by Zane Grey
He found it necessary to apply the brake so that he would not take the sharp curves at dangerous speed. The brake did not work well and gave indications that it would not stand a great deal. With steady, rattling creak and an occasional clank, the car rolled on.
If Casey remembered the lay of the land, there was a long, straight stretch of track, ending in several curves, the last of which turned sharply into the narrow cut where the Sioux would ambush and obstruct the train. At this point it was Casey’s intention to put off the brake and let his car run wild.
It seemed an endless time before he reached the head of that stretch. Then he let go of the wheel. And the gravel car began to roll on faster.
Casey appeared to be grimly and conscientiously concerned over a piece of difficult work. And he was worried about the outcome. He must get his car beyond that narrow cut. If it jumped the track or ran into an obstruction, or if the Sioux spied him in time, then his work would not be well done. He welcomed the gathering momentum, yet was fearful of the curve he saw a long distance ahead. When he reached that, he would be going at a high rate of speed—too fast to take the curve safely.
A little dimness came to Casey’s eyes. Years of hot sun and dust and desert wind had not made his eyes any stronger. The low gray walls, the white bleached rocks, the shallow stream of water, the fringe of brush, and the long narrowing track—all were momentarily indistinct in his sight. His breast seemed weighted. Over and over in his mind revolved the several possibilities that awaited him at the cut, and every rod of the distance now added to his worry. It grew to be dread. Chances were against him. The thing entrusted to him was not in his control. Casey resented this. He had never failed at a job. The U.P.R. had to be built—and who could tell?—if the chief engineer and all his staff and the directors of the road were massacred by the Sioux, perhaps that might be a last and crowning catastrophe.
Casey had his first cold thrill. And his nerves tightened for the crisis, while his horny hands gripped on the brake. The car was running wild, with a curve just ahead. It made an unearthly clatter. The Indians would hear that. But they would have to be swift, if he stayed on the track. Almost before he realized it the car lurched at the bend. Casey felt the offside wheels leave the rail, heard the scream of the inside wheels grinding hard. But for his grip on the wheel, he would have been thrown. The wind whistled in his ears. With a sudden lurch the car seemed to rise. Casey thought it had jumped the track. But it banged back, righted itself, rounded the curve.
Here the gully widened—sent off branches. Casey saw hundreds of horses—but not an Indian. He rolled swiftly on, crossed a bridge, and saw more horses. His grim anticipation became a reality. The Sioux were in the ambush. What depended on him and his luck! Casey’s red cheek blanched, but it was not with fear for himself. Not yet on this ride had he entertained one thought concerning his own personal relation to its fragile possibilities.
To know the Sioux were there made a tremendous difference. A dark and terrible sternness actuated Casey. He projected his soul into that clattering car of iron and wood. And it was certain he prayed. His hair stood straight up. There—the narrow cut in the hill! The curve of the track! He was pounding at it. The wheels shrieked. Looking up, he saw only the rocks and gray patches of brush and the bare streak of earth. No Indian showed.
His gaze strained to find an obstruction on the track. The car rode the curve on two wheels. It seemed alive. It entered the cut with a hollow, screeching roar. The shade of the narrow place was gloomy. Here! It must happen! Casey’s heart never lifted its ponderous weight. Then, shooting around the curve, he saw an open track and bright sunlight beyond.
Above the roar of wheels sounded spatting reports of rifles. Casey forgot to dodge into his gravel shelter. He was living a strange, dragging moment—an age. Out shot the car into the light. Likewise Casey’s dark blankness of mind ended. His heart lifted with mighty throb. There shone the gray endless slope, stretching out and down to the black hills in the distance. Shrill wild yells made Casey wheel. The hillside above the cut was colorful and spotted with moving objects. Indians! Puffs of white smoke arose. Casey felt the light impact of lead. Glancing bright streaks darted down. They were arrows. Two thudded into the gravel, one into the wood. Then something tugged at his shoulder. Another arrow! Suddenly the shaft was there in his sight, quivering in his flesh. It bit deep. With one wrench he tore it out and shook it aloft at the Sioux.
