakes and despair, and Nellie Cassidy looking quite her smartest, Mullen would drink his coffee in an impassive rush, never even glancing Bullhead's way – absolutely ignoring Bullhead. What was he but a nightman, anyway? Then Mullen would take as much as a minute of his running time to walk forward to the engine with Miss Cassidy, and stand in the lee of the drivers chatting with her, while Bullhead went completely frantic.

It was being ignored in that way, after her smiles had once been his, that crushed the night operator. It filled his head with schemes for obtaining recognition at all hazards. He began by quarrelling violently with Nellie, and things were coming to a serious pass around the depot when the Klondike business struck the Mountain Division. It came with a rush and when they began running through freight extras by way of the Goose River short line, day and night, the Junction station caught the thick of it. It was something new altogether for the short line rails and the short line operators, and Bullhead's night trick, with nothing to do but poke the fire and pop at coyotes, became straightway a busy and important post. The added work kept him jumping from sundown till dawn, and kept him from loafing daytimes around the lunch counter and ruining himself on fermented syrup.

On a certain night, windier than all the November nights that had gone before, the night operator sat alone in the office facing a resolve. Goose River had become intolerable. Medicine Bend was not to be thought of, for Bullhead now had a suspicion, due to Callahan, that he was a good deal of a chump, and he wanted to get away from the ridicule that had always and everywhere made life a burden. There appeared to Bullhead nothing for it but the Klondike. On the table before the moody operator lay his letter of resignation, addressed in due form to J. S. Bucks, superintendent. Near it, under the lamp, lay a well-thumbed copy of the book of rules, open at the chapter on Resignations, with subheads on —

Resign, who should.

Resign, how to.

Resign, when to. (See also Time.)

The fact was it had at last painfully forced itself on Bullhead that he was not fitted for the railroad business. Pat Francis had unfeelingly told him so. Callahan had told him so; Neighbor had told him so; Bucks had told him so. On that point the leading West End authorities were agreed. Yet in spite of these discouragements he had persisted and at last made a show. Who was it now that had shaken his stubborn conviction? Bullhead hardly dared confess. But it was undoubtedly one who put up to be no authority whatever on Motive Power or Train Service or Operating – it was Matt Cassidy's girl.

While he re-read his formal letter and compared on spelling with his pocket Webster, a train whistled. Bullhead looked at the clock: 11.40 P. M. It was the local freight, Thirty, coming in from the West, working back to Medicine. From the East, Number One had not arrived; she was six hours late, and Bullhead looked out at his light, for he had orders for the freight. It was not often that such a thing happened, because One rarely went off schedule badly enough to throw her into his turn. He had his orders copied and O.K.'d, and waited only to deliver them.

It was fearfully windy. The 266 engine, pulling Thirty that night, wheezed in the gale like a man with the apoplexy. She had a new fireman on, who was burning the life out of her, and as she puffed painfully down on the scrap rails of the first siding and took the Y, her overloaded safety gasped violently.

When the conductor of the Number Thirty train opened the station door, the wind followed him like a catamount. The stove puffed open with a down draft, and shot the room full of stinging smoke. The lamp blaze flew up the chimney – out – and left the nightman and the conductor in darkness. The trainman with a swear shoved-to the door, and Bullhead, the patient, turned over his letter of resignation quick in the dark, felt for a match and relighted his lamp. Swearing again at Bullhead, the freight conductor swaggered over to his table, felt in all the operator's pockets for a cigar, tumbled all the papers around, and once more, on general principles, swore.

Bullhead took things uncomplainingly, but he watched close, and was determined to fight if the brute discovered his letter of resignation. When the trainman could think of no further indignities he took his orders, to meet Number One at Sackley, the second station east of Goose River. After he had signed, Bullhead asked him about the depot fire at Bear Dance that had been going over the wires for two hours, reminded him of the slow order for the number nine culvert and as the rude visitor slammed the door behind him, held his hand over the lamp. Then he sat down again and turned over his letter of resignation.

