Whispering Smith

by Frank H. Spearman

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE TURN IN THE STORM

  The beginning of the Crawling Stone Line marked the first determinedeffort under President Bucks, while undertaking the reconstruction ofthe system for through traffic, to develop the rich local territorytributary to the mountain division. New policies in construction datedfrom the same period. Glover, with an enormous capital staked for thenew undertakings, gave orders to push the building every month in theyear, and for the first time in mountain railroad-building winter wasto be ignored. The older mountain men met the innovation as they metany departure from their traditions, with curiosity and distrust. Onthe other hand, the new and younger blood took hold with confidence,and when Glover called, "Yo, heave ho!" at headquarters, they bentthemselves clear across the system for a hard pull together.

  McCloud, resting the operating on the shoulders of his assistantAnderson, devoted himself wholly to forwarding the construction plans,and his first clash over winter road-building in the Rockies camewith his own right-hand man, Mears. McCloud put in a switch belowPiedmont, opened a material-yard, and began track-laying toward thelower Crawling Stone Valley, when Mears said it was time to stop worktill spring. When McCloud told him he wanted track across the divideand into the lower valley by spring, Mears threw up his hands. Butthere was metal in the old man, and he was for orders all the time. Hekept up a running fire of protests and forebodings about the danger ofexposing men during the winter season, but stuck to his post. Gloversent along the men, and although two out of every three deserted theday after they arrived, Mears kept a force in hand, and crowded thetrack up the new grade as fast as the ties and steel came in, workingday in and day out with one eye on the clouds and one on the tie-lineand hoping every day for orders to stop.

  December slipped away to Christmas with the steel still going down andthe disaffected element among the railroad men at Medicine Bendwaiting for disaster. The spectacle of McCloud handling a flyingcolumn on the Crawling Stone work in the face of the most treacherousweather in the mountain year was one that brought out constantcriticism of him among Sinclair's sympathizers and friends, and whileMcCloud laughed and pushed ahead on the work, they waited only for hisdiscomfiture. Christmas Day found McCloud at the front, with menstill very scarce, but Mears's gang at work and laying steel. The worktrain was in charge of Stevens, the freight conductor, who had beenset back after the Smoky Creek wreck and was slowly climbing back toposition. They were working in the usual way, with the flat cars aheadpushed by the engine, the caboose coupled to the tender being on theextreme hind end of the train.

  At two o'clock on Christmas afternoon, when there was not a cloud inthe sky, the horizon thickened in the east. Within thirty minutes themountains from end to end of the sky-line were lost in the sweep of acoming wind, and at three o'clock snow struck the valley like a pall.Mears, greatly disturbed, ordered the men off the grade and into thecaboose. McCloud had been inspecting culverts ahead, and had startedfor the train when the snow drove across the valley. It blotted thelandscape from sight so fast that he was glad after an anxious fiveminutes to regain the ties and find himself safely with his men.

  But when McCloud came in the men were bordering on a panic. Mears,with his two foremen, had gone ahead to hunt McCloud up, and hadpassed him in the storm; it was already impossible to see, or to hearan ordinary sound ten yards away. McCloud ordered the flat cars cutoff the train and the engine whistle sounded at short intervals, and,taking Stevens, buttoned his reefer and started up the grade after thethree trackmen. They fired their revolvers as they went on, but thestorm tossed their signals on the ears of Mears and his companionsfrom every quarter of the compass. McCloud was standing on the lasttie and planning with his companion how best to keep the grade as thetwo advanced, when the engine signals suddenly changed. "Now thatsounds like one of Bill Dancing's games," said McCloud to hiscompanion. "What the deuce is it, Stevens?"

  Stevens, who knew a little of everything, recognized the signals in aninstant and threw up his hands. "It's Morse code, Mr. McCloud, andthey are in--Mears and the foremen--and us for the train as quick asthe Lord will let us; that's what they're whistling."

  "So much for an education, Stevens. Bully for you! Come on!"

  They regained the flat cars and made their way back to the cabooseand engine, which stood uncoupled. McCloud got into the cab withDancing and Stevens. Mears, from the caboose ahead, signalled all in,and, with a whistling scream, the engine started to back the cabooseto Piedmont. They had hardly more than got under full headway whena difficulty became apparent to the little group around thesuperintendent. They were riding an unballasted track and using suchspeed as they dared to escape from a situation that had becomeperilous. But the light caboose, packed like a sardine-box with men,was dancing a hornpipe on the rail-joints. McCloud felt the peril,and the lurching of the car could be seen in the jerk of the enginetender to which it was coupled. Apprehensive, he crawled back onthe coal to watch the caboose himself, and stayed long enough tosee that the rapidly drifting snow threatened to derail the outfitany minute. He got back to the cab and ordered a stop. "This won'tdo!" said he to Stevens and the engineman. "We can't back thatcaboose loaded with men through this storm. We shall be off thetrack in five minutes."

