V
THE OUTLAWS
For the first few weeks after the change in ownership and the arrival ofthe new superintendent, the Red Butte Western and its nerve-centre,Angels, seemed disposed to take Mr. Howard Lidgerwood as a ratherill-timed joke, perpetrated upon a primitive West and its people by someone of the Pacific Southwestern magnates who owned a broad sense ofhumor.
During this period the sardonic laugh was heard in the land, and thechuckling appreciation of the joke by the Red Butte rank and file, andby the Angelic soldiers of fortune who, though not upon the company'spay-rolls, still throve indirectly upon the company's bounty, lackednothing of completeness. The Red Desert grinned like the famed Cheshirecat when an incoming train from the East brought sundry boxes andtrunks, said to contain the new boss's wardrobe. Its guffaws were longand uproarious when it began to be noised about that the companycarpenters and fitters were installing a bath and other civilizing andsoftening appliances in the alcove opening out of the superintendent'ssleeping-room in the head-quarters building.
Lidgerwood slept in the Crow's Nest, not so much from choice as for thereason that there seemed to be no alternative save a room in the towntavern, appropriately named "The Hotel Celestial." Between hissleeping-apartment and his private office there was only a thin boardpartition; but even this gave him more privacy than the Celestial couldoffer, where many of the partitions were of building-paper, muslincovered.
It is a railroad proverb that the properly inoculated railroad man eatsand sleeps with his business; Lidgerwood exemplified the saying byhaving a wire cut into the despatcher's office, with the terminals on alittle table at his bed's head, and with a tiny telegraph relayinstrument mounted on the stand. Through the relay, tapping softly inthe darkness, came the news of the line, and often, after the strenuousday was ended, Lidgerwood would lie awake listening.
Sometimes the wire gossiped, and echoes of Homeric laughter trickledthrough the relay in the small hours; as when Ruby Creek asked the nightdespatcher if it were true that the new boss slept in what translateditself in the laborious Morse of the Ruby Creek operator as"pijjimmies"; or when Navajo, tapping the same source of information,wished to be informed if the "Chink"--doubtless referring to TadasuMatsuwari--ran a laundry on the side and thus kept His Royal Highness incollars and cuffs.
At the tar-paper-covered, iron-roofed Celestial, where he took hismeals, Lidgerwood had a table to himself, which he shared at times withMcCloskey, and at other times with breezy Jack Benson, the youngengineer whom Vice-President Ford had sent, upon Lidgerwood's requestand recommendation, to put new life into the track force, and to makethe preliminary surveys for a possible western extension of the road.
When the superintendent had guests, the long table on the opposite sideof the dining-room restrained itself. When he ate alone, Maggie Donovan,the fiery-eyed, heavy-handed table-girl who ringed his plate with thesemicircle of ironstone portion dishes, stood between him and the menwho were still regarding him as a joke. And since Maggie's displeasuremanifested itself in cold coffee and tough cuts of the beef, the longtable made its most excruciating jests elaborately impersonal.
On the line, and in the roundhouse and repair-shops, the joke was fartoo good to be muzzled. The nickname, "Collars-and-Cuffs," becameclassical; and once, when Brannagan and the 117 were ordered out on theservice-car, the Irishman wore the highest celluloid collar he couldfind in Angels, rounding out the clownery with a pair of huge wickerwarecuffs, which had once seen service as the coverings of a pair ofMaraschino bottles.
No official notice having been taken of Brannagan's fooling, Buck Tryon,ordered out on the same duty, went the little Irishman one better,decorating his engine headlight and handrails with festoonings ofcolored calico, the decoration figuring as a caricature of Lidgerwood'scollege colors, and calico being the nearest approach to buntingobtainable at Jake Schleisinger's emporium, two doors north of Red-LightSammy's house of call.
All of which was harmless enough, one would say, however subversive ofdignified discipline it might be. Lidgerwood knew. The jests were toobroad to be missed. But he ignored them good-naturedly, rather thankfulfor the playful interlude which gave him a breathing-space and time tostudy the field before the real battle should begin.
That a battle would have to be fought was evident enough. As yet, thedemoralization had been scarcely checked, and sooner or later thenecessary radical reforms would have to begin. Gridley, whose attitudetoward the new superintendent continued to be that of a disinterestedadviser, assured Lidgerwood that he was losing ground by not opening thecampaign of severity at once.
"You'll have to take a club to these hoboes before you can ever hope tomake railroad men out of them," was Gridley's oft-repeated assertion;and the fact that the master-mechanic was continually urging the warfaremade Lidgerwood delay it.
