The Mountain Divide

While he lay casting up his chances, and discharging his revolver at intervals to make a showing, the fire of the Indians slackened. This, Bucks felt, boded no good, and reckless of his store of cartridges he continued to blaze away whenever he could see a bush moving.

It was at this moment that he heard the despatcher calling him, and a message followed. “If you are alive, answer me.”

Bucks ran to the key. The situation was hopeless. No train was in sight as he pressed his fingers on the button for the last time.

“Stopped their first advance and wounded one. They are going to charge–”

He heard a sharp chorus outside and, feeling what it meant, sent his last word: “Good-by.” From three sides of the open ground around the building the Indians were riding down upon him. Firing as fast as he could with any accuracy, he darted from window to window, reaching the west window last. As he looked out he saw up the valley the smoke of the approaching train and understood from the fury of his enemies that they, too, had seen it. But the sight of the train now completely unnerved him. To lose his life with help a few moments away was an added bitterness, and he saw that the relief train would be too late to save him.

He fired the last cartridge in his hot revolver at the circling braves and, as he reloaded, the Indians ran up on the platform and threw themselves against the door. Fiendish faces peered through the window-panes and one Indian smashed a sash in with a war club.

Bucks realized that his reloading was useless. The cartridges were, in fact, slipping through his fingers, when, dropping his revolver, he drew Bob Scott’s knife and backed up against the inner office door, just as a warrior brandishing a hatchet sprang at him.

CHAPTER XII

Before Bucks had time to think, a second Indian had sprung through the open window. A feeling of helpless rage swept over him at being cornered, defenceless; and, expecting every instant to be despatched with no more consideration than if he had been a rat, he stood at bay, determined not to be taken alive.

For an instant his mind worked clearly and with the rapidity of lightning. His life swept before him as if he were a drowning man. In that horrible moment he even heard his call clicking from the despatcher. Of the two Indians confronting him, half-naked and shining with war-paint, one appeared more ferocious than the other, and Bucks only wondered which would attack first.

He had not long to wait. The first brave raised a war club to brain him. As Bucks’s straining eye followed the movement, the second Indian struck the club down. Bucks understood nothing from the action. The quick, guttural words that followed, the sharp dispute, the struggle of the first savage to evade the second and brain the white boy in spite of his antagonist–a lithe, active Indian of great strength who held the enraged warrior back–all of this, Bucks, bewildered, could understand nothing of. The utmost he could surmise was that the second warrior, from his dress and manner of authority perhaps a chief, meant to take him alive for torture. He watched the contest between the two Indians until with force and threats the chief had driven the warrior outside and turned again upon him.

It was then that Bucks, desperate, hurled himself knife in hand at the chief to engage him in final combat. The Indian, though surprised, met his onset skilfully and before Bucks could realize what had occurred he had been disarmed and tossed like a child half-way across the room.

Before he could move, the chief was standing over him. “Stop!” he exclaimed, catching Bucks’s arm in a grip of steel as the latter tried to drag down his antagonist. “I am Iron Hand. Does a boy fight me?” he demanded with contempt in every word. “See your knife.” He pointed to the floor. “When I was wounded by the Cheyennes you gave me venison. You have forgotten; but the Sioux is not like the white man–Iron Hand does not forget.”

A fusillade of shots and a babel of yelling from outside interrupted his words. The chief paid no attention to the uproar. “Your soldiers are here. The building is on fire, but you are safe. I am Iron Hand.”

So saying, and before Bucks could find his tongue, the chief strode to the rear window, with one blow of his arm smashed out the whole sash, and springing lightly through the crashing glass, disappeared.

Bucks, panting with confusion, sprang to his feet. Smoke already poured in from the freight room, and the crackling of flames and the sounds of the fighting outside reminded Bucks of Iron Hand’s words. He ran to the door.

The train had pulled up within a hundred feet of the station and the railroad men in the coaches were pouring a fire upon the Indians, under the cover of which scouts were unloading, down a hastily improvised chute, their horses, together with those of such troopers as had been gathered hurriedly.

Bucks ran back into the office and opening his wooden chest threw into it what he could of his effects and tried to drag it from the burning building out upon the platform. As he struggled with the unwieldy box, two men ran up from the train toward him, staring at him as if he had been a ghost. He recognized Stanley and Dancing.