“Oi bate yez domn’ Sooz!” he yelled in fierce defiance. The long screeching clamor of baffled rage and the scattering volley of rifle shots kept up until the car passed out of range.
Casey faced ahead. The Sioux were behind him. He had a free track. Far down the gray valley, where the rails disappeared, were low streaks of black smoke from a locomotive. The general’s train was coming.
The burden of worry and dread that had been Casey’s was now no more—vanished as if by magic. His job had not yet been completed, but he had won. He never glanced back at the Sioux. They had failed in their first effort at ambushing the cut, and Casey knew the troops would prevent a second attempt. Casey faced ahead. The whistle of wind filled his ears, the dry, sweet odor of the desert filled his nostrils. His car was on a straight track, rolling along downgrade, half a mile a minute. And Casey, believing he might do well to slow up gradually, lightly put on the brake. But it did not hold. He tried again. The brake had broken.
He stood at the wheel, his eyes clear now, watching ahead. The train, down in the valley, was miles away, not yet even a black dot in the gray. The smoke, however, began to lift.
Casey was suddenly struck by a vague sense that something was wrong with him. “Phwat the hell,” he muttered. Then his mind, strangely absorbed, located the trouble. His pipe had gone out! Casey stooped in the hole he had made in the gravel, and there, knocking his pipe in his palm, he found the ashes cold. When had that ever happened before? Casey wagged his head. For his pipe to go cold and he not to know! Things were happening on the U.P.R. these days. Casey refilled the pipe, and, with the wind whistling over him, he relit it. He drew deep and long, stood up, grasped the wheel, and felt all his blood change.
“Me poipe goin’ cold . . . that wor funny,” soliloquized Casey. The phenomenon appeared remarkable to him. Indeed, it stood alone. He measured the nature of this job by that forgetfulness. And memories thrilled him. With his eye clear on the track that split the gray expanse, with his whole being permeated by the soothing influence of smoke, with his task almost done, Casey experienced an unprecedented thing for him—he lived over past performances and found them vivid, thrilling, somehow sweet. Battles of the Civil War; the day he saved a flag, and, better, the night he saved Pat Shane, who had lived only to stop a damned Sioux bullet; many and many an adventure with McDermott, who, just a few minutes past, had watched him with round, shining eyes; the fights he had seen and shared—these things passed swiftly through Casey’s mind and left more of pride than he had ever known and vaguely bore their relation on to this day when he had outwitted the Sioux and prevented a massacre.
He was pleased with himself—more pleased with what McDermott would think. Casey’s boyhood did not return to him, but his mounting exhilaration and all satisfaction were boyish. It was great to ride this way! There—he saw a long, black dot down in the gray. The train! General Lodge had once shaken hands with Casey.
Somebody had to do these things, since the U.P.R. must go across to the Pacific. A day would come when a splendid passenger train would glide smoothly down this easy grade where Casey jolted along on his gravel car. The fact loomed large in the simplicity of the Irishman. He began to hum his favorite song. Facing westward, he saw the black dot grow into a long train. Likewise, he saw the beauty of the red-gold sunset behind the hills. Casey gloried in the wildness of the scene—in the meaning of his ride—particularly in his loneliness. He seemed strangely alone there on that vast gray slope—a man—somehow accountable for all these things. He felt more than he understood. His long-tr
ied nerve and courage and strength had never yielded this buoyancy and sense of loftiness. He was Casey—Casey who had let all the gang run for shelter from the Sioux while he had remained for one last and final drive at a railroad spike. But the cool, devil-may-care indifference, common to all his comrades as well as to himself, was not the strongest factor in the Casey’s state today. Up out of the rugged and dormant soul had burst the spirit of a race embodied in one man. Casey was his own audience, and the light upon him was the glory of the setting sun. A nightingale sang in his heart, and he realized that this was his hour. Here the bloody, hard years found their reward. Not that he had ever wanted one or thought of one, but it had come—out of the toil, the pain, the weariness. So his nerves tingled, his pulses beat, his veins glowed, his heart throbbed, and all the new, sweet, young sensations of a boy wildly reveling in the success of his first great venture, all the vague, strange, deep, complex emotions of a man who has become conscious of what he was giving—these shook Casey by storm, and life had no more to give. He knew that, whatever he was, whatever this incomprehensible driving spirit in him, whatever his unknown relation to man and to duty, there had been given him in the peril just passed, in this wonderful ride, a gift splendid and divine.