Just why Gridley's counsel should have produced such a contrary effect,Lidgerwood could not have explained. The advice was sound, and the manwho gave it was friendly and apparently ingenuous. But prejudices, likeprepossessions, are sometimes as strong as they are inexplicable, andwhile Lidgerwood freely accused himself of injustice toward themaster-mechanic, a certain feeling of distrust and repulsion, datingback to his first impressions of the man, died hard.
Oddly enough, on the other hand, there was a prepossession, quite asunreasoning, for Hallock. There was absolutely nothing in the chiefclerk to inspire liking, or even common business confidence; on thecontrary, while Hallock attended to his duties and carried out hissuperior's instructions with the exactness of an automaton, his attitudewas distinctly antagonistic. As the chief subaltern on Lidgerwood'ssmall staff he was efficient and well-nigh invaluable. But as a man,Lidgerwood felt that he might easily be regarded as an enemy whosedesigns could never be fathomed or prefigured.
In spite of Hallock's singular manner, which was an abrupt challenge toall comers, Lidgerwood acknowledged a growing liking for the chiefclerk. Under the crabbed and gloomy crust of the man the superintendentfancied he could discover a certain savage loyalty. But under theloyalty there was a deeper depth--of misery, or tragedy, or both; and tothis abysmal part of him there was no key that Lidgerwood could find.
McCloskey, who had served under Hallock for a number of months beforethe change in management, confessed that he knew the gloomy chief clerkonly as a man in authority, and exceedingly hard to please. Questionedmore particularly by Lidgerwood, McCloskey added that Hallock wasmarried; that after the first few months in Angels his wife, astrikingly beautiful young woman, had disappeared, and that since herdeparture Hallock had lived alone in two rooms over the freight station,rooms which no one, save himself, ever entered.
These, and similar bits of local history, were mere gatherings by theway for the superintendent, picked up while the Red Desert was havingits laugh at the new bath-room, the pajamas, and the clean linen. Theyweighed lightly, because the principal problem was, as yet, untouched.For while the laugh endured, Lidgerwood had not found it possible tobreach many of the strongholds of lawlessness.
Orders, regarded by disciplined railroad men as having the immutabilityof the laws of the Medes and Persians, were still interpreted as looselyas if they were but the casual suggestions of a bystander. Rules wereformulated and given black-letter emphasis in their postings on thebulletin boards, only to be coolly ignored when they chanced to conflictwith some train crew's desire to make up time or to kill it. Directed toaccount for fuel and oil consumed, the enginemen good-naturedly forgedreports and the storekeepers blandly O.K.'d them. Instructed to keep anaccurate record of all material used, the trackmen jocosely scatteredmore spikes than they drove, made fire-wood of the stock cross-ties, andwere not above underpinning the section-houses with new dimensiontimbers.
In countless other ways the waste was prodigious and often mysteriouslyunexplainable. The company supplies had a curious fashion ofdisappearing in transit. Two car-loads of building lumber sent to repairthe station at Red Butte vanished somewhere between the Angel
sshipping-yards and their billing destination. Lime, cement, and paintwere exceedingly volatile. House hardware, purchased in quantities forcompany repairs, figured in the monthly requisition sheet as regularlyas coal and oil; and the lost-tool account roughly balanced the pay-rollof the company carpenters and bridge-builders.
In such a chaotic state of affairs, track and train troubles were therule rather than the exception, and it was a Red Butte Western boastthat the fire was never drawn under the wrecking-train engine. For thefirst few weeks Lidgerwood let McCloskey answer the "hurry calls" to thevarious scenes of disaster, but when three sections of an eastboundcattle special, ignoring the ten-minute-interval rule, were piled up inthe Pinon Hills, he went out and took personal command of thetrack-clearers.
This happened when the joke was at flood-tide, and the men of thewrecking-crew took a ten-gallon keg of whiskey along wherewith tocelebrate the first appearance of the new superintendent in character asa practical wrecking-boss. The outcome was rather astonishing. For onething, Lidgerwood's first executive act was to knock in the head of theten-gallon celebration with a striking-hammer, before it was evenspiggoted; and for another he quickly proved that he was Gridley'sequal, if not his master, in the gentle art of track-clearing; lastly,and this was the most astonishing thing of all, he demonstrated thatclean linen and correct garmentings do not necessarily make for softnessand effeminacy in the wearer. Through the long day and the still longernight of toil and stress the new boss was able to endure hardship withthe best man on the ground.
This was excellent, as far as it went. But later, with the offendingcattle-train crews before him for trial and punishment, Lidgerwood lostall he had gained by being too easy.
