III
A LITTLE BROTHER OF THE COWS
Crosswater Gap, so named because the high pass over which the railroadfinds its way is anything but a gap, and, save when the winter snows aremelting, there is no water within a day's march, was in sight from theloopings of the eastern approach. Lidgerwood, scanning the grades as theservice-car swung from tangent to curve and curve to tangent up thesteep inclines, was beginning to think of breakfast. The morning air wascrisp and bracing, and he had been getting the full benefit of it for anhour or more, sitting under the umbrella roof at the observation end ofthe car.
With the breakfast thought came the thing itself, or the invitation toit. As a parting kindness the night before, Ford had transferred one ofthe cooks from his own private car to Lidgerwood's service, and thelittle man, Tadasu Matsuwari by name, and a subject of the Mikado byrace and birth, came to the car door to call his new employer to thetable.
It was an attractive table, well appointed and well served; butLidgerwood, temperamentally single-eyed in all things, was diverted fromhis reorganization problem for the moment only. Since early dawn he hadbeen up and out on the observation platform, noting, this time with theeye of mastership, the physical condition of the road; the bridges, theembankments, the cross-ties, the miles of steel unreeling under thedrumming trucks, and the object-lesson was still fresh in his mind.
To a disheartening extent, the Red Butte demoralization had involved thepermanent way. Originally a good track, with heavy steel, easy gradescompensated for the curves, and a mathematical alignment, the roadbedand equipment had been allowed to fall into disrepair under indifferentsupervision and the short-handing of the section gangs--always animpractical directory's first retrenchment when the dividends begin tofail. Lidgerwood had seen how the ballast had been suffered to sink atthe rail-joints, and he had read the record of careless supervision ateach fresh swing of the train, since it is the section foreman'sweakness to spoil the geometrical curve by working it back, little bylittle, into the adjoining tangent.
Reflecting upon these things, Lidgerwood's comment fell into speech overhis cup of coffee and crisp breakfast bacon.
"About the first man we need is an engineer who won't be too exalted toget down and squint curves with the section bosses," he mused, and fromthat on he was searching patiently through the memory card-index for theright man.
At the summit station, where the line leaves the Pannikin basin toplunge into the western desert, there was a delay. Lidgerwood was stillat the breakfast-table when Bradford, the conductor, black-shirted andlooking, in his slouch hat and riding-leggings, more like ahorse-wrangler than a captain of railroad trains, lounged in to explainthat there was a hot box under the 266's tender. Bradford was not of anyfaction of discontent, but the spirit of morose insubordination, born ofthe late change in management, was in the air, and he spoke gruffly.Hence, with the flint and steel thus provided, the spark was promptlyevoked.
"Were the boxes properly overhauled before you left Copah?" demanded thenew boss.
Bradford did not know, and the manner of his answer implied that he didnot care. And for good measure he threw in an intimation thatroundhouse dope kettles were not in his line.
Lidgerwood passed over the large impudence and held to the matter inhand.
"How much time have we on 201?" he asked, Train 201 being the westboundpassenger overtaken and left behind in the small hours of the morning bythe lighter and faster special.
"Thirty minutes, here," growled the little brother of the cows; afterwhich he took himself off as if he considered the incident sufficientlyclosed.
Fifteen minutes later Lidgerwood finished his breakfast and went back tohis camp-chair on the observation platform of the service-car. A glanceover the side rail showed him his train crew still working on the heatedaxle-bearing. Another to the rear picked up the passenger-train stormingaround the climbing curves of the eastern approach to the summit. Therewas a small problem impending for the division despatcher at Angels, andthe new superintendent held aloof to see how it would be handled.
It was handled rather indifferently. The passenger-train was pulling inover the summit switches when Bradford, sauntering into the telegraphoffice as if haste were the last thing in the world to be considered,asked for his clearance card, got it, and gave Williams the signal togo.
Lidgerwood got up and went into the car to consult the time-tablehanging in the office compartment. Train 201 had no dead time atCrosswater; hence, if the ten-minute interval between trains of the sameclass moving in the same direction was to be preserved, the passengerwould have to be held.
