Held for Orders Part 14

Had he no relations back in the mountains? n.o.body up in the Spider country? No wives or daughters or fathers or mothers or friends or anything? Delaroo always shook his head. If they persisted he shook his head. Maje Sampson, sitting after supper, would ask, and Martie, when the dishes were side-tracked, would begin to sew and listen, and Delaroo, of course, would listen, but never by any chance would he answer; not even when Maje tried to explain how it bore on 16 to 1. He declined to discuss any ratio or to name any beneficiary whatsoever. The right honorable recording secretaries fumed and denounced it as irregular, and Maje Sampson wore holes in his elbows gesticulating, but in the matter of distributing his personal share of the unearned increment, Delaroo expressed no preference whatsoever. He paid his dues; he made his pa.s.ses; he sat in his place, what more could be required? If they put him in a post of honor he filled it with a silent dignity. If they set him to guard the outer portal he guarded well; it was perilous rather for a visiting frater or even a local brother to try getting past Delaroo if he was rusty in the ritual. Not Maje Sampson himself could work the outer guard without the countersign; if he forgot it in the hurry of getting to lodge he had to cool his heels in the outer air till it came back; Delaroo was pitiless.

In the cab he was as taciturn as he was in the lodge or under the kerosene lamp at Sampson's; he just listened. But his firing was above any man's who ever stoked the 264. Delaroo made more steam on less coal than any man in the roundhouse. Neighbor began to hold him up as a model for the division, and the boys found that the way to jolly Neighbor was to say nice things about Delaroo. The head of the Motive Power would brighten out of a sulk at the mention of Delaroo's name, and he finally fixed up a surprise for the Indian man. One night after Delaroo came in, Neighbor, in the bluff way he liked to use in promoting a man, told Delaroo he could have an engine; a good one, one of the K. cla.s.s; as much finer a machine than the old 264 as Duffy's chronometer was than a prize package watch. Delaroo never said ay, yes, or no; he merely listened. Neighbor never had a promotion received in just that way; it nearly gave him the apoplexy.

But if Delaroo treated the proposal coolly, not so Maje Sampson; when the news of the offer reached him, Maje went into an unaccountable flutter. He acted at first exactly as if he wanted to hold his man back, which was dead against cab ethics. Finally he a.s.sented, but his cheeks went flabby and his eyes hollow, and he showed more worry than his creditors. n.o.body understood it, yet there was evidently something on, and the Major's anxiety increased until Delaroo, the Indian fireman and knight companion of the Ancient Order of Druids and Fluids, completely took Neighbor's breath by declining the new engine. That was a West End wonder. He said if it made no odds he would stay on the 264. The men all wondered; then something new came up and the thing was forgotten. Maje Sampson's cheeks filled out again, he regained his usual nerve, and swore on the money question harder than ever.

After that it was pretty generally understood that Delaroo and Maje Sampson and the 264 were fixtures. Neighbor never gave any one a chance to decline an engine more than once. The boys all knew, if Delaroo didn't, that he would be firing a long time after throwing that chance by; and he was.

The combination came to be regarded as eternal. When the sloppy 264 hove in sight, little Delaroo and big Maje Sampson were known to be behind the boiler pounding up and down the mountains, up and down, year in and year out. Big engines came into the division and bigger. All the time the division was crowding on the Motive Power and putting in the mammoth types, until, when the 264 was stalled alongside a consolidated, or a mogul skysc.r.a.per, she looked like an ancient beer gla.s.s set next an imported stein.

With the 264, when the 800 or the 1100 cla.s.s were concerned, it was simply a case of keep out of our way or get smashed, Maje Sampson or no Maje Sampson, money question or no money question. Benevolent benefits fraternally proposed or ante-room signals confidentially put forth by the bald-headed 264 were of no sort of consequence with the modern giants that pulled a thousand tons in a string up a two-thousand-foot grade at better than twenty miles an hour. It was a clear yet cold, "You old tub, get out of our way, will you?" And the fast runners, like Moore and Hawksworth and Mullen and the Crowleys, Tim and Syme, had about as much consideration for Maje and his financial theories as their machines had for his machine. His jim-crow freight outfit didn't cut much of a figure in _their_ track schedules.

So the Maje Sampson combination, but quite as bra.s.sy as though it had rights of the first cla.s.s, dodged the big fellows up and down the line pretty successfully until the government began pushing troops into the Philippines, and there came days when a Rocky Mountain sheep could hardly have kept out of the way of the extras that tore, hissing and booming, over the mountains for 'Frisco. For a time the traffic came hot; so hot we were pressed to handle it. There was a good bit of skirmishing on the part of the pa.s.senger department to get the business, and then tremendous skirmishing in the operating department to deliver the goods. Every broken-down coach in the backyards was scrubbed up for the soldier trains. We aimed to kill just as few as possible of the boys en route to the islands, though that may have been a mistaken mercy. However, we handled them well; not a man in khaki got away from us in a wreck, and in the height of the push we put more live stock into South Omaha, car for car, than has ever gone in before or since.