To make it binding it lacked only his signature – James Gillespie Blaine Lyons – now, himself, of the opinion of every one else on the West End: that he was just a natural born blooming fool. He lifted his pen to sign off the aspirations of a young lifetime when the sounder began to snap and sputter his call. It was the despatcher, and he asked hurriedly if Number Thirty was there.

"Number Thirty is on the Y," answered Bullhead.

Then came a train order. "Hold Number Thirty till Number One arrives."

Bullhead repeated the order, and got back the O. K. He grabbed his hat and hurried out of the door to deliver the new order to the local freight before it should pull out.

To reach the train Bullhead had to cross the short line tracks. The wind was scouring the flats, and as he tacked up the platform the dust swept dead into him. At the switch he sprang across the rails, thinking of nothing but reaching the engine cab of the local – forgetting about the track he was crossing. Before he could think or see or jump, a through freight on the short line, wild, from the West, storming down the grade behind him, struck Bullhead as a grizzly would a gnat – hurled him, doubling, fifty feet out on the spur – and stormed on into the East without a quiver out of the ordinary. One fatality followed another. The engineer of the short line train did not see the man he had hit, and with the nightman lying unconscious in the ditch, the local freight pulled out for Sackley.

Bullhead never knew just how long he lay under the stars. When his head began to whirl the wind was blowing cool and strong on him, and the alkali dust was eddying into his open mouth. It was only a matter of seconds, though it seemed hours, to pull himself together and to put up his hand unsteadily to feel what it was soaking warm and sticky into his hair; then to realize that he had been struck by a short line train; to think of what a failure he had lately acknowledged himself to be; and of what it was he was clutching so tightly in his right hand – the holding order for Number Thirty. He raised his reeling head; there was a drift of starlight through the dust cloud, but no train in sight; Number Thirty was gone. With that consciousness came a recollection – he had forgotten to put out his red light.

His red light wasn't out. He kept repeating that to himself to put the picture of what it meant before him. He had started to deliver an order without putting out his light, and Number Thirty was gone; against Number One – a head end collision staring the freight and the belated passenger in the face. Number Thirty, running hard on her order to make Sackley for the meeting, and One, running furiously, as she always ran – to-night worse than ever.

He lifted his head, enraged with himself; enraged. He thought about the rules, and he grew enraged. Only himself he blamed, nobody else – studying the rules for a lifetime and just when it would mean the death of a trainload of people forgetting his red signal. He lifted his head; it was sick, deadly sick. But up it must come, Thirty gone, and it wabbled, swooning sick and groggy as he stared around and tried to locate himself. One thing he could see, the faint outline of the station and his lamp blazing smoky in the window. Bullhead figured a second; then he began to crawl. If he could reach the lamp before his head went off again, before he went completely silly, he might yet save himself and Number One.

It wasn't in him to crawl till he thought of his own mistake; but there was a spur in the sweep of that through his head. His brain, he knew, was wabbling, but he could crawl; and he stuck fainting to that one idea, and crawled for the light of his lamp.

It is a bare hundred feet across to the Y. Bullhead taped every foot of the hundred with blood. There was no one to call on for help; he just stuck to the crawl, grinding his teeth in bitter self-reproach. They traced him, next morning when he was past the telling of it, and his struggle looked the track of a wounded bear. Dragging along one crushed leg and half crazed by the crack on his forehead, Bullhead climbed to the platform, across, and dragged himself to the door. He can tell yet about rolling his broken leg under him and raising himself to grasp the thumb latch. Not until he tried to open it did he remember it was a spring lock and that he was outside. He felt in his pocket for his keys – but his keys were gone.