The assumption that the passenger-train would be held aroused all therailroad martinet's fury in the new superintendent. In Lidgerwood'scalendar, time-killing on regular trains stood next to an infringementof the rules providing for the safety of life and property. His hand wason the signal-cord when, chancing to look back, he saw that thepassenger-train had made only the momentary time-card stop at the summitstation, and was coming on.
This turned the high crime into a mere breach of discipline, commonenough even on well-managed railroads when the leading train can betrusted to increase the distance interval. But again the martinet inLidgerwood protested. It was his theory that rules were made to beobserved, and his experience had proved that little infractions pavedthe way for great ones. In the present instance, however, it was toolate to interfere; so he drew a chair out in line with one of the rearobservation windows and sat down to mark the event.
Pitching over the hilltop summit, within a minute of each other, the twotrains raced down the first few curving inclines almost as one. Mileafter mile was covered, and still the perilous situation remainedunchanged. Down the short tangents and around the constantly recurringcurves the special seemed to be towing the passenger at the end of aninvisible but dangerously short drag-rope.
Lidgerwood began to grow uneasy. On the straight-line stretches thefollowing train appeared to be rushing onward to an inevitable rear-endcollision with the one-car special; and where the track swerved to rightor left around the hills, the pursuing smoke trail rose above theintervening hill-shoulders near and threatening. With the parts of agreat machine whirling in unison and nicely timed to escape destruction,a small accident to a single cog may spell disaster.
Lidgerwood left his chair and went again to consult the time-table. Abrief comparison of miles with minutes explained the effect withoutexcusing the cause. Train 201's schedule from the summit station to thedesert level was very fast; and Williams, nursing his hot box, eithercould not, or would not, increase his lead.
At first, Lidgerwood, anticipating rebellion, was inclined to charge thehazardous situation to intention on the part of his own train crew.Having a good chance to lie out of it if they were accused, Williams andBradford might be deliberately trying the nerve of the new boss. Thepresumption did not breed fear; it bred wrath, hot and vindictive. Twosharp tugs at the signal-cord brought Bradford from the engine. Thememory of the conductor's gruff replies and easy impudence was freshenough to make Lidgerwood's reprimand harsh.
"Do you call this railroading?" he rasped, pointing backward to themenace. "Don't you know that we are on 201's time?"
Bradford scowled in surly antagonism.
"That blamed hot box--" he began, but Lidgerwood cut him off short.
"The hot box has nothing to do with the case. You are not hired to takechances, or to hold out regular trains. Go forward and tell yourengineer to speed up and get out of the way."
"I got my clearance at the summit, and I ain't despatchin' trains onthis jerk-water railroad," observed the conductor coolly. Then headded, with a shade less of the belligerent disinterest: "Williams can'tspeed up. That housin' under the tender is about ready to blaze up andset the woods afire again, right now."
Once more Lidgerwood turned to the time-card. It was twenty milesfarther along to the next telegraph station, and he heaped up wrathagainst the day of wrath in store for a despatcher who would
recklesslyturn two trains loose and out of his reach under such criticalconditions, for thirty hazardous mountain miles.
Bradford, looking on sullenly, mistook the new boss's frown for more tofollow, with himself for the target, and was moving away. Lidgerwoodpointed to a chair with a curt, "Sit down!" and the conductor obeyedreluctantly.
"You say you have your clearance card, and that you are not despatchingtrains," he went on evenly, "but neither fact relieves you of yourresponsibility. It was your duty to make sure that the despatcher fullyunderstood the situation at Crosswater, and to refuse to pull out aheadof the passenger without something more definite than a formal permit.Weren't you taught that? Where did you learn to run trains?"
It was an opening for hard words, but the conductor let it pass.Something in the steady, business-like tone, or in the shrewdlyappraisive eyes, turned Bradford the potential mutineer into Bradfordthe possible partisan.
"I reckon we are needing a _rodeo_ over here on this jerk-water mightybad, Mr. Lidgerwood," he said, half humorously. "Take us coming andgoing, about half of us never had the sure-enough railroad brand putonto us, nohow. But, Lord love you! this little _pasear_ we're makingdown this hill ain't anything! That's the old 210 chasin' us with thepassenger, and she couldn't catch Bat Williams and the '66 in a month o'Sundays if we didn't have that doggoned spavined leg under the tender.She sure couldn't."