It was November, and great weather for running, and when the rails were not springing under the soldiers westbound, they were humming under the steers eastbound. Maje Sampson, with his beer kegs and his crackers and his 264 and his be-knighted fireman, hugged the sidings pretty close that week. Some of the trains had part of the rights and others had the remainder. The 264 and her train took what was left, which threw Maje Sampson most of the time on the worn-out, run-down, sc.r.a.p rails that made corduroy roads of the pa.s.sing tracks. Then came the night that Moulton, the Philippine commandant, went through on his special. With his staff and his baggage and his correspondents and that kind he took one whole train. Syme Crowley pulled them, with Ben Sherer, conductor, and whatever else may be said of that pair, they deliver their trains on time. Maje Sampson left Medicine Bend with Twenty-nine at noon on his regular run and tried to get west. But between the soldiers behind him and the steers against him, he soon lost every visionary right he ever did possess. They laid him out nearly every mile of the way to the end of the run. At Sugar b.u.t.tes they held him thirty minutes for the Moulton Special to pa.s.s, and, to crown his indignities, kept him there fifteen minutes more waiting for an eastbound sheep train. Sampson afterward claimed that Barnes Tracy, the despatcher that did it, was a Gold Democrat, but this never was proved.

It was nearing dark when the crew of local freight Twenty-nine heard the dull roar of the Moulton Special speeding through the canon of the Rat.

A pa.s.senger train running through the canon at night comes through with the far roll of a thousand drums, deepening into a rumble of thunder.

Then out and over all comes the threatening purr of the straining engine breaking into a storm of exhausts, until like a rocket the headlight bursts streaming from the black walls, and Moore on the 811, or Mullen with the 818, or Hawksworth in the 1110, tear with a fury of alkali and a sweep of noise over the b.u.t.te switch, past caboose and flats and boxes and the 264 like fading light. Just a sweep of darkened gla.s.s and dead varnish, a whirl of smoking trucks beating madly at the fishplates, and the fast train is up, and out, and gone!

Twenty-nine, local, was used to all this. Used to the vanishing tail lights, the measured sinking of the sullen dust, the silence brooding again over the desert with, this night, fifteen minutes more to wait for the eastbound stock train before they dared open the switch. Maje Sampson killed the time by going back to the caboose to talk equities with the conductor. It was no trick for him to put away fifteen minutes discussing the rights of man with himself; and with an angel of a fireman to watch the cab, why not? The 264 standing on the siding was chewing her cud as sweet as an old cow, with maybe a hundred and forty pounds of steam to the right of the dial, maybe a hundred and fifty--I say maybe, because no one but Delaroo ever knew--when the sheep train whistled.

Sheep--nothing but sheep. Car after car after car, rattling down from the Short line behind two spanking big engines. They whistled, hoa.r.s.e as pirates, for the b.u.t.te siding, and, rising the hill a mile west of it, bore down the grade throwing Dannah coal from both stacks like hydraulic gravel.

No one knew or ever will know how it happened. They cat-hauled men on the carpet a week about that switch. The crew of the Moulton Special testified; the crews of the stock train testified; Maje Sampson testified; his conductor and both brakemen testified; the roadmaster and the section boss each testified, and their men testified--but however or whatever it was--whether the Moulton Special fractured the tongue, or whether the pony of the lead engine flew the guard, or whether the switch had been opened, or whether, in closing, the slip rail had somehow failed to follow the rod--the double-headed stocker went into that b.u.t.te switch, into that b.u.t.te siding, into the peaceable old 264 and the Twenty-nine, local, like a lyddite sh.e.l.l, crashing, rearing, ripping, scattering two whole trains into blood and sc.r.a.p. Destruction, madness, throes, death, silence; then a pyre of dirty smoke, a wail of sickening bleats, and a scream of hissing steam over a thousand sheep caught in the sudden shambles.

There was frightened crawling out of the shattered cabooses, a hurrying up of the stunned crews, and a bewildering count of heads. Both engine crews of the stock train had jumped as their train split the switch. The train crews were badly shaken; the head brakeman of the sheep train lay torn in the barbed-wire fencing the right of way; but only one man was missing--the fireman of Twenty-nine--Delaroo.

"Second 86 jumped west switch pa.s.sing track and went into train 29, engine 264. Bad spill. Delaroo, fireman the 264, missing," wired Sugar b.u.t.tes to Medicine Bend a few minutes later.

