Held for Orders Part 5

Not officially; I don't pretend to say that. You might travel the West End from fresh water to salt--and we dip into both--without ever locating the Spider Water by map or by name.

But if you should happen anywhere on the West End to sit among a gang of bridge carpenters; or get to confidence with a bridge foreman; or find the springy side of a roadmaster's heart; _then_, you might hear all you wanted about the Spider Water--maybe more; anyway, full plenty, as Hailey used to say.

The Sioux named it; and whatever may be thought of their interpretation of Scriptural views on land-grabbing, no man with sense ever attempted to improve on their names for things, whether birds, or braves, or winds, or waters--they know.

Our General Managers hadn't always sense--this may seem odd, but on the system it would excite no comment--and one of them countenanced a shameful change in the name of the Spider Water. Some polytechnical idiot at a safe distance dubbed it The Big Sandy; and the Big Sandy it is to this day on map and in folder--but not in the lingo of trackmen nor the heart of the Sioux. Don't say Big Sandy to trackmen and hand out a cigar. It will not go. Say Spider Water without any cigar and you will get a word and a stool, and if you ask it, fine cut.

The Spider Water--although ours is the pioneer line--was there when we first bridged it. It is probably as old as sundown, and nothing like as pretty. The banks--it has none to speak of. Its stones--they are whiskered. Its bed--full of sand-burs. Everything about the villain stream has a dilapidate, broken-down air: the very mud of the Spider Water is rusty.

So our people bridged it; and the trouble began. A number of matters bothered our pioneer managements--Indians, outlaws, cabinet officers, congressional committees, and Wall Street magnates--but at one time or another our folks managed all of them. The only thing they couldn't at any time satisfactorily manage was the Spider Water. Bridge after bridge they threw across it--and into it. Year after year the Spider Water toyed with our civil engineers and our material department. One man at Omaha given to asthma and statistics estimated, between spells, that the Spider Water had cost us more money than all the water courses together from the Missouri to the Sierras.

Then came to the West End a masterful man, a Scotchman, pawky and hard.

Brodie was his name, an Edinburgh man with no end of degrees and master of every one. Brodie came to be superintendent of bridges on the Western Division, and to boss every water course on the plains and in the mountains. But the Spider Water took a fall even out of Brodie. It swept out a Howe truss bridge for Brodie before he got his bag unpacked, and thereafter Brodie, who was reputed not to care a stringer for anybody, did not conceal a distinct respect for the Spider.

Brodie went at it right. He tried, not to make friends with the Spider, for n.o.body could do that, but to get acquainted with it. For this he went to its oldest neighbors, the Sioux. Brodie spent weeks and weeks up the Spider Water hunting, summers; and with the Sioux he talked Spider Water and drank fire-water. That was Brodie's shame--the fire-water.

But he was pawky, and he chinned unceasingly the braves and the medicine men about the uncommonly queer water that took the bridges so fast. The river that month in and month out couldn't squeeze up water enough to baptize a pollywog and then, of a sudden, and for a few days, would rage like the Missouri, restore to the desert its own and living image, and leave our bewildered rails hung up either side in the wind.

Brodie talked cloudbursts up country; for the floods came, times, under clear skies--and the Sioux sulked in silence. He suggested an unsuspected inlet from some mountain stream which maybe, times, sent its storm water over a low divide into the Spider--and the red men shrugged their faces. As a last resort and in desperation he hinted at the devil; and the sceptics took a quick brace with as much as to say, now you _are_ talking; and muttered very bad Medicine.

Then they gave him the Indian stuff about the Spider Water; took him away up where once a party of p.a.w.nees had camped in the dust of the river bed to surprise the Sioux; and told Brodie how the Spider, more sudden than buck, fleeter than pony, had come down in the night and surprised the p.a.w.nees--and so well that the next morning there wasn't enough material left for a scalp dance.

They took Brodie out into the ratty bed himself and when he said, heap dry, and said, no water, they laughed, Indianwise, and pointed to the sand. Scooping little wells with their hands they showed him the rising and the filling; the instant water where before was no water. And dropping into the wells feathers of the grouse, they showed Brodie how the current carried them always across the well--every time, and always, Brodie noticed--southeast.

