The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  “It is curious,” mused Callahan, as Morrison, the head operator, handed him some McCloud messages—“curious, that we get nothing from Sleepy Cat.”

  Sleepy Cat, it should be explained, is a new town on the West End; not only that, but a division town, and though one may know something about the Mountain Division he may yet be puzzled at Callahan’s mention of Sleepy Cat. When gold was found in the Pilot range and camps grew up and down Devil’s Gap like mushrooms, a branch was run from Sleepy Cat through the Pilot country, and the tortoise-like way station became at once a place of importance. It takes its name from the neighboring mountain around the base of which winds the swift Rat River. At Sleepy Cat town the main line leaves the Rat, and if a tenderfoot brakeman ask a reservation buck why the mountain is called Sleepy Cat the Indian will answer, always the same, “It lets the Rat run away.”

  “Now it’s possible,” suggested Hughie Morrison, looking vaguely at the stove, “that the wires are down.”

  “Nonsense,” objected Callahan.

  “It is raining at Soda Sink,” persisted Morrison, mildly.

  “What?” demanded the general superintendent, pulling his pipe from his mouth. Hughie Morrison kept cool. His straight, black hair lay boyishly smooth across his brow. There was no guile in his expression even though he had stunned Callahan, which was precisely what he had intended. “It is raining at Soda Sink,” he repeated.

  Now there is no day in the mountains that goes back of the awful tradition concerning rain at Soda Sink. Before Tom Porter, first manager; before Brodie, who built the bridges; before Sikes, longest in the cab; before Pat Francis, oldest of conductors, runs that tradition about rain at the Sink—which is desert absolute—where it never does rain and never should. When it rains at Soda Sink, this say the Medicine men, the Cat will fall on the Rat. It is Indian talk as old as the foothills.

  Of course no railroad man ever gave much heed to Indian talk; how, for instance, could a mountain fall on a river? Yet so the legend ran, and there being one superstitious man on the force at Medicine Bend one man remembered it—Hughie Morrison.

  Callahan studied the bulletin to which the operator called his attention and resumed his pipe sceptically, but he did make a suggestion. “See if you can’t get Sleepy Cat, Hughie, and find out whether that is so.”

  Morris Blood was away with the Pittsburgers and Callahan had foolishly consented to look after his desk for a few days. At the moment that Morrison took hold of the key Giddings opened the door from the despatchers’ room. “Mr. Callahan, there’s a message coming from Francis, conductor of Number Two. They’ve had a cloudburst on Dry Dollar Creek,” he said, excitedly; “twenty feet of water came down Rat Cañon at five o’clock. The track’s under four feet in the cañon.”

  As a pebble striking an anthill stirs into angry life a thousand startled workers, so a mountain washout startles a division and concentrates upon a single point the very last reserve of its activities and energies.

  For thirty minutes the wires sung with Callahan’s messages. When his special for a run to the Rat Cañon was ready all the extra yardmen and both roadmasters were in the caboose; behind them fumed a second section with orders to pick up along the way every section man as they followed. It was hard on eight o’clock when Callahan stepped aboard. They double-headed for the pass, and not till they pulled up with their pony truck facing the water at the mouth of the big cañon did they ease their pace.

  In the darkness they could only grope. Smith Young, roadmaster of the Pilot branch, an old mountain boy, had gone down from Sleepy Cat before dark, and crawling over the rocks in the dusk had worked his way along the cañon walls to the scene of the disaster.

  Just below where Dry Dollar Creek breaks into the Rat the cañon is choked on one side by a granite wall two hundred feet high. On the other, a sheer spur of Sleepy Cat Mountain is thrust out like a paw against the river. It was there that the wall of water out of Dry Dollar had struck the track and scoured it to the bedrock. Ties, steel, ballast, riprap, roadbed, were gone, and where the heavy construction had run below the paw of Sleepy Cat the river was churning in a channel ten feet deep.