Neighbor got up there by ten o'clock with both roadmasters and the wrecking outfit. It was dark as a canon on the desert that night.

Benedict Morgan's men tore splintered car timber from the debris, and on the knolls back of the siding lighted heaping bonfires that threw a light all night on the dread pile smoking on the desert. They dug by the flame of the fires at the ghastly heap till midnight; then the moon rose, an extra crew arrived from the Bend, and they got the derrick at work. Yet with all the toil when day broke the confusion looked worse confounded. The main line was so hopelessly blocked that at daylight a special with ties and steel was run in to lay a temporary track around the wreck.

"What do I think of it?" muttered Neighbor, when the local operator asked him for a report for Callahan. "I think there's two engines for the sc.r.a.p in sight--and the 264, if we can ever find anything of her--and about a million sheep to pay for--" Neighbor paused to give an order and survey the frightful scene.

"And Delaroo," repeated the operator. "He wants to know about Delaroo--"

"Missing."

At dawn hot coffee was pa.s.sed among the wreckers, and shortly after sunrise the McCloud gang arrived with the second derrick. Then the men of the night took hold with a new grip to get into the heart of the pile; to find--if he was there--Delaroo.

None of the McCloud gang knew the man they were hunting for, but the men from the Bend were soon telling them about Maje Sampson's Indian. Not a mute nod he ever gave; not a piece of tobacco he ever pa.s.sed; not a brief word he ever spoke to one of the battered old hulks who rode and cut and slashed and stormed and drank and cursed with Benedict Morgan, was forgotten then. Every slewed, twisted, weather-beaten, crippled-up, gin-shivered old wreck of a wrecker--they were hard men--had something to say about Delaroo. And with their hair matted and their faces streaked and their shirts daubed and their elbows in blood, they said it--whatever it was, much or little--of Delaroo.

The picks swung, the derricks creaked, and all day with the heaving and the calling they toiled; but the sun was sinking before they got to the middle of it. Then Benedict Morgan, crawling under the drivers of the hind mogul, partly uncovered, edged out with a set face; he swore he heard breathing. It was alcohol to the veins of the double gang.

Neighbor himself went in and heard--and stayed to fasten a grapple to pull the engine truck off the roof of a box car that was jammed over and against the mogul stack.

The big derrick groaned as the slack drew and the truck crashed through a tier of stays and swung whirling into the clear. A giant wrecker dodged the suspended wheels and raising his axe bit a hole into the jammed roof. Through that they pa.s.sed a second grapple, and presently it gave sullenly, toppled back with a crash, and the foremost axman, peering into the opening, saw the heart of the wreck. Bending forward, he picked up something struggling in his arms. They thought it was a man; but it was a sheep, alive and uninjured, under all the horror: that was the breathing they heard. Benedict Morgan threw the man and his burden aside and stepped himself into the gap and through. One started to follow, but the chief of the wreckers waved him back. Close by where the sheep had been freed stood Delaroo. He stood as if with ear alert, so closely did the counterfeit seem the real. So sure was the impression of life that not until Morgan, speaking to the fireman, put his hand on his shoulder did he realize that the Indian stood quite dead just where the shock had caught him in his cab.

Stumbling over the wreckage, they pa.s.sed him in the silence of the sunset from hand to hand into the open. A big fellow, pallid and scared, tottered after them, and when they laid the dead man down, half fell at his side: it was Maje Sampson.

It surprised everybody the way Maje Sampson went to pieces after Delaroo was killed. The Indian was carried back to the Bend and up to Sampson's and laid out in the G.o.d-forsaken parlor; but Maje wasn't any good fixing things up that time. He usually shone on like occasions. He was the comforter of the afflicted to an extraordinary degree; he gave the usual mourner no chance to let up. But now his day was as one that is darkened. When Neighbor went up next night to see about some minor matters connected with the funeral and the precedence of the various dozen orders that were to march, he found Maje Sampson and Martie alone in the darkness of the parlor with the silent Delaroo.

Maje turned to the master mechanic from where Delaroo lay. "Neighbor, you might as well know it now as any time. Don't you say so, Martie?

Martie, what do you say?" Martie burst into tears; but through them Neighbor caught the engineer's broken confession. "Neighbor--I'm color blind." The master mechanic sat stunned.

"True as G.o.d's word. You might as well know it now. There's the man that stood between me and the loss of my job. It's been coming on me for two year. He knew it, that's why he stayed in my cab. He stayed because I was color blind. He knowed I'd git ketched the minute a new fireman come in, Neighbor. He watched the signals--Delaroo. I'm color blind, G.o.d help me." Maje Sampson sat down by the coffin. Martie hushed her crying; the three sat in the darkness.