“Are you hurt?” cried Stanley hastening to his side.

“No,” exclaimed Bucks, his head still swimming, “but everything will be burned.”

“How in the name of God, boy, have you escaped?” demanded Stanley, as he clenched Bucks’s shoulder in his hand. Dancing seized the cumbersome chest and dragged it out of danger. The Indians, jeering, as they retreated, at the railroad men, made no attempt to continue the attack, but rode away content with the destruction of the train and the station.

Stanley, assured of Bucks’s safety, though he wasted no time in waiting for an explanation of it, directed the men to save what they could out of the station–it was too late to save the building–and hurried away to see to the unloading of the horses.

Bill Dancing succeeded in rescuing the telegraph instruments and with Bucks’s help he got the wires rigged upon a cracker-box outside where the operator could report the story to the now desperate despatcher. The scouts and troopers were already in the saddle and, leading the way for the men, gave chase across the bottoms to the Indians.

Bob Scott, riding past Bucks reined up for a moment. “Got pretty warm for you, Bucks–eh? How did you get through?”

Bucks jumped toward him. “Bob!” he exclaimed, grasping his arm. “It was Iron Hand.”

“Iron Hand!” echoed Bob, lifting his eyebrows. “Brulés, then. It will be a long chase. What did he say?”

“Why, we talked pretty fast,” stammered Bucks. “He spoke about the venison but never said a blamed word about my fixing his arm.”

Bob laughed as he struck his horse and galloped on to pass the news to Stanley. A detail was left to clear the cotton-woods across the creek and guard the railroad men against possible attack while clearing the wreck. The body of the unfortunate brakeman was brought across the bridge and laid in the baggage car and a tent was pitched to serve as a temporary station for Bucks.

While this was being done, Bob Scott, who had ridden farthest up the creek, appeared leading his horse and talking to a white man who was walking beside him. He had found the conductor of the wrecked train, Pat Francis, who, young though he was, had escaped the Indians long enough to reach a cave in the creek bank and whose rifle shots Bucks had heard, while Francis was holding the Sioux at bay during the fight. The plucky conductor, who was covered with dust, was greeted with acclamations.

“He claims,” volunteered Scott, speaking to Stanley, “he could have stood them off all day.”

Francis’s eyes fell regretfully on the dead brakeman. “If that boy had minded what I said and come with me he would have been alive now.”

The wrecking train, with a gang of men from Medicine Bend, arrived late in the afternoon, and at supper-time a courier rode in from Stanley’s scouting party with despatches for General Park. Stanley reported the chase futile. As Bob Scott had predicted, the Brulés had burned the ranch and craftily scattered the moment they reached the sand-hills. Instead of a single trail to follow, Stanley found fifty. Only his determination to give the Indians a punishment that they would remember held the pursuing party together, and three days afterward he fought a battle with the wily raiders, surprised in a canyon on the Frenchman River, which, though indecisive, gave Iron Hand’s band a wholesome respect for the stubborn engineer.

The train service under the attacks of the Indians thus repeated, fell into serious demoralization, and an armed guard of regular soldiers rode all trains for months after the Goose Creek attack. Bucks was given a guard for his own lonely and exposed position in the person of Bob Scott, the man of all men the young operator would have wished for. And at intervals he read from his favorite novel to the scout, who still questioned whether it was a true story.

CHAPTER XIII

With Bob Scott to lead an occasional hunting trip, Bucks found the time go fast at Goose Creek and no excitement came again until later in the summer.

Where Goose Creek breaks through the sand-hills the country is flat, and, when swollen with spring rains, the stream itself has the force and fury of a mountain river. Then summer comes; the rain clouds hang no longer over the Black Hills, continuing sunshine parches the face of the great plains, and the rushing and turbulent Goose Creek ignominiously evaporates–either ascending to the skies in vapor or burrowing obscurely under the sprawling sands that lie within its course. Only stagnant pools and feeble rivulets running in widely separated channels–hiding under osiers or lurking within shady stretches of a friendly bank–remain to show where in April the noisy Goose engulfs everything within reach of its foaming wings. The creek bed becomes in midsummer a mere sandy ford that may be crossed by a child–a dry map that prints the running feet of snipe and plover, the creeping tread of the mink and the muskrat, and the slouching trail of the coyote and the wolf.