There were no rules to consult then. No way on earth of getting into the office in time to do anything; to drag himself to the lunch room, twice further than the station, was out of the question. But there was a way to reach his key in spite of all bad things, and Bullhead knew the way. He struggled fast around to the window. Raising himself with a frightful twinge on one knee, he beat at the glass with his fist. Clutching the sash, he drew himself up with a hand, and with the other tore away the muntin, stuck his head and shoulders through the opening, got his hand on the key, and called the first station east, Blaisdell, with the 19. Life and death that call meant; the 19, the despatcher's call – hanging over the key, stammering the 19 over the wire, and baptizing the call in his own blood – that is the way Bullhead learned to be a railroad man.

For Blaisdell got him and his warning, and had Number One on the siding just as the freight tore around the west curve, headed for Sackley. While it was all going on, Bullhead lay on the wind-swept platform at Goose River with a hole in his head that would have killed anybody on the West End, or, for that matter on earth except James Gillespie Blaine Lyons.

After Number Thirty had passed so impudently, Number One felt her way rather cautiously to Goose River, because the despatchers couldn't get the blamed station. They decided, of course, that Bullhead was asleep, and fixed everything at the Wickiup to send a new man up there on Three in the morning and fire him for good.

But about one o'clock Number One rolled, bad-tempered, into Goose River Junction, and Bat Mullen, stopping his train, strode angrily to the station. It was dark as a pocket inside. Bat smashed in the door with his heel, and the trainmen swarmed in and began looking with their lanterns for the nightman. The stove was red-hot, but he was not asleep in the arm-chair, nor napping under the counter on the supplies. They turned to his table and discovered the broken window, and thought of a hold-up. They saw where the nightman had spilled something that looked like ink over the table, over the order book, over the clip, and there was a hand print that looked inky on an open letter addressed to the superintendent – and a little pool of something like ink under the key.

Somebody said suicide; but Bat Mullen suddenly stuck his lamp out of the broken window, put his head through after it, and cried out. Setting his lantern down on the platform, he crawled through the broken sash and picked up Bullhead.

Next morning it was all over the West End.

"And Bullhead!" cried everybody. "That's what gets me. Who'd have thought it of Bullhead!"

When they all got up there and saw what Bullhead had done, everybody agreed that nobody but Bullhead could have done it.

The pilot bar of the short line mogul, in swiping Bullhead unmercifully, had really made a railroad man of him. It had let a great light in on the situation. Whereas before every one else on the line had been to blame for his failures, Bullhead now saw that he himself had been to blame, and was man enough to stand up and say so. When the big fellows, Callahan and Kenyon and Pat Francis, saw his trail next morning, saw the blood smeared over the table, and saw Bullhead's letter of resignation signed in his own blood manual, and heard his straight-out story days afterward, they said never a word.

But that morning, the morning after, Callahan picked up the letter and put it just as it was between the leaves of the order book and locked both in his grip. It was some weeks before he had a talk with Bullhead, and he spoke then only a few words, because the nightman fainted before he got through. Callahan made him understand, though, that as soon as he was able he could have any key on that division he wanted as long as he was running it – and Callahan is running that division yet.

It all came easy after he got well. Instead of getting the worst of it from everybody, Bullhead began to get the best of it, even from pretty Nellie Cassidy. But Nellie had missed her opening. She tried tenderness while the boy was being nursed at the Junction. Bullhead looked grim and far-off through his bulging bandages, and asked his mother to put the sugar in his coffee for him; Bullhead was getting sense.

Besides, what need has a young man with a heavy crescent-shaped scar on his forehead, that people inquire about and who within a year after the Goose River affair was made a train despatcher under Barnes Tracy at Medicine Bend – what need has he of a coquette's smiles? His mother, who has honorably retired from hard work, says half the girls at the Bend are after him, and his mother ought to know, for she keeps house for him.

Bullhead's letter of resignation with the print of his hand on it hangs framed over Callahan's desk, and is shown to railroad big fellows who are accorded the courtesies of the Wickiup. But when they ask Bullhead about it, he just laughs and says some railroad men have to have sense pounded into them.

The Master Mechanic's Story

DELAROO

"You tell it. I can't tell it," growled Neighbor.