Then Brodie made Hailey dig many holes, and the Spider welled into them, and he threw in bits of notebooks and tobacco wrappers, but always they travelled southeast--always the same; and a bigger fool than Brodie could see that the water was all there, only underground. But when did it rise? asked Brodie. When the Chinook spoke, said the Sioux. And why?

persisted Brodie. Because the Spider woke, said the Sioux. And Brodie went out of the camp of the Sioux wondering.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hailey]

And he planned a new bridge which should stand the Chinook and the Spider and the de'il himself, said Brodie, Medicine or no Medicine. And full seven year it lasted; then the fire-water spoke for the wicked Scotchman--and he himself went out into the night.

And after he died, miserable wreck of a man--and of a very great man--the Spider woke and took his pawky bridge and tied up the main line for two weeks and set us crazy--for we were already losing our grip on the California fast freight business. But at that time Hailey was superintendent of bridges on the West End.

I

His father was a section foreman. When Hailey was a kid--a mere kid--he got into Brodie's office doing errands; but whenever he saw a draughtsman at work he was no good for errands. At such times he went all into a mental tangle that could neither be thrashed nor kicked out of him, though both were conscientiously tried by old man Hailey and Superintendent Brodie; and Brodie, since he could do nothing else with him, finally kicked him into learning to read--and to cipher, Brodie called it. Then, by and by, Hailey got an old table and part of a cake of India ink himself, and himself became a draughtsman, and soon, with some cursing from Brodie and a "Luk a' that now!" from his paralyzed daddy, became chief draughtsman in Brodie's office. Hailey was no college man--Hailey was a Brodie man. Single mind on single mind--concentration absolute. Mathematics, drawing, bridges, brains--that was Hailey. But no cla.s.sics except Brodie, who himself was a cla.s.sic. All that Brodie knew, Hailey had from him; and where Brodie was weak, Hailey was strong--master of himself. When Brodie shamed the image he was made in, Hailey hid the shame best he could,--though never touched or made it his own--and Brodie, who hated even himself, showed still a light in the wreck by molding Hailey to his work. For, one day, said Brodie in his heart, this boy shall be master of these bridges.

When I am rot, he will be here what I ought to have been--this Irish boy--and they will say he was Brodie's man. And better than any of these dough-heads they send me out, better than any of their Eastern graduates he shall be, if he was made engineer by a drunkard. And Hailey was better, far, far better than the graduates, better than Brodie--and to Hailey came the time to wrestle the Spider.

Stronger than any man before or since he was for that work. All Brodie knew, all the Indians knew, all that a life's experience, eating, living, watching, sleeping with the big river had taught him, that Hailey knew. And when Brodie's bridge went out, Hailey was ready with his new bridge for the Spider Water which should be better than Brodie's, just as he was better than Brodie. It was to be such a bridge as Brodie's bridge with the fire-water left out. And the plans for a Howe truss, two pier, two abutment, three span, pneumatic caisson bridge to span the Big Sandy River were submitted to headquarters.

But the cost! The directors jumped their table when they saw the figures. We were being milked at that time--to put it bluntly, being sucked, worse than lemons--by a Wall Street clique that robbed our good road, shaved our salaries, impoverished our equipment, and cut our maintenance to the quick. They talked economy and studied piracy. In the matter of appropriations, for themselves they were free-booters; for us, they were thrifty as men of Hamelin town. When Hailey demanded a thousand guilders for his Spider Water bridge, they laughed and said, "Come, take fifty." He couldn't do anything else; and he built a fifty guilder bridge to bar the Spider's crawl. It lasted really better than the average bridge and since Hailey never could get a thousand guilders at once, he kept drawing fifty at a time and throwing them annually at the Spider.

But the dream of his life--this _we_ all knew, and the Sioux would have said the Spider knew--was to build a final bridge over the Spider Water: a bridge to throttle it for all time.

It was the one subject on which you could get a rise out of Hailey any time, day or night,--the two pier, two abutment, three span, pneumatic caisson Spider bridge. He would talk Spider bridge to a Chinaman. His bridge foreman Ed Peeto, a staving big, one-eyed French Canadian, actually had but two ideas in life: one was Hailey; the other the Spider bridge. When the management changed again--when the pirates were sent out on the plank so many good men had walked at their command--and a great and public-spirited man took control of the system, Ed Peeto kicked his little water spaniel in a frenzy of delight. "Now, Sport, old boy," he exclaimed riotously, "we'll get the bridge!"