Yet there is treachery in the Goose even in its apparent repose, and the unwary emigrant sometimes comes to grief upon its treacherous bed. The sands of the Goose have swallowed up more than one heedless buffalo, and the Indian knows them too well to trust them at all.

When the railroad bridge was put across the creek, the difficulties of securing it were very considerable and Brodie, the chief engineer, was in the end forced to rely upon temporary foundations. Trainmen and engineers for months carried “slow” orders for Goose Creek bridge, and Bucks grew weary with warnings from the despatchers to careless enginemen about crossing it.

Among the worst offenders in running his engine too fast over Goose Creek bridge was Dan Baggs, who, breathing fire through his bristling red whiskers and flashing it from his watery blue eyes, feared nobody but Indians, and obeyed reluctantly everybody connected with the railroad. Moreover, he never hesitated to announce that when “they didn’t like the way he ran his engine they could get somebody else to run it.”

Baggs’s great failing was that, while he often ran his train too fast, he wasted so much time at stations that he was always late. And it was said of him that the only instance in which he ever reached the end of his division on time was the day he ran away from Iron Hand’s band of Sioux at Goose Creek–on that occasion he had made, without a doubt, a record run.

But when, one hot afternoon in August, Baggs left Medicine Bend with a light engine for Fort Park, where he was to pick up a train-load of ties, he had no thought of making further pioneer railroad history. His engine had been behaving so well that his usual charges of inefficiency against it had not for a long time been registered with the roundhouse foreman, and Dan Baggs, dreaming in the heat and sunshine of nothing worse than losing his scalp to the Indians or winning a fortune at cards–gambling was another of his failings–was pounding lightly along over the rails when he reached, without heeding it, Goose Creek bridge.

There were those who averred that after his experience with Iron Hand he always ran faster across the forbidden bridge than anywhere else. On this occasion Baggs bowled merrily along the trestle and was getting toward the middle of the river when the pony trucks jumped the rail and the drivers dropped on the ties. Dan Baggs yelled to his fireman.

It was unnecessary. Delaroo, the fireman, a quiet but prudent fellow, was already standing in the gangway prepared for an emergency. He sprang, not a minute too soon, from the engine and lighted in the sand. But Dan Baggs’s fixed habit of being behind time chained him to his seat an instant too long. The bulky engine, with its tremendous impetus, shot from the trestle and plunged like a leviathan clear of the bridge and down into the wet sand of the creek-bed.

The fireman scrambled to his feet and ran forward, expecting to find his engineman hurt or killed. What was his surprise to behold Baggs, uninjured, on his feet and releasing the safety-valve of his fallen locomotive to prevent an explosion. The engine lay on its side. The crash of the breaking timbers, followed by a deafening blast of escaping steam, startled Bucks and, with Bob Scott, he ran out of the station. As he saw the spectacle in the river, he caught his breath. He lived to see other wrecks–some appalling ones–but this was his first, and the shock of seeing Dan Baggs’s engine lying prone in the river, trumpeting forth a cloud of steam, instead of thundering across the bridge as he normally saw it every day, was an extraordinary one.

Filled with alarm, he ran toward the bridge expecting that the worst had happened to the engineman and fireman. But his amazement grew rather than lessened when he saw Delaroo and Baggs running for their lives toward him. He awaited them uneasily.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Bucks, as Baggs, well in the lead, came within hailing distance.

“Matter!” panted Baggs, not slackening his pace. “Matter! Look at my engine! Indians!”

“Indians, your grandmother!” retorted Bob Scott mildly. “There’s not an Indian within forty miles–what’s the matter with you?”

“They wrecked us, Bob,” declared Baggs, pointing to his roaring engine; “see for yourself, man. Them cotton-woods are full of Indians right now.”

“Full of rabbits!” snorted Bob Scott. “You wrecked yourself by running too fast.”

“Delaroo,” demanded Dan Baggs, pointing dramatically at his taciturn fireman, who had now overtaken him, “how fast was I running?”