Casey rolled on, and the train grew plain in his sight. When perhaps several miles of track lay between him and the approaching engine, he concluded it was time to get ready. Lifting one of the heavy ties, he laid it in front where he could quickly shove it off with his foot.
Then he stood up. It was certain that he looked backward, but at no particular thing, an instinctive glance. With his foot on the tie he steadied himself so that he could push it off and leap instantly after. And at that moment he remembered the little book he had found on Beauty Stanton’s breast, and which contained the letter to his friend Neale. Casey deliberated in spite of the necessity for speed. Then he took the book from his pocket.
“B’gorra, yez niver can tell, an’ thim U.P.R. throopers hev been known to bury a mon widout searchin’ his pockets,” he said.
And he put the little book between the teeth that held his pipe. Then he shoved off the tie and leaped.
Chapter Thirty
Neale’s amaze and rage at hearing Allie Lee’s name on the lips of the Stanton woman had been so great that he was beside himself. When he got out of the hall he was shaking, and wet with sweat.
He tore at the neck of his shirt. There was not enough air to keep him from suffocating. He hated the dark street with its hurrying passers-by, and the dim lights, and its incessant murmur. Benton was being torn down. And he plunged away in the direction of the railroad station.
What had happened? Why was he shaking so? How come the sudden keen pang in an old dull wound? The very air and the dim pale tents seemed whirling about his head. And he strode along a block before all became clear in his mind. Beauty Stanton had been at her old trick of trying to win him, but this time either he had been drunk or she had overstepped a certain restraint in her importunity. And he had cursed her—then struck her! He regretted that. But how dared she speak the name of Allie Lee. Neale’s body leaped hot again at the memory of her insidious whisper. What had the poor deluded fool meant anyhow? Where had she ever heard that name—so sacred to him? Beauty Stanton had always appeared to be a woman of good instincts and of refinement. Neale had been sorry for her. He appreciated what must have been the difference between her life once and the horror of it now. It began to be a marvel to him that she could have spoken Allie Lee’s name. Why? Had she wished to taunt him with the name of an old love? Neale scarcely credited that, and, when he recalled the strange, thrilling sweetness of her voice, he made certain she had not been mocking him. How strange then.
Before he grew aware of the swiftness of his gait, he had reached the station. It was a crowded, noisy, dark place. A long train of freight and passenger cars was pulling out westward to the new construction camp terminus—Roaring City. Neale swung up between two boxcars and climbed to the top of one, where he sat with legs dangling over.
Dim, pale, flickeringly lighted Benton. He saw the dark splotches where two blocks had already been removed. Another day would see the end of that place of hell and gold and blood. He gloated over the fact. This scene before him was like the scene of failure in his heart. His life that was to have been so bright and useful! What had he not suffered in that hideous flat desert hole? And these last few moments of the last hour there—they had been the worst. He was fleeing like a thief in the night. As one fascinated, he watched the lights of Benton disappear. He left nothing there. Even his baggage was not worth taking away. His friend King would follow him, and so would the drinking, gambling horde. All at once Neale was conscious of a strong impelling desire to leap off the car and go back. He had to hold himself. The impulse was strange, inexplicable, and the wrench he suffered when the last light vanished was so poignant that he fell back flat upon the car; all of which emotions he presently decided to be the result of a shock. And accounting for it in that manner, he returned to wondering about the catastrophe a name had wrought. Allie Lee! His despair was as keen as if he had only lost her yesterday. A whisper of her name had made him strike a woman! But he had struck like the savage beast, involuntarily, in blind pain.