"Oh, no. No. That's your story, Neighbor."

"I ain't no story-teller – "

"Just an able-jawed liar," suggested Callahan through a benevolent bluish haze.

"Delaroo's story wasn't any lie, though," muttered Neighbor. "But a fellow would think it was to hear it; now he would, for a fact, wouldn't he?"

I

If you want him, quick and short, it would be: whiskers, secret societies, statistics and plug tobacco – the latter mostly worked up. That was Maje Sampson.

Bluntly, a wind-bag; two hundred and seventy pounds of atmosphere. Up on benevolent fraternities, up on politics, up on the money question, up on everything. The Seven Financial Conspiracies engaged Maje Sampson's attention pretty continually, and had for him a practical application: there were never less than seven conspiracies afoot in Medicine Bend to make Maje Sampson pay up.

Pay? Indeed, he did pay. He was always paying. It was not a question of paying. Not at all. It was a question of paying up, which is different.

The children – they were brickbats. Tow-headed, putty-faced, wash-eyed youngsters of all sizes and conditions. About Maje Sampson's children there was but one distinguishing characteristic, they were all boys, nothing but boys, and they spread all over town. Was there a baby run over? It was Maje Sampson's. Was there a child lost? Maje Sampson's. Was there a violently large-headed, coarse-featured, hangdog, clattering sort of a chap anywhere around? In the street, station, roundhouse, yards, stock pens? It was a brickbat, sure, one of Maje Sampson's brickbat boys.

The Sampsons were at the end of the street, and the end of the street was up the mountain. Maje Sampson's lot, "raired," as Neighbor put it – stood on its hind legs. His house had a startling tumble-over aspect as you approached it. The back end of his lot ran up into the sheer, but he marked the line sharply by a kind of horizontal fence, because the cliff just above belonged to the corporation that owned everything else on earth around Medicine Bend.

Maje Sampson did not propose to let any grasping corporation encroach on his lines, so he built, and added to from time to time, a cluster of things on the hind end of his lot – an eruption of small buildings like pimples on a boy's nose, running down in size from the barn to the last dry-goods box the boys had heaved up the slope for a dog house. To add to the variety, some one of the structures was always getting away in the wind, and if anything smaller than a hotel was seen careening across-lots in a Medicine Bend breeze it was spotted without further investigation as Maje Sampson's. When the gale abated, Joe McBracken, who conducted the local dray line, was pretty sure to be seen with a henhouse or a woodshed, or something likewise, loaded on his trucks headed for Maje Sampson's. Once the whole lean-to of the house blew off, but Joe McBracken stood ready for any emergency. He met the maverick addition at the foot of the grade, loaded it on his house-moving truck, hitched on four bronchos, crawled inside the structure, and, getting the lines through the front window, drove up Main Street before the wind had gone down. Joe was photographed in the act, and afterward used the exhibit in getting judgment against Maje Sampson for his bill.

Now a man like Maje wouldn't be likely to have very much of a run nor very much of an engine. He had the 264; an old pop bottle with a stack like a tepee turned upside down. For a run he had always trains Number Twenty-nine and Thirty, the local freights, with an accommodation coach east of Anderson. There were times of stress frequently on the West End, times when everybody ran first in first out, except Maje Sampson; he always ran Twenty-nine and Thirty west to Silver River and back. A pettifogging, cheap, jerk-water run with no rights to speak of, not even against respectable hand-cars. The only things Maje Sampson did not have to dodge were tramps, blanket Indians and telegraph poles; everything else side-tracked Twenty-nine and Thirty and Maje Sampson. Almost everybody on through trains must at some time have seen Maje Sampson puffing on a siding as Moore or Mullen shot by on Number One or Number Two. Maje was so big and his cab so little that when he got his head through the window you couldn't see very much of the cab for shoulders and whiskers and things. From the cab window he looked like a fourteen-year-old boy springing out of a ten-year-old jacket. Three things only, made Maje tolerable. First, the number of benevolent orders he belonged to; second, Delaroo; third, Martie.