Lidgerwood smiled in spite of his annoyance, and wondered at what pagein the railroad primer he would have to begin in teaching these men ofthe camps and the round-ups.
"But it isn't railroading," he insisted, meeting his first pupilhalf-way, and as man to man. "You might do this thing ninety-nine timeswithout paying for it, and the hundredth time something would turn up toslow or to stop the leading train, and there you are."
"Sure!" said the ex-cowboy, quite heartily.
"Now, if there should happen to be----"
The sentence was never finished. The special, lagging a little now indeference to the smoking hot box, was rounding one of the long hillcurves to the left. Suddenly the air-brakes ground sharply upon thewheels, shrill whistlings from the 266 sounded the stop signal, and pastthe end of the slowing service-car a trackman ran frantically up theline toward the following passenger, yelling and swinging his strippedcoat like a madman.
Lidgerwood caught a fleeting glimpse of a section gang's green "slow"flag lying toppled over between the rails a hundred feet to the rear.Measuring the distance of the onrushing passenger-train against thelife-saving seconds remaining, he called to Bradford to jump, and thenran forward to drag the Japanese cook out of his galley.
It was all over in a moment. There was time enough for Lidgerwood torush the little Tadasu to the forward vestibule, to fling him intospace, and to make his own flying leap for safety before the crisiscame. Happily there was no wreck, though the margin of escape was thenarrowest. Williams stuck to his post in the cab of the 266, applyingand releasing the brakes, and running as far ahead as he dared upon theloosened timbers of the culvert, for which the section gang's slowflagwas out. Carter, the engineer on the passenger-train, jumped; but hisfireman was of better mettle and stayed with the machine, sliding thewheels with the driver-jams, and pumping sand on the rails up to themoment when the shuddering mass of iron and steel thrust its pilot underthe trucks of Lidgerwood's car, lifted them, dropped them, and drew backsullenly in obedience to the pull of the reverse and the recoil of thebrake mechanism.
It was an excellent opportunity for eloquence of the explosive sort, andwhen the dust had settled the track and trainmen were evidentlyexpecting the well-deserved tongue-lashing. But in crises like this thenew superintendent was at his self-contained best. Instead of swearingat the men, he gave his orders quietly and with the brisk certainty ofone who knows his trade. The passenger-train was to keep ten minutesbehind its own time until the next siding was passed, making up beyondthat point if its running orders permitted. The special was to proceedon 201's time to the siding in question, at which point it wouldside-track and let the passenger precede it.
Bradford was in the cab of 266 when Williams eased his engine and theservice-car over the unsafe culvert, and inched the throttle open forthe speeding race down the hill curves toward the wide valley plain ofthe Red Desert.
"Turn it loose, Andy," said the big engineman, when the requisite numberof miles of silence had been ticked off by the space-devouring wheels."What-all do you think of Mister Collars-and-Cuffs by this time?"
Bradford took a leisurely minute to whittle a chewing cube from hispocket plug of hard-times tobacco.
"Well, first dash out o' the box, I allowed he was some locoed; hejumped me like a jack-rabbit for takin' a clearance right under JimCarter's nose that-a-way. Then we got down to business, and I was justbeginning to get onto his gait a little when the green flag butted in."
"Gait fits the laundry part of him?" suggested Williams.
"It does and it don't. I ain't much on systems and sure things, Bat, butI can make out to guess a guess, once in a while, when I have to. Ifthat little tailor-made man don't get his finger mashed, or something,and have to go home and get somebody to poultice it, things are goin' tohave a spell of happenings on this little old cow-trail of a railroad.That's my ante."
"What sort of things?" demanded Williams.
"When it comes to that, your guess is as good as mine, but they'llspell trouble for the amatoors and the trouble-makers, I reckon. I ain'tplacin' any bets yet, but that's about the way it stacks up to me."
Williams let the 266 out another notch, hung out of his window to lookback at the smoking hot box, and, in the complete fulness of time, said,"Think he's got the sand, Andy?"