  "Try it slow," suggested Stevens.

  "If we had the time," returned McCloud; "but the snow is drifting onus. We've got to make a run for it if we ever get back, and we musthave the engine in front of that way car with her pilot headed for thedrifts. Let's look at things."

  Dancing and Stevens, followed by McCloud, dropped out of the gangway.Mears opened the caboose door and the four men went forward to inspectthe track and the trucks. In the lee of the caboose a council washeld. The roar of the wind was like the surge of many waters, and thesnow had whitened into storm. They were ten miles from a habitation,and, but for the single track they were travelling, might as well havebeen a hundred miles so far as reaching a place of safety wasconcerned. They were without food, with a caboose packed with men ontheir hands, and they realized that their supply of fuel for eitherengine or caboose was perilously slender.

  "Get your men ready with their tools, Pat," said McCloud to Mears.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to turn the train around and put the nose of the engineinto it."

  "Turn the train around--why, yes, that would make it easy. I'd be gladto see it turned around. But where's your turntable, Mr. McCloud?"asked Mears.

  "How are you going to turn your train around on a single track?" askedStevens darkly.

  "I'm going to turn the track around. I know about where we are, Ithink. There's a little stretch just beyond this curve where the gradeis flush with the ground. Ask your engineman to run back very slowlyand watch for the bell-rope. I'll ride on the front platform of thecaboose till we get to where we want to go to work. Lose no time, Pat;tell your men it's now or never. If we are caught here we may staytill they carry us home, and the success of this little game dependson having everything ready and working quick."

  Stevens, who stayed close to McCloud, pulled the cord within fiveminutes, and before the caboose had stopped the men were tumblingout of it. McCloud led Mears and his foreman up the track. Theytramped a hundred yards back and forth, and, with steel tapes forsafety lines, swung a hundred feet out on each side of the track tomake sure of the ground. "This will do," announced McCloud; "youwaited here half a day for steel a week ago; I know the ground.Break that joint, Pat." He pointed to the rail under his foot. "Passahead with the engine and car about a thousand feet," he said tothe conductor, "and when I give you a signal back up slow and lookout for a thirty-degree curve--without any elevation, either. Get outall your men with lining-bars."

  The engine and caboose faded in the blur of the blizzard as the breakwas made in the track. "Take those bars and divide your men intobatches of ten with foremen that can make signs, if they can't talkEnglish," directed McCloud. "Work lively now, and throw this track tothe south!"

/>   Pretty much everybody--Japs, Italians, and Greeks--understood the gamethey were playing. McCloud said afterward he would match his Piedmonthundred in making a movable Y against any two hundred experts Glovercould pick; they had had the experience, he added, when the move meanttheir last counter in the game of mountain life or death. The Piedmont"hundred," to McCloud's mind, were after that day past masters in theart of track-shifting. Working in a driving cloud of grit and snow,the ignorant, the dull, and the slow rose to the occasion. BillDancing, Pat Mears and his foreman, and Stevens moved about in thedriving snow like giants. The howling storm rang with the shouting ofthe foremen, the guttural cries of the Japs, and the clank of thelining-bars as rail-length after rail-length of the heavy track wasslued bodily from the grade alignment and swung around in a shortcurve to a right angle out on the open ground.

  McCloud at last gave the awaited signal, and, with keen-eyed, anxiousmen watching every revolution of the cautious driving-wheels, theengine, hissing and pausing as the air-brakes went off and on, pushedthe light caboose slowly out on the rough spur to its extreme end andstopped with the pilot facing the main track at right angles; butbefore it had reached its halting-place spike-mauls were ringing atthe fish-plates where a moment before it had left the line on thecurve. The track at that point was cut again, and under a long lineof bars and a renewed shouting it was thrown gradually quite acrossthe long gap in the main line, and the new joints in a very roughcurve were made fast just as the engine, running now with its pilotahead, steamed slowly around the new curve and without accidentregained the regular grade. It was greeted by a screeching yell as themen climbed into the caboose, for the engine stood safely headed intothe teeth of the storm for Piedmont. The ten miles to cover were now amatter of less than thirty minutes, and the construction train drewinto the Piedmont yards just as the telegraph wires were heating fromheadquarters with orders annulling freights, ordering ploughs onoutgoing engines, and battening the division hatches for a grapplewith a Christmas blizzard.

  No man came back better pleased than Stevens. "That man is all right,"said he to Mears, nodding his head toward McCloud, as they walked upfrom the caboose. "That's all I want to say. Some of these fellowshave been a little shy about going out with him; they've hounded mefor months about stepping over his way when Sinclair and his mugsstruck. I reckon I played my hand about right."