Held for Orders Part 4

"Give me steam--steam," cried the wiper, looking straight ahead.

It was the foreman of the steel gang from the caboose. Aloysius, through the backs of his eyes, saw him grab the shovel and make a pa.s.s at the tender. Doing so, he nearly took a header through the gangway, but he hung to the shovel and braced himself better.

With the next attempt he got a shovelful into the cab, but in the delivery pa.s.sed it well up Aloysius's neck. There were neither words nor grins, but just another shovelful of coal a minute after; and the track-layer, in spite of the dizzy lurching, shot it where it belonged--into the furnace. Feeling that if one shovelful could be landed, more could, Aloysius's own steam rose. As they headed madly around the Cinnamon bend the dial began to climb in spite of the obstacles; and the wiper, considering there were two, and the steam and the sand to fight the thing out, opened his valve and dusted the whiskers on the curve with something more than a gleam of hope.

If there was confusion on the runaway train, there was terror and more below it. As the spectre flitted past Pringle station, five miles down the valley, the agent caught a glimpse of the sallow face of the wiper at the cab window, and saw the drivers whirling backward. He rushed to his key and called the Medicine Bend despatcher. With a tattoo like a drum-roll the despatcher in turn called Soda Springs, ten miles below Pringle, where Number Sixteen, the up-pa.s.senger, was then due. He rattled on with his heart in his fingers, and answer came on the instant. Then an order flashed into Soda Springs:

To No. 16.

Take Soda Springs siding quick. Extra 240 West has lost control of the train. DI.

There never was such a bubbling at Soda Springs as that bubbling. The operator tore up the platform like a hawk in a chicken yard. Men never scattered so quick as when Number Sixteen began screaming and wheezing and backing for the clear. Above the town, Aloysius, eyes white to the sockets, shooting the curves like a meteor, watched his lessening stream of sand pour into the frost on the track. As they whipped over bridges and fills the caboose reeled like a dying top--fear froze every soul on board. To leave the track now meant a scatter that would break West End records.

When Soda Springs sighted Extra 240 West, pitching down the mountain, the steel dancing behind and Aloysius jumping before, there was a painful sensation--the sensation of good men who see a disaster they are powerless to avert. Nor did Soda Springs know how desperate the wiper's extremity had become. Not even the struggling steel foreman knew that with Soda Springs pa.s.sing like the films of a cinematograph, and two more miles of down-grade ahead, the last cupful of sand was trickling from the wiper's tank. Aloysius, at that moment, wouldn't have given the odd change on a pay check for all the chances Extra 240 and he himself had left. He stuck to his levers merely because there was no particular reason for letting go. It was only a question of how a man wanted to take the rocks. Yet, with all his figuring, Aloysius had lost sight of his only salvation--maybe because it was quite out of his power to effect it himself. But in making the run up to Soda Springs Number Sixteen had already sanded the rails below.

He could feel the help the minute the tires ground into the grit. They began to smoke, and Aloysius perceived the grade was easing somewhat.

Even the dazed foreman, looking back, saw an improvement in the lurch of the caboose. There was one more hair-raiser ahead--the appalling curve at the forks of the Goose. But, instead of being hurled over the elevation, they found themselves around it and on the bridge with only a vicious slew. Aloysius's hair began to lie down, and his heart to rise up. He had her checked--even the hoboes knew it--and a mile further, with the dangers past, they took new ones by dropping off the hind end.

At the second bend below the Goose, Aloysius made a stop, and began again to breathe. A box was blazing on the tender truck, and, with his handy fireman, he got down at once to doctor it. The whole thing shifted so mortally quick from danger to safety that the two never stopped to inventory their fears; they seemed to have vanished with the frost that lured them to destruction. They jumped together into the cab; and whistling at the laborers strung back along the right of way Extra 240 West began backing pluckily up hill to Soda Springs. The first man who approached the cab as they slowed down for the platform--in fact, people rather stood back for him--was Bucks, Superintendent of the Division; his car had come in attached to Number Sixteen.