Peter Delaroo, an Indian half-blood himself, returned a disconcerting answer. “As fast as you could, I reckon.” He understood at once that Baggs had raised a false alarm to protect himself from blame for the accident, and resented being called upon to support an absurd story.

Baggs stood his ground. “If you don’t find an Indian has done this,” he asserted, addressing Bob Scott with indignation, “you can have my pay check.”

“Yes,” returned Bob, meditatively. “I reckon an Indian did it, but you are the Indian.”

“Come, stop your gabble, you boys!” blustered the doughty engineman, speaking to everybody and with a show of authority. “Bucks, notify the despatcher I’m in the river.”

“Get back to your engine, then,” said Scott. “Don’t ask Bucks to send in a false report. And afterward,” suggested Scott, “you and I, Dan, can go over and clean the Indians out of the cotton-woods.”

Baggs took umbrage at the suggestion, and no amount of chaffing from Scott disconcerted him, but after Bucks reported the catastrophe to Medicine Bend the wires grew warm. Baxter was very angry. A crew was got together at Medicine Bend, and a wrecking-train made up with a gang of bridge and track men and despatched to the scene of the disaster. The operating department was so ill equipped to cope with any kind of a wreck that it was after midnight before the train got under way.

The sun had hardly risen next morning, when Bob Scott, without any words of explanation, ran into Bucks’s room, woke him hurriedly, and, bidding him dress quickly, ran out. It took only a minute for Bucks to spring from his cot and get into his clothes and he hastened out of doors to learn what the excitement was about. Scott was walking fast down toward the bridge. Bucks joined him.

“What is it, Bob?” he asked hastily. “Indians?”

“Indians?” echoed Bob scornfully. “I guess not this time. I’ve heard of Indians stealing pretty nearly everything on earth–but not this. No Indian in this country, not even Turkey Leg, ever stole a locomotive.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Dan Baggs’s engine is gone.”

Bucks’s face turned blank with amazement. “Gone?” he echoed incredulously. He looked at Scott with reproach. “You are joking me.”

“See if you can find it,” returned Scott tersely.

As they hastened on, Bucks looked to the spot where the engine had lain the night before. It was no longer there.

He was too stunned to ask further questions. The two strode along the ties in silence. Eagerly Bucks ran to the creek bank and scanned more closely the sandy bed. It was there that the wrecked engine and tender had lain the night before. The sand showed no disturbance whatever. It was as smooth as a table. But nothing was to be seen of the engine or tender. These had disappeared as completely as if an Aladdin’s slave, at his master’s bidding, had picked them from their resting place and set them on top of some distant sand-hill.

“Bob,” demanded Bucks, breathless, “what does it mean?”

“It means the company is out one brand-new locomotive.”

“But what has happened?” asked Bucks, rubbing his eyes to make sure he was not dreaming. “Where is the engine?”

Scott pointed to the spot where the engine had lain. “It is in that quicksand,” said he.

The engine, during the night, had, in fact, sunk completely into the sand. No trace was left of it or of its tender. Not a wheel or cab corner remained to explain; all had mysteriously and completely disappeared.

“Great Heavens, Bob!” exclaimed Bucks. “How will they ever get it out?”

“The only way they’ll ever get it out, I reckon, is by keeping Dan Baggs digging there till he digs it out.”

“Dan Baggs never could dig that out–how long would it take him?”

“About a hundred and seventy-five years.”

As Scott spoke, the two heard footsteps behind them. Baggs and Delaroo, who had slept at the section-house, were coming down the track. “Baggs,” said Scott ironically, as the sleepy-looking engineman approached, “you were right about the Indians being in the cotton-woods last night.”

“I knew I was right,” exclaimed Baggs, nodding rapidly and brusquely. “Next time you’ll take a railroad man’s word, I guess. Where are they?” he added, looking apprehensively around. “What have they done?”

“They have stolen your engine,” answered Scott calmly. He pointed to the river bed. Baggs stared; then running along the bank he looked up-stream and down and came back sputtering.

“Why–what–how–what in time! Where’s the engine?”

“Indians,” remarked Scott sententiously, looking wisely down upon the sphinx-like quicksand. “Indians, Dan. They must have loaded the engine on their ponies during the night–did you hear anything?” he demanded, turning to Bucks. Bucks shook his head. “I thought I did,” continued Scott. “Thought I heard something–what’s that?”