Maje Sampson was a joiner and a sitter up. He would join anything on the West End that had a ritual, a grip and a password, and he would sit up night after night with anybody that had a broken leg or a fever: and if nothing better offered, Maje, rather than go to bed, would tackle a man with the stomachache. This kind of took the cuss off; but he was that peculiar he would sit up all night with a sick man and next day make everybody sick talking the money question – at least everybody but Delaroo. If Delaroo was bored he never showed it. As long as Maje would talk Delaroo would listen. That single word was in fact the key to Delaroo: Delaroo was a listener; for that reason nobody knew much about him.

He wasn't a railroad man by birth, but by adoption. Delaroo came from the mountains: he was just a plain mountain man. Some said his father was a trapper; if so, it explained everything – the quiet, the head bent inquiringly forward, the modest unobtrusiveness of a man deaf. Of a size and shape nothing remarkable, Delaroo – but a great listener, for though he looked like a deaf man he heard like a despatcher, and saw marvellously from out the ends of his silent eyes. Delaroo for all the world was a trapper.

He came into the service as a roundhouse sweeper; then Neighbor, after a long time, put him at wiping. Delaroo said nothing but wiped for years and years, and was in a fair way to become liked, when, instead, he became one morning pitted with umbilical vesicles, and the doctors, with Delaroo's brevity, said smallpox. The boarding house keeper threw him out bodily and at once. Having no better place to go, Delaroo wandered into Steve Boyer's saloon, where he was generally welcome. Steve, however, pointed a hospitable gun at him and suggested his getting away immediately from the front end of it. Delaroo went from there to the roundhouse with his umbilicals, and asked Neighbor what a man with the smallpox ought to do with it. Neighbor wouldn't run, not even from the smallpox – but he told Delaroo what it meant to get the smallpox started in the roundhouse, and Delaroo wandered quietly away from the depot grounds, a pretty sick man then, staggered up the yards, and crawled stupid into a box car to die without embarrassing anybody.

By some hook or crook, nobody to this day knows how, that car was switched on to Maje Sampson's train when it was made up that day for the West. Maybe it was done as a trick to scare the wind-bag engineer. If so, the idea was successful. When the hind-end brakeman at the second stop came forward and reported a tramp with the smallpox in the empty box car, Maje was angry. But his curiosity gradually got the upper hand. This man might be, by some distant chance, he reflected, a P. Q. W. of A., or a frater, or a fellow, or a knight or something like – and when they stopped again to throw off crackers and beer and catsup, Maje went back and entered the infected car like a lion-tamer to try lodge signals and things on him. Maje advanced and gave the countersign. It was not cordially received. He tried another and another – and another; his passes were lost in the air. The smallpox man appeared totally unable to come back at Maje with anything. He was not only delirious, but by this time so frightfully broken out that Maje couldn't have touched a sound spot with a Masonic signal of distress. Finally the venturesome engineer walked closer into the dark corner where the sick man lay – and by Heaven! it was the Indian wiper, Delaroo.

When Maje Sampson got back into the cab he could not speak – at least not for publication. He was tearing mad and sputtered like a safety. He gathered up his cushion and a water bottle and a bottle that would explode if water touched it, and crawled with his plunder into the box car. He straightened Delaroo up and out and gave him a drink and by way of sanitary precaution took one personally, for he himself had never had the smallpox – but once. When he had done this little for Delaroo he finished his run and came back to the Bend hauling his pest-house box car. The fireman quit the cab immediately after Maje exposed himself; the conductor communicated with him only by signals. The Anderson operator wired ahead that Maje Sampson was bringing back a man with smallpox on Thirty, and when Maje, bulging out of the 264 cab, pulled into the division yard nobody would come within a mile of him. He set out the box car below the stock pens, cross-lots from his house up on the hill, and, not being able to get advice from anybody else, went home to consult Martie.