"How did your train get away from you?" he asked of Aloysius; there was neither speculation nor sympathy in his manner and his words were bitten with frost.

"It didn't get away from me," retorted Aloysius, who had never before in his life seen the man, and was not aware that he owed him any money. But the operator at the Springs, who knew Aloysius and the superintendent both, was standing behind the latter doing a pantomime that would shame a medicine man.

"Quick talking will do more for you than smart talking," replied the superintendent, crisply. "You'll never get a better chance while you're working for this company to explain yourself."

Aloysius himself began to think so, for the nods and winks of the operator were bewildering. He tried to speak up, but the foreman of the steel gang put in: "See here, sport," he snapped, irreverently, at the angry official. "Why don't you cool your hat before you jump a fellow like that?"

"What business is it of yours how I jump a fellow?" returned the superintendent, sharply, "who are you?"

"I'm only foreman of this steel gang, my friend; and I don't take any back talk from anybody."

"In that case," responded Bucks, with velvet sarcasm, "perhaps you will explain things. I'm only superintendent of this division; but it's customary to inquire into matters of this kind."

Aloysius at the words nearly sank to the platform; but the master of the hoboes, who had all the facts, went at the big man as if he had been one of the gang, and did not falter till he had covered the perspiring wiper with glory.

"What's the reason the air wouldn't work?" asked the superintendent, turning, without comment, when the track-layer had finished, to Aloysius.

"I haven't had time to find out, sir."

"Find out and report to me. What's your name?"

"McGrath."

"McGraw, eh? Well, McGraw, look close into the air. There may be something in it for you. You did the firing?" he added, turning short again on the unabashed steel foreman.

"What there was done."

"I'll do a little now myself. I'll fire you right here and now for impertinence."

"I suppose you're the boss," responded the man of ties, imperturbably.

"When I made the crack, I'd made it harder if I had known who you were."

"You know now, don't you?"

"I guess so."

"Very good," said Bucks, in his mildest tones. "If you will report to me at Medicine Bend this afternoon, I'll see whether we can't find something better for your manners than cursing hoboes. You can ride down in my car, sport. What do you say? That will save you transportation."

It brought a yell from the railroad men crowding around, for that was Bucks's way of doing things; and the men liked Bucks and his way. The ex-captain of the dagoes tried to look cool, but in point of fact went very sheepish at his honors.

Followed by a mob, eager to see the finish, Superintendent Bucks made his way up the track along the construction train to where Aloysius and the engineer of Number Sixteen were examining the air. They found it frozen between the first and the second car. Bucks heard it all--heard the whole story. Then he turned to his clerk.

"Discharge both crews of Extra 240. Fire Johnnie Horigan."

"Yes, sir."

"McGrath, run your train back to Wind River behind us. We'll scare up a conductor here somewhere; if we can't, I'll be your conductor. Make your report to Medicine Bend," Bucks added, speaking to the operator; and without further words walked back to his car.

As he turned away, the engineer of Number Sixteen slapped Aloysius on the back:

"Kid, why the blazes didn't you thank him?"

"Who?"

"Bucks."

"What for?"

"What for? Jiminey Christmas! What for? Didn't he just make you an engineer? Didn't he just say, 'Run your train back behind us to Wind River'?"

"My train?"

"Sure, your train. Do you think Bucks ever says a thing like that without meaning it? You bet not."

Bucks's clerk, too, was a little uncertain about the promotion. "I suppose he's competent to run the train back, isn't he?" he asked of Bucks, suggestively.

Bucks was scrawling a message.

"A man that could hold a train from Wind River here on whiskers, with nothing but a tankful of sand and a hobo fireman, wouldn't be likely to fall off the right of way running back," he returned dryly. "He's been firing for years, hasn't he? We haven't got half enough men like McGraw.

Tell Neighbor to give him an engine."

The Roadmaster's Story

THE SPIDER WATER