Baggs jumped. All were ready to be startled at anything–for even Scott, in spite of his irony, had been as much astounded as any one at the first sight of the empty bed of sand. It was enough to make any one feel queerish. The noise they heard was the distant rumble of the wrecking-train.

In the east the sun was bursting over the sand-hills into a clear sky. Bucks ran to the station to report the train and the disappearance of the engine. When he had done this he ran back to the bridge. The wrecking-train had pulled up near at hand and the greater part of the men, congregated in curious groups on the bridge, were talking excitedly and watching several men down on the sand, who with spades were digging vigorously about the spot which Baggs and Delaroo indicated as the place where the engine had fallen. Others from time to time joined them, as they scraped out wells and trenches in the moist sand. These filled with water almost as rapidly as they were opened.

Urged by their foreman, a dozen additional men joined the toilers. They dug in lines and in circles, singly and in squads, broadening their field of prospecting as the laughter and jeers of their companions watching from the bridge spurred them to further toil. But not the most diligent of their efforts brought to light a single trace of the missing engine.

The wrecking crew was mystified. Many refused to believe the engine had ever fallen off the bridge. But there was the broken track! They could not escape the evidence of their eyes, even if they did scoff at the united testimony of the two men that had been on the engine when it leaped from the bridge and the two that had afterward seen it lying in the sand.

The track and bridge men without more ado set to work to repair the damage done the track and bridge. A volley of messages came from head-quarters. At noon a special car, with Colonel Stanley and the division heads arrived to investigate.

The digging was planned and directed on a larger scale and resumed with renewed vigor. Sheet piling was attempted. Every expedient was resorted to that Stanley’s scientific training could suggest to bring to light the buried treasure–for an engine in those days, and so far from locomotive works, was very literally a treasure to the railroad company. Stanley himself was greatly upset. He paced the ties above where the men were digging, directing and encouraging them doggedly, but very red in the face and contemplating the situation with increasing vexation. He stuck persistently to the work till darkness set in. Meantime, the track had been opened and the wrecking-train crossed the bridge and took the passing track. The moon rose full over the broad valley and the silent plains. Men still moved with lanterns under the bridge. Bucks, after a hard day’s work at the key, was invited for supper to Stanley’s car, where the foremen had assembled to lay new plans for the morrow. But Bob Scott, when Bucks told him, shook his head.

“They are wasting their work,” he murmured. “The company is ‘out.’ That engine is half-way to China by this time.”

It might, at least, as well have been, as far as the railroad company was concerned. The digging and sounding and scraping proved equally useless. The men dug down almost as deep as the piling that supported the bridge itself–it was in vain. In the morning the sun smiled at their efforts and again at night the moon rose mysteriously upon them, and in the distant sand-hills a thousand coyotes yelped a requiem for the lost locomotive. But no human eye ever saw so much as a bolt of the great machine again.

CHAPTER XIV

The loss of the engine at Goose Creek brought an unexpected relief to Bucks. His good work in the emergency earned for him a promotion. He was ordered to report to Medicine Bend for assignment, and within a week a new man appeared at Goose Creek to relieve him.

There was little checking up to do. Less than thirty minutes gave Bucks time to answer all of his successor’s questions and pack his trunk. He might have slept till morning and taken a passenger train to Medicine Bend, but the prospect of getting away from Goose Creek at once was too tempting to dismiss. A freight train of bridge timbers pulled across the bridge just as Bucks was ready to start. Pat Francis, the doughty conductor, who, single-handed, had held Iron Hand’s braves at bay, was in charge of the train. He offered Bucks a bench and blanket in the caboose for the night, and promised to have him in Medicine Bend in the morning; Bucks, nothing loath, accepted. His trunk was slung aboard and the train pulled out for Medicine Bend.

The night proved unseasonably cold. Francis built a blazing fire in the caboose stove and afterward shared his hearty supper with his guest. As the train thundered and rumbled slowly over the rough track, the conductor, while Bucks stretched out on the cushions, entertained him with stories of his experiences on the railroad frontier–not suspecting that before morning he should furnish for his listener one of the strangest of them.