"We've got him chasin' his feet," said Tryon, one of the rule-breakingengineers, making his report to the roundhouse contingent at the closeof the "sweat-box" interview. "It's just as I've been tellin' you mugsall along, he hain't got sand enough to fire anybody."
Likewise Jack Benson, though from a friendlier point of view. The"sweat-box" was Lidgerwood's private office in the Crow's Nest, andBenson happened to be present when the reckless trainmen were told to goand sin no more.
"I'm not running your job, Lidgerwood, and you may fire the inkstand atme if the spirit moves you to, but I've got to butt in. You can't handlethe Red Desert with kid gloves on. Those fellows needed an artisticcussing-out and a thirty-day hang-up at the very lightest. You can'thold 'em down with Sunday-school talk."
Lidgerwood was frowning at his blotting-pad and pencilling idle littlesquares on it--a habit which was insensibly growing upon him.
"Where would I get the two extra train-crews to fill in the thirty-daylay-off, Jack? Had you thought of that?"
"I had only the one think, and I gave you that one," rejoined Bensoncarelessly. "I suppose it is different in your department. When I go upagainst a thing like that on the sections, I fire the whole bunch andimport a few more Italians. Which reminds me, as old Dunkenfeld used tosay when there wasn't either a link or a coupling-pin anywhere withinthe four horizons: what do you know about Fred Dawson, Gridley's shopdraftsman?"
"Next to nothing, personally," replied Lidgerwood, taking Benson'sabrupt change of topic as a matter of course. "He seems a fine fellow;much too fine a fellow to be wasting himself out here in the desert.Why?"
"Oh, I just wanted to know. Ever met his mother and sister?"
"No."
"Well, you ought to. The mother is one of the only two angels in Angels,and the sister is the other. Dawson, himself, is a ghastly monomaniac."
Lidgerwood's brows lifted, though his query was unspoken.
"Haven't you heard his story?" asked Benson; "but of course you haven't.He is a lame duck, you know--like every other man this side ofCrosswater Summit, present company excepted."
"A lame duck?" repeated Lidgerwood.
"Yes, a man with a past. Don't tell me you haven't caught onto thehall-mark of the Red Desert. It's notorious. The blacklegs and tin-hornsand sure-shots go without saying, of course, but they haven't amonopoly on the broken records. Over in the ranch country beyond theTimanyonis they lump us all together and call us the outlaws."
"Not without reason," said Lidgerwood.
"Not any," asserted Benson with cheerful pessimism. "The entire RedButte Western outfit is tarred with the same stick. You haven't a dozenoperators, all told, who haven't been discharged for incompetence, orworse, somewhere else; or a dozen conductors or engineers who weren'tgood and comfortably blacklisted before they climbed Crosswater. TakeMcCloskey: you swear by him, don't you? He was a chief despatcher backEast, and he put two passenger-trains together in a head-on collisionthe day he resigned and came West to grow up with the Red Desert."
"I know," said Lidgerwood, "and I did not have to learn it atsecond-hand. Mac was man enough to tell me himself, before I had knownhim five minutes." Then he suggested mildly, "But you were speaking ofDawson, weren't you?"
"Yes, and that's what makes me say what I'm saying; he is one of them,though he needn't be if he weren't such a hopelessly sensitive ass. He'sa B.S. in M.E., or he would have been if he had stayed out his senioryear in Carnegie, but also he happened to be a foot-ball fiend, and inthe last intercollegiate game of his last season he had the horribleluck to kill a man--and the man was the brother of the girl Dawson wasgoing to marry."
"Heavens and earth!" exclaimed Lidgerwood. "Is he _that_ Dawson?"
"The same," said the young engineer laconically. "It was the sheerestaccident, and everybody knew it was, and nobody blamed Dawson. I happento know, because I was a junior in Carnegie at the time. But Fred tookit hard; let it spoil his life. He threw up everything, left collegebetween two days, and came to bury himself out here. For two years henever let his mother and sister know where he was; made remittances tothem through a bank in Omaha, so they shouldn't be able to trace him.Care to hear any more?"
"Yes, go on," said the superintendent.
"_I_ found him," chuckled Benson, "and I took the liberty of piping hislittle game off to the harrowed women. Next thing he knew they droppedin on him; and he is just crazy enough to stay here, and to keep themhere. That wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for Gridley, Fred's boss andyour peach of a master-mechanic."
"Why 'peach'? Gridley is a pretty decent sort of a man-driver, isn'the?" said Lidgerwood, doing premeditated and intentional violence towhat he had come to call his unjust prejudice against the handsomemaster-mechanic.
"You won't believe it," said Benson hotly, "but he has actually got thenerve to make love to Dawson's sister! and he a widow-man, old enough tobe her father!"