"This time you've got me goin'," was the slow reply. "Sizing him up oneside and down the other when he called me back to pull my ear, I said,'No, my young bronco-buster; you're a bluffer--the kind that'll put upboth hands right quick when the bluff is called.' Afterward, I wasn't soblamed sure. One kind o' sand he's got, to a dead moral certainty. Whenhe saw what was due to happen back yonder at the culvert, he told me'23,' all right, but he took time to hike up ahead and yank that Japcook out o' the car-kitchen before he turned his own little handspringinto the ditch."
The big engineer nodded, but he was still unconvinced when he made thestop for the siding at Last Chance. After the fireman had dropped off toset the switch for the following train, Williams put the unconvincementinto words.
"That kind of sand is all right in God's country, Andy, but out here inthe nearer edges of hell you got to know how to fight with pitchforksand such other tools as come handy. The new boss may be that kind of ascrapper, but he sure don't look it. You know as well as I do that menlike Rufford and 'Cat' Biggs and Red-Light Sammy'll eat him alive, justfor the fun of it, if he can't make out to throw lead quicker'n theycan. And that ain't saying anything about the hobo outfit he'll have togo up against on this make-b'lieve railroad."
"No," agreed Bradford, ruminating thoughtfully. And then, by way ofrounding out the subject: "Here's hopin' his nerve is as good as hisclothes. I don't love a Mongolian any better'n you do, Bat, but the wayhe hustled to save that little brown man's skin sort o' got next to me;it sure did. Says I, 'A man that'll do that won't go round hunting achance to kick a fice-dog just because the fice don't happen to be ablooded bull-terrier.'"
Williams, brawny and broad-chested, leaned against his box, his barearms folded and his short pipe at the disputatious angle.
"He'd better have nerve, or get some," he commented. "T'otherways it'shim for an early wooden overcoat and a trip back home in theexpress-car. After which, let me tell you, Andy, that man Ford'll siftthis cussed country through a flour-shaker but what he'll cinch theoutfit that does it. You write that out in your car-report."
Back in the service-car Lidgerwood was sitting quietly in the doorway,smoking his delayed after-breakfast cigar, and timing the up-comingpassenger-train, watch in hand. Carter was ten minutes, to the exactsecond, behind his schedule time when the
train thundered past on themain track, and Lidgerwood pocketed his watch with a smile ofsatisfaction. It was the first small victory in the campaign for reform.
Later, however, when the special was once more in motion westward, thedesert laid hold upon him with the grip which first benumbs, then breedsdull rage, and finally makes men mad. Mile after mile the glisteningrails sped backward into a shimmering haze of red dust. The glow of thebreathless forenoon was like the blinding brightness of a forge-fire. Toright and left the great treeless plain rose to bare buttes, backed bystill barer mountains. Let the train speed as it would, there was alwaysthe same wearying prospect, devoid of interest, empty of humanlandmarks. Only the blazing sun swung from side to side with the slowveerings of the track: what answered for a horizon seemed never tochange, never to move.
At long intervals a siding, sometimes with its waiting train, butoftener empty and deserted, slid into view and out again. Still lessfrequently a telegraph station, with its red, iron-roofed office, itswater-tank cars and pumping machinery, and its high-fenced corral andloading chute, moved up out of the distorting heat haze ahead, and waslost in the dusty mirages to the rear. But apart from the crews of thewaiting trains, and now and then the desert-sobered face of sometelegraph operator staring from his window at the passing special, therewere no signs of life: no cattle upon the distant hills, no loungers onthe station platforms.
Lidgerwood had crossed this arid, lifeless plain twice within the weekon his preliminary tour of inspection, but both times he had been in thePullman, with fellow-passengers to fill the nearer field of vision andto temper the awful loneliness of the waste. Now, however, the desertwith its heat, its stillness, its vacancy, its pitiless barrenness,claimed him as its own. He wondered that he had been impatient with themen it bred. The wonder now was that human virtue of any temper couldlong withstand the blasting touch of so great and awful a desolation.
It was past noon when the bowl-like basin, in which the train seemed tocircle helplessly without gaining upon the terrifying horizons, began tolose its harshest features. Little by little, the tumbled hills drewnearer, and the red-sand dust of the road-bed gave place to broken lava.Patches of gray, sun-dried mountain grass appeared on the passing hillslopes, and in the arroyos trickling threads of water glistened, or, ifthe water were hidden, there were at least paths of damp sand to hint atthe blessed moisture underneath.