  The best news Young had was that Agnew, the division engineer who happened to be at Sleepy Cat, had made the inspection with him and had already returned to order in men and material for daybreak.

  Leaving the roadmasters to care for their incoming forces, Callahan, with Smith Young’s men for guides, took the footpath on the south side to the head of the cañon, where, above the break, an engine was waiting to run him to Sleepy Cat. When he reached the station Agnew was up at the material yard, and Callahan sat down in his shirt sleeves to take reports on train movements. The despatchers were annulling, holding the freights and distributing passenger trains at eating stations. But an hour’s work at the head-breaking problem left the division, Callahan thought, in worse shape than when the planning began, and he got up from the keg in a mental whirl when Duffy at Medicine Bend sent a body blow in a long message supplementary to his first report.

  “Bear Dance reports the fruit extras making a very fast run. First train of eighteen cars has just pulled in: there are seven more of these fruit extras following close, should arrive at Sleepy Cat at four A.M.”

  Callahan turned from the message with his hand in his hair. Of all bad luck this was the worst. The California fruit trains, not due for twenty-four hours, coming in a day ahead of time with the Mountain Division tied up by the worst washout it had ever seen. In a heat he walked out of the operators’ office to find Agnew; the two men met near the water tank.

  “Hello, Agnew. This puts us against it, doesn’t it? How soon can you give us a track?” asked Callahan, feverishly.

  Agnew was the only man on the division that was always calm. He was thorough, practical, and after he had cut his mountain teeth in the Peace River disaster, a hardheaded man at his work.

  “It will take forty-eight hours after I get my material here—”

  “Forty-eight hours!” echoed Callahan. “Why, man, we shall have eight trains of California fruit here by four o’clock.”

  “I’m on my way to order in the filling, now,” said Agnew, “and I shall push things to the limit, Mr. Callahan.”

  “Limit, yes, your limit—but what about my limit? Forty-eight hours’ delay will put every car of that fruit into market rotten. I’ve got to have some kind of a track through there—any kind on earth will do—but I’ve got to have it by to-morrow night.”

  “To-morrow night?”

  “To-morrow night.”

  Agnew looked at him as a sympathizing man looks at a lunatic, and calmly shook his head. “I can’t get rock here till to-morrow morning. What is the use talking impossibilities?”

  Callahan ground his heel in the ballast. Agnew only asked him if he realized what a hole there was to fill. “It’s no use dumping gravel in there,” he explained patiently, “the river will carry it out faster than flat cars can carry it in.”

  Callahan waved his hand. “I’ve got to have track there by to-morrow night.”

  “I’ve got to dump a hundred cars of rock in there before we shall have anything to lay track on; and I’ve got to pick the rock up all the way from here to Goose River.”

  They walked together to the station.

  When the night grew too dark for Callahan he had but one higher thought—Bucks. Bucks was five hundred miles away at McCloud, but he already had the particulars and was waiting at a key ready to take up the trouble of his favorite division. Callahan at the wire in Sleepy Cat told his story, and Bucks at the other end listened and asked questions. He listened to every detail of the disaster, to the cold hard figures of Agnew’s estimates—which nothing could alter, jot or tittle—and to Callahan’s despairing question as to how he could possibly save the unlooked-for avalanche of fruit.

  For some time
after the returns were in, Bucks was silent; silent so long that the copper-haired man twisted in his chair, looked vacantly around the office and chewed a cigar into strings. Then the sounder at his hand clicked. He recognized Bucks sending in the three words lightly spelled on his ear and jumped from his seat. Just three words Bucks had sent and signed off. What galvanized Callahan was that the words were so simple, so all-covering, and so easy. “Why didn’t I think of that?” groaned Callahan, mentally.

  Then he reflected that he was nothing but a redheaded Irishman, anyway, while Bucks was a genius. It never showed more clearly, Callahan thought, than when he received the three words, “Send for Glover.”