Lidgerwood smiled. It is the privilege of youth to be intolerant of agein its rival. Gridley was, possibly, forty-two or three, but Benson wasstill on the sunny slope of twenty-five. "You are prejudiced, Jack," hecriticized. "Gridley is still young enough to marry again, if he wantsto--and to live long enough to spoil his grandchildren."
"But he doesn't begin to be good enough for Faith Dawson," countered theyoung engineer, stubbornly.
"Isn't he? or is that another bit of your personal grudge? What do youknow against him?"
Pressed thus sharply against the unyielding fact, Benson was obliged toconfess that he knew nothing at all against the master-mechanic, nothingthat could be pinned down to day and date. If Gridley had the weaknessescommon to Red-Desert mankind, he did not parade them in Angels. As thehead of his department he was well known to be a hard hitter; and nowand then, when the blows fell rather mercilessly, the railroad colonycalled him a tyrant, and hinted that he, too, had a past that would notbear inspection. But even Benson admitted that this was mere gossip.
Lidgerwood laughed at the engineer's failure to make his case, and askedquizzically, "Where do I come in on all this, Jack? You have an axe togrind, I take it."
"I have. Mrs. Dawson wants me to take my meals at the house. I'minclined to believe that she is a bit shy of Gridley, and maybe shethinks I could do the buffer act. But as a get-between I'd be chieflyconspicu
ous by my absence."
"Sorry I can't give you an office job," said the superintendent in mocksympathy.
"So am I, but you can do the next best thing. Get Fred to take you homewith him some of these fine evenings, and you'll never go back to MaggieDonovan and the Celestial's individual hash-holders; not if you canpersuade Mrs. Dawson to feed you. The alternative is to fire Gridley outof his job."
"This time you are trying to make the tail wag the dog," saidLidgerwood. "Gridley has twice my backing in the P. S-W. board ofdirectors. Besides, he is a good fellow; and if I go up on the mesa andtry to stand him off for you, it will be only because I hope you are abetter fellow."
"Prop it up on any leg you like, only go," said Benson simply. "I'lltake it as a personal favor, and do as much for you, some time. Isuppose I don't have to warn you not to fall in love with Faith Dawsonyourself--or, on second thought, perhaps I _had_ better."
This time Lidgerwood's laugh was mirthless.
"No, you don't have to, Jack. Like Gridley, I am older than I look, andI have had my little turn at that wheel; or rather, perhaps I should saythat the wheel has had its little turn at me. You can safely deputizeme, I guess."
"All right, and many thanks. Here's 202 coming in, and I'm going over toNavajo on it. Don't wait too long before you make up to Dawson. You'llfind him well worth while, after you've broken through his shell."
The merry jest on the Red Butte Western ran its course for another weekafter the three-train wreck in the Pinons--for a week and a day. ThenLidgerwood began the drawing of the net. A new time-card was strung withMcCloskey's cooperation, and when it went into effect a notice on allbulletin boards announced the adoption of the standard "Book of Rules,"and promised penalties in a rising scale for unauthorized departuretherefrom.
Promptly the horse-laugh died away and the trouble storm was evoked.Grievance committees haunted the Crow's Nest, and the insurrectionaryfaction, starting with the trainmen and spreading to the track force,threatened to involve the telegraph operators--threatened to become aprotest unanimous and in the mass. Worse than this, the service,haphazard enough before, now became a maddening chaos. Orders weremisunderstood, whether wilfully or not no court of inquiry coulddetermine; wrecks were of almost daily occurrence, and the shop trackwas speedily filled to the switches with crippled engines and cars.
In such a storm of disaster and disorder the captain in command soonfinds and learns to distinguish his loyal supporters, if any such therebe. In the pandemonium of untoward events, McCloskey was Lidgerwood'sright hand, toiling, smiting, striving, and otherwise approving himselfa good soldier. But close behind him came Gridley; always suave andgood-natured, making no complaints, not even when the repair work madenecessary by the innumerable wrecks grew mountain-high, and alwayscounselling firmness and more discipline.
"This is just what we have been needing for years, Mr. Lidgerwood," hetook frequent occasion to say. "Of course, we have now to pay thepenalty for the sins of our predecessors; but if you will persevere,we'll pull through and be a railroad in fact when the clouds roll by.Don't give in an inch. Show these muckers that you mean business, andmean it all the time, and you'll win out all right."