"It wouldn't worry me so much if it wasn't f'r the family, Neighbor. The woman--and the boys. I ain't much a-savin'; you know that. If you can gi' me a job I can get bread an' b.u.t.ter out of, give it to me. I can't pull a train; my eyes went out with this man here. I wish to G.o.d it was me, and him standing over. A man that's color blind, and don't know a thing on G.o.d's earth but runnin' an engine, is worse 'n' a dead man."

Neighbor went home thinking.

They buried Delaroo. But even then they were not through with him.

Delaroo had insurance in every order in the Bend, which meant almost every one on earth. There was no end to his benefit certificates, and no known beneficiaries. But when they overhauled his trunk they found every last certificate filed away up to the last paid a.s.sessment and the last quarter's dues. Then came a shock. People found out there was a beneficiary. While the fraters were busy making their pa.s.ses Delaroo had quietly been directing the right honorable recording secretaries to make the benefits run to Neighbor, and so every dollar of his insurance ran.

n.o.body was more thunderstruck at the discovery than the master mechanic himself.

Yet Delaroo meant something by it. After Neighbor had studied over it nights the best of a month; after Maje Sampson had tried to take the color test and failed, as he persistently said he would; after he had gone to tinkering in the roundhouse, and from tinkering respectably, and by degrees down the hill to wiping at a dollar and forty cents a day with time and a half for overtime--Neighbor bethought himself all of a sudden one day of a paper Delaroo had once given him and asked him to keep.

He had put it away in the storekeeper's safe with his own papers and the drawings of his extension front end patent--and safely forgotten all about it. It was the day they had to go into the county court about the will that was not, when he recollected Delaroo's paper and pulled it out of its envelope. There was only a half sheet of paper, inside, with this writing from Delaroo to Neighbor:

R. B. A.--What is coming to me on ensurance give to Marty Sampson, wife of Maje. Give my trunk to P. McGraw.

Rispk.,

P. DE LA ROUX.

When the master mechanic read that before the probate judge, Maje Sampson took a-trembling: Martie hid her face in her shawl, crying again. Maybe a glimmer of what it meant came for the first time in her life over her. Maybe she remembered Delaroo as he used to sit with them under the kerosene lamp while Maje untiringly pounded the money question into him--smoking as he listened, and Martie mended on never-ending trousers. Looking from Maje Sampson, heated with monologue, to his wife, patiently st.i.tching. No comments; just looking as Pierre Delaroux could look.

Strange, Neighbor thought it, and yet, maybe, not so strange. It was all there in the paper--the torn, worn little book of Delaroo's life. She was the only woman on earth that had ever done him a kindness.

n.o.body at Medicine Bend quite understood it; but n.o.body at Medicine Bend quite suspected that under all the barrenness up at Maje Sampson's an ambition could have survived; yet one had. Martie had an ambition. Way down under her faded eyes and her faded dress there was an ambition, and that for the least promising subjects in the Rocky Mountains--the brickbats. Under the unending mending and the poverty and the toil, Martie, who never put her nose out of doors, who never attended a church social, never ventured even to a free public school show--had an ambition for the boys. She wanted the two biggest to go to the State University; wanted them to go and get an education. And they went; and Maje Sampson says them boys, ary one, has forgotten more about the money question than he ever knew. It looks as if after all the brickbats might come out; a bit of money in Martie's hands goes so far.

There are a few soldiers buried at the Bend. Decoration Day there is an attempt at a turn-out; a little speeching and a little marching. A thin, straggle column of the same warped, bent old fellows in the same faded old blue. Up the hill they go and around to the cemetery to decorate.

When they turn at Maje Sampson's place--there's a gate there now--Martie and more or less of the boys, and Maje, kind of join in along and go over with them carrying a basket or so of flowers and a bucket of water.

The boys soon stray over to where the crowd is, around the graves of the Heroes. But Martie gets down by a grave somewhat apart and prods the drifting gravel all up loose with an old case-knife. You would think she might be kneading bread there, the way she sways under her sun-bonnet and gloves--for her little boiled hands are in gloves now.

"I don't know how much good it does Delaroo spiking up his grave once a year," Neighbor always winds up. "It may not do him a blamed bit of good, I don't say it does. But I can see them. I see them from the roundhouse; it does me good. Hm?

"Maje?" he will add. "Why, I've got him over there at the house, wiping.

I'm going to put him running the stationary if old John Boxer ever dies.

When will he die? Blamed if I know. John is a pretty good man yet. I can't kill him, can I? Well, then, what's a matter with you?

"No, Maje don't talk as much as he used to; forgetting his pa.s.ses more or less, too. Getting old like some more of us. He's kind of quit the money question; claims he don't understand it now as well as the boys do. But he can talk about Delaroo; he understands Delaroo pretty well--now."