  CHAPTER VII

  TIME BEING MONEY

  Sleepy Cat town was but just rubbing its eyes next morning when the Brock train pulled in from Cascade. Clouds rolling loosely across the mountains were pushing the night into the west, and in the east wind promise of day followed, soft and cool.

  On the platform in the gray light three men were climbing into the gangway of a switch-engine, the last man so long and so loosely put together that he was taking, as he always took when he tried to get into small quarters, the chaffing of his companions on his size. He smiled languidly at Callahan’s excited greeting, and as they ran down the yard listened without comment to the story of the washout. No words were needed to convey to Glover or to Blood the embarrassment of the situation. Freight trains crowded every track in the yard, and the block of twelve hours indicated what a two-day tie-up would mean. In the cañon the roadmasters were already taking measurements and section men were lining up track that had been lifted and wrenched by the water. Callahan and Blood did the talking, but when they left the flooded roadbed and Glover took a way up the cañon wall it became apparent what the mountain engineer’s long legs were for. He led, a quick, sure climber, and if he meant by rapidly scaling the bowlders to shut off Callahan’s talk the intent was effective. Nothing more was said till the three men, followed by the roadmasters, had gained a ledge, fifty feet above the water, that commanded for a quarter of a mile a view of the cañon.

  They were standing above the mouth of Dry Dollar Creek, opposite the point of rocks called the Cat’s Paw, and Glover, pulling his hat brim into a perspective, looked up and down the river. The roadmasters had taken some measurements and these they offered him, but he did no more than listen while they read their figures as if mentally comparing them with notes in his memory. Once he questioned a figure, but it was not till the roadmaster insisted he was right that Glover drew from one of his innumerable pockets an old field-book and showed the man where he had made his error of ten feet in the disputed measurement.

  “Bucks said last night you knew all this track work,” remarked Callahan.

  “I helped Hailey a little here when he rebuilt three years ago. The track was put in then as well as it ever can be put in. The fact simply is this, Callahan, we shall never be safe here. What must be done is to tunnel Sleepy Cat, get out of the infernal cañon with the main line and use this for the spur around the tunnel. When your message came last night, Morris and I took the chance to tell Mr. Brock so, and he is here this morning to see what things look like after a cloudburst. A tunnel will save two miles of track and all the double-heading.”

  “But, Glover, what’s that got to do with this fruit? Confound your tunnel, what I want is a track. By heavens, if it’s going to take three days to get one in we might as well dump a hundred cars of fruit into the river now—and Bucks is looking to you to save them.”

  “Looking to me?” echoed Glover, raising his brows. “What’s the matter with Agnew?”

  “Oh, hang Agnew!”

  “If you like. But he is in charge of this division. I can’t do anything discourteous or unprofessional, Callahan.”

  “You are not required to.”

  “It looks very much as if I am being called in to instruct Agnew how to do his work. He is a perfectly competent engineer.”

  “That point has been covered. Bucks had a long talk with Agnew over the wire last night. He is needed all the time at the Blackwood bridge and he is relieved here when you arrive. Now what’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing whatever if that is the situation. I’d much rather keep out of it, but there isn’t work enough here for two engineers.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t very bad.”

  “Not very bad! Well, how much time do you want to put a track in here?”

  Glover’s eyes were roaming up and down the cañon. “How much can you give me?” he asked.

  “Till to-night.”

  Glover looked at his watch. “Then get two hundred and fifty men in here inside of an hour.”

  “We’ve picked up about seventy-five section men so far, but there aren’t two hundred and fifty men within a hundred miles.”

  Glover pointed north. “Ed Smith’s got two hundred men not over three miles from here on the irrigation ditch.”

  “That only shows I’ve no business in this game,” remarked Callahan, looking at Morris Blood. “This is where you take hold.”

  Blood nodded. “Leave that to me. Let’s have the orders all at once, Ab. Say where you want headquarters.”

  The engineer stretched a finger toward the point of rocks across the cañon. “Right above the Cat’s Paw.”