Thus the master-mechanic; and McCloskey, with more at stake and a lessinsulated point of view, took it out in good, hard blows, backing hissuperior like a man. Indeed, in the small head-quarters staff, Hallockwas the only non-combatant. From the beginning of hostilities he seemedto have made a pact with himself not to let it be known by any act orword of his that he was aware of the suddenly precipitated conflict. Theroutine duties of a chief clerk's desk are never light; Hallock's becameso exacting that he rarely left his office, or the pen-like contrivancein which he entrenched himself and did his work.
When the fight began, Lidgerwood observed Hallock closely, trying todiscover if there were any secret signs of the satisfaction which therevolt of the rank and file might be supposed to awaken in anunsuccessful candidate for the official headship of the Red ButteWestern. There were none. Hallock's gaunt face, with the loose lips andthe straggling, unkempt beard, was a blank; and the worst wreck of thethree which promptly followed the introduction of the new rules, wasnoted in his reports with the calm indifference with which he might havejotted down the breakage of a section foreman's spike-maul.
McCloskey, being of Scottish blood and desert-seasoned, was a coolin-fighter who could take punishment without wincing overmuch. But atthe end of the first fortnight of the new time-card, he cornered hischief in the private office and freed his mind.
"It's no use, Mr. Lidgerwood; we can't make these reforms stick with theoutfit we've got," he asserted, in sharp discouragement. "The next thingon the docket will be a strike, and you know what that will mean, in acountry where the whiskey is bad and nine men out of every ten go fixedfor trouble."
"I know; nevertheless the reforms have got to stick," returnedLidgerwood definitively. "We are going to run this railroad as it shouldbe run, or hang it up in the air. Did you discharge that operator atCrow Canyon? the fellow who let Train 76 get by him without orders nightbefore last?"
"Dick Rufford? Oh yes, I fired him, and he came in on 202 to-day lugginga piece of artillery and shooting off his mouth about what he was goingto do to me ... and to you. I suppose you know that his brother Bart,they call him 'the killer', is the lookout at Red-Light Sammy Faro'sgame, and the meanest devil this side of the Timanyonis?"
"I didn't know it, but that cuts no figure." Lidgerwood forced himselfto say it, though his lips were curiously dry. "We are going to havediscipline on this railroad while we stay here, Mac; there are no twoways about that."
McCloskey tilted his hat to the bridge of his nose, his characteristicgesture of displeasure.
"I promised myself that I wouldn't join the gun-toters when I came outhere," he said, half musingly, "but I've weakened on that. Yesterday,when I was calling Jeff Cummings down for dropping that newshifting-engine out of an open switch in broad daylight, he pulled on meout of his cab window. What I had to take while he had me 'hands up' ismore than I'll take from any living man again."
As in other moments of stress and perplexity, Lidgerwood was absentlymarking little pencil squares on his desk blotter.
"I wouldn't get down to the desert level, if I were you, Mac," he saidthoughtfully.
"I'm down there right now, in self-defence," was the sober rejoinder."And if you'll take a hint from me you'll heel yourself, too, Mr.Lidgerwood. I know this country better than you do, and the men in it. Idon't say they'll come after you deliberately, but as things are now youcan't open your face to one of them without taking the chance of aquarrel, and a quarrel in a gun-country----"
"I know," said Lidgerwood patiently, and the trainmaster gave it up.
It was an hour or two later in the same day when McCloskey came into theprivate office again, hat tilted to nose, and the gargoyle faceportraying fresh soul agonies.
"They've taken to pillaging now!" he burst out. "The 316, that newsaddle-tank shifting-engine, has disappeared. I saw Broderick using the'95, and when I asked him why, he said he couldn't find the '16."
"Couldn't find it?" echoed Lidgerwood.
"No; nor I can't, either. It's nowhere in the yards, the roundhouse, orback shop, and none of Gridley's foremen know anything about it. I'vehad Callahan wire east and west, and if they're all telling the truth,nobody has seen it or heard of it."
"Where was it, at last accounts?"
"Standing on the coal track under chute number three, where the nightcrew left it at midnight, or thereabouts."
"But certainly somebody must know where it has gone," said Lidgerwood.
"Yes; and by grapples! I think I know who the somebody is."
"Who is it?"
"If I should tell you, you wouldn't believe it, and besides I haven'tgot the proof. But I'm going to get the proof," shaking a menacingforefinger, "and when I do----"
The interruption was the entrance of Hallock, coming in with thepay-rolls for the superi
ntendent's approval. McCloskey broke off shortand turned to the door, but Lidgerwood gave him a parting command.
"Come in again, Mac, in about half an hour. There is another matter thatI want to take up with you, and to-day is as good a time as any."
The trainmaster nodded and went out, muttering curses to the tilted hatbrim.
The Taming of Red Butte Western Page 5