The long train rolled out upon the desert. Neale saw the flare of light from the engine and heard the steady exhaust. The roar of wheel and clink of chains and creak of wood all meant energy—remorseless action—the business of the railroad to move Benton on to another town. Upon every boxcar Neale espied men, and there were two upon the other end of his car. He had faint stirrings in him of the old love of travel, of movement, of the night and the wild, but these seemed only vague and passed away in bitter memory. Achievement, adventure, life were nothing to him any more. His future seemed as dark as that desert floor with its pale horizon line. There seized upon him the blackest gloom, made up of thoughts of defeat and agony and death. A picture stood out in his mind—a picture of a man pursued by the furies down a bleak and naked shingle of the world—and that tremendous abandon of energy, the fixed and staring eyes of horror, the face of torture—all these were his own, and these terrible furies were at him now. Soon this mood would become fixed and stable and he would be lost. His mind seemed to embrace all his old possibilities, his hopes, at the same moment that it held all the horrible contrast—his broken heart and ruined life—and the baseness that had made him strike a woman. Self-destruction had long abided in Neale’s reflections, and all that opposed it now was his innate conviction of its cowardliness. He lay there while the train rolled along, hours and miles on into the night and the desert, and his flesh was cold and damp, his blood sluggish, his spirit faint and low.
The dawn came. And the very fact of daylight and the needs of life and the fellowship of men bound for some common goal helped Neale. He swung down inside the boxcar, where he found every companion-traveler ready to share food and drink.
All day the train crept along, making slow time, and the rumor flew in from somewhere that the train ahead was fighting off an Indian attack. Late that afternoon, suddenly Neale grew weak with a wild sick pain. He got as far as possible into a corner of the car, and there he lay, living over once more the old battle. But it was not a battle any more. It was a retreat, a rout, and in Neale’s mind augmented sinister thoughts. He for once would have welcomed an attack of the Sioux. But nothing of such nature occurred, and he went to sleep at last. When he awoke, another day had come; the train had kept on, and somewhere near at hand in the great upland plateau lay the new camp, Roaring City.
* * * * *
It took Neale nearly forty-eight hours to reach the new camp—Roaring City. A bigger town than Benton had gone up and more was going up—tents and clapboard houses, sheds and cabins—the same motley jumble, set under beetling red Utah bluffs.
He found lodgings and bought new articles of clothing and a few necessaries for his bare room. Being without food or bed or wash for two days and nights was no
t helpful to the task he must accomplish—the conquering of depression. He ate and slept long, and the following day he took time to make himself comfortable and presentable before he sallied forth to find the offices of the engineer corps. Then he walked on as directed, and heard men talking of Indian ambushes and troops.
When at length he reached the headquarters of the engineer corps, he was greeted with restraint by his old officers and associates; he was surprised and at a loss to understand their attitude.
Even in General Lodge there was a difference. Neale gathered at once that something had happened to put out of his chief’s mind the interest that officer surely must have in Neale’s trip to Washington. And after greeting him, the first thing General Lodge said gave warrant to the rumors of trouble with Indians.
“My train was to have been ambushed at Deep Cut yesterday,” he explained. “Big force of Sioux. We were amazed to find them so far west. It would have been a massacre . . . but for Casey . . . We have no particulars yet, for the wire is cut. But we know what Casey did. He ran the gantlet of the Indians through that cut. He was on a gravel car running wild downhill. You know the grade . . . Of course his intention was to hold up my train . . . block us before we reached the ambushed cut. There must have been a broken brake, for he derailed the car not half a mile ahead of us. My engineer saw the runaway flat car and feared a collision . . . Casey threw a railroad tie . . . on the track . . . in front of him . . . We found him under the car . . . crushed . . . dying . . .”
General Lodge’s voice thickened and slowed a little. He looked down. His face appeared quite pale.