  “Tell Bill Dancing to cut in the wrecking instrument and put an operator over there for Glover’s orders,” directed Blood, turning to Smith Young.

  “I’m off for something to eat,” said Callahan, “and by the way, what shall I tell Bucks about the chances?”

  “Can you get Ed Smith’s outfit?” asked Glover, speaking to Blood. “Well, I know you can—Ed’s a Denver man.” He meditated another moment; “We need his whole outfit, mind you.”

  “I’ll get it or resign. If I succeed, when can you get a train through?”

  “By midnight.” Callahan staggered. Glover raised his finger. “If you back off the ledge they will need a new general superintendent.”

  “By midnight?”

  “I think so.”

  “You can’t get your rock in by that time?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Agnew says it will take a hundred cars.”

  “That’s not far out of the way. On flat cars you won’t average much over ten yards to the car, will you, Morris?”

  Like two wary gamblers Callahan and the chief of construction on the mountain lines coldly eyed each other, Glover standing pat and the general superintendent disinclined through many experiences to call.

  “I’m not doing the talking now,” said Callahan at length with a sidewise glance, “but if you get a hundred cars of rock into that hole by twelve o’clock to-night—not to speak of laying steel—you can have my job, old man.”

  “Then look up another right away, for I’ll have the rock in the river long before that. Now don’t rubber, but get after the men and the drills—”

  “The drills?”

  “I said the whole outfit.”

  “Would it be proper to ask what you are going to drill?”

  “Perfectly proper.” Glover pointed again to the shelving wall across the river. “It will save time and freight to tumble the Cat’s Paw into the river—there’s ten times the rock we need right there—I can dump a thousand yards where we need it in thirty seconds after I get my powder in. That will give us our foundation and your roadmasters can lay a track over it in six hours that will carry your fruit—I wouldn’t recommend it for dining-cars, but it will do for plums and cherries. And by the way, Morris,” called Glover—Blood already twenty feet away was scrambling down the path—“if Ed Smith’s got any giant powder borrow sticks enough to spring thirty or forty holes with, will you? I’ve got plenty of black up at Pilot. You can order it down by the time
we are ready to blast.”

  In another hour the cañon looked as if a hive of bees were swarming on the Cat’s Paw. With shovels, picks, bars, hammers, and drills, hearty in miners’ boots and pied in woollen shirts the first of Ed Smith’s men were clambering into place. The field telegraph had been set up on the bench above the point: every few moments a new batch of irrigation men appeared stringing up the ledge, and with the roadmasters as lieutenants, Glover, on the apex of the low spur of the mountain, taking reports and giving orders, surveyed his improvised army.

  At the upper and lower ends of the track where the roadbed had not completely disappeared the full force of section men, backed by the irrigation laborers, were busy patching the holes.

  At the point where the break was complete and the Rat River was viciously licking the vertical face of the rock a crew of men, six feet above the track level, were drilling into the first ledge a set of six-foot holes. On the next receding ledge, twelve feet above the old track level, a second crew were tamping a set of holes to be sunk twelve feet. Above them the drills were cutting into the third ledge, and still higher and farther back, at twenty feet, the largest of all the crews was sinking the eighteen-foot holes to complete the fracture of the great wall. Above the murmuring of the steel rang continually the calls of the foremen, and hour after hour the shock of the drills churned up and down the narrow cañon.

  During each hour Glover was over every foot of the work, and inspecting the track building. If a track boss couldn’t understand what he wanted the engineer could take a pick or a bar and give the man an object lesson. He patrolled the cañon walls, the roadmasters behind him, with so good an eye for loose bowlders, and fragments such as could be moved readily with a gad, that his assistants before a second round had spotted every handy chunk of rock within fifty feet of the water. He put his spirit into the men and they gave their work the enthusiasm of soldiers. But closest of all Glover watched the preparations for the blast on the Cat’s Paw.