Lidgerwood began to breathe again; and when the shrill whistle of thelocomotive signalled the approach to the division head-quarters, he wasthankful that the builders of Angels had pitched their tents and driventheir stakes in the desert's edge, rather than in its heart.
Truly, Angels was not much to be thankful for, as the exile from theEast regretfully admitted when he looked out upon it from the windows ofhis office in the second story of the Crow's Nest. A many-trackedrailroad yard, flanked on one side by the repair shops, roundhouse, andcoal-chutes; and on the other by a straggling town of bare andcommonplace exteriors, unpainted, unfenced, treeless, and wind-swept:Angels stood baldly for what it was--a mere stopping-place in transitfor the Red Butte Western.
The new superintendent turned his back upon the depressing outlook andlaid his hand upon the latch of the door opening into the adjoiningroom. There was a thing to be said about the reckless bunching of trainsout of reach of the wires, and it might as well be said now as later, hedetermined. But at the moment of door-opening he was made to realizethat a tall, box-like contrivance in one corner of the office was adesk, and that it was inhabited.
The man who rose up to greet him was bearded, heavy-shouldered, andhollow-eyed, and he was past middle age. Green cardboard conesprotecting his shirt-sleeves, and a shade of the same material visoringthe sunken eyes, were the only clerkly suggestions about him. Since hemerely stood up and ran his fingers through his thick black hair, withno more than an abstracted "Good-afternoon" for speech, Lidgerwood wasleft to guess at his identity.
"You are Mr. Hallock?" Lidgerwood made the guess without offering toshake hands, the high, box-like desk forbidding the attempt.
"Yes." The answer was neither antagonistic nor placatory; it was merelycolorless.
"My name is Lidgerwood. You have heard of my appointment?"
Again the colorless "Yes."
Lidgerwood saw no good end to be subserved by postponing the inevitable.
"Mr. Ford spoke to me about you last night. He told me that you had beenMr. Cumberley's chief clerk, and that since Cumberley's resignation youhave been acting superintendent of the Red Butte Western. Do you want tostay on as my lieutenant?"
For the long minute that Hallock took before replying, the loose-lippedmouth under the shaggy mustache seemed to have lost the power of speech.But when the words finally came, they were shorn of all euphemism.
"I suppose I ought to tell you to go straight to hell, Mr. Lidgerwood,put on my coat and walk out," said this most singular of all railwaysubordinates. "By all the rules of the game, this job belongs to me.What I've gone through to earn it, you nor any other man will ever know.If I stay, I'll wish I hadn't; and so will you. You'd better give me atime-check and let me go."
Lidgerwood walked to the window and once more stared out upon the drearyprospect, bounded by the bluffs of the second mesa. A horseman wasambling down the single street of the town, weaving in his saddle, andgiving vent to a series of Indian war-whoops. Lidgerwood saw the drunkencowboy only with the outward eye. And when he turned back to the man inthe rifle-pit desk, he could not have told why the words of regret anddismissal which he had made up his mind to say, refused to come. Butthey did refuse, and what he said was not at all what he had intended tosay.
"If I can't quite match your frankness, Mr. Hallock, it is because myearly education was neglected. But I'll say this: I appreciate yourdisappointment; I know what it means to a man situated as you are.Notwithstanding, I want you to stay with me. I'll say more; I shall takeit as a personal favor if you will stay."
"You'll be sorry for it if I do," was the ungracious rejoinder.
"Not because you will do anything to make me sorry, I am sure," said thenew superintendent, in his evenest tone. And then, as if the matter weredefinitely settled: "I'd like to have a word with the trainmaster, Mr.McCloskey. May I trouble you to tell me which is his office?"
Hallock waved a hand toward the door which Lidgerwood had been about toopen a few minutes earlier.
"You'll find him in there," he said briefly, adding, with hisaltogether remarkable disregard for the official proprieties: "If hegives you the same chance that I did, don't take him up. He is the oneman in this outfit worth more than the powder it would take to blow himto the devil."
The Taming of Red Butte Western Page 3