So there were many long conferences at division headquarters between Bucks, superintendent, and Callahan, a.s.sistant, and Hailey, superintendent of bridges, and after, Hailey went once more to general headquarters lugging all his estimates revised and all his plans refigured. All his expense estimates outside the Spider bridge and one other point were slight, because Hailey could skin along with less money than anybody ever in charge of the bridge work. He did it by keeping everything up; not a sleeper, not a spike--nothing got away from him.

The new president, as befitted a very big man, was no end of a swell, and received Hailey with a considerate dignity unknown on our End. He listened carefully to the superintendent's statement of the necessities at the Big Sandy River. The amount looked large; but the argument, supported by a ma.s.s of statistics, was convincing. Three bridges in ten years, and the California fast freight business lost twice. Hailey's budget called, too, for a new bridge at the Peace River--and a good one.

Give him these, he said in effect, and he would guarantee the worst stretch on the system for a lifetime against tie-up disasters. Hailey stayed over to await the decision; but he was always in a hurry, and he haunted the general offices until the president told him he could have the money. To Hailey this meant, particularly, the bridge of his dreams.

The wire flashed the word to the West End; everybody at the Wickiup was glad; but Ed Peeto burned red fire and his little dog Sport ate rattlesnakes.

The old shack of a depot building that served as division headquarters at Medicine Bend we called the Wickiup. Everybody in it was crowded for room, and Hailey, whose share was what was left, had hard work to keep out of the wastebasket. But right away now it was different. Two extra offices were a.s.signed to Hailey, and he took his place with those who sported windows and cuspidors--in a word, had departments in the service. Old Denis Hailey went very near crazy. He resigned as section boss and took a place at smaller wages in the bridge carpenter's gang so he could work on the boy's bridge, and Ed Peeto, savage with responsibility, strutted around the Wickiup like a cyclops.

For a wonder the bridge material came in fast--the Spider stuff first--and early in the summer Hailey, very quiet, and Peeto, very profane, with all and several their traps and slaves and belongings moved into construction headquarters at the Spider, and the first airlock ever sunk west of the Missouri closed over the heads of tall Hailey and big Ed Peeto. Like a swarm of ants the bridge-workers cast the refuse up out of the Spider bed. The blow-pipes never slept: night and day the sand streamed from below, and Hailey's caissons, like armed cruisers, sunk foot by foot towards the rock; by the middle of September the masonry was crowding high-water mark, and the following Sat.u.r.day Hailey and Peeto ran back to Medicine Bend to rest up a bit and get acquainted with their families. Peeto was so deaf he couldn't hear himself swear, and Hailey looked ragged and thin, like the old depot, but immensely happy.

Sunday morning counted a little even then in the mountains. It was at least a day to get your feet on the tables up in Bucks's office and smoke Callahan's Cavendish--which was enough to make a man bless Callahan if he did forget his Maker. Sunday mornings Bucks would get out the dainty, pearl-handled Wostenholm that Lillienfeld, the big San Francisco spirit-shipper, left annually for him at the Bend, and open the R. R. B. mail and read the news aloud for the benefit of Callahan and Hailey and such hangers-on as Peeto and an occasional stray despatcher.

"h.e.l.lo," exclaimed Bucks, chucking a nine-inch official manila under the table, "here's a general order--Number Fourteen----"

The boys drew their briers like one. Bucks read out a lot of stuff that didn't touch our End, and then he reached this paragraph:

"'The Mountain and the Inter-mountain divisions are hereby consolidated under the name of the Mountain Division with J. F. Bucks as Superintendent, headquarters at Medicine Bend. C. T. Callahan is appointed a.s.sistant Superintendent of the new division.'"

"Good boy!" roared Ed Peeto, straining his ears.

"Well, well, well," said Hailey, opening his eyes, "here's promotions right and left."

"'H. P. Agnew is appointed Superintendent of bridges of the new division with headquarters at Omaha, vice P. C. Hailey,'" Bucks read on, with some little surprise growing into a shock. Then he read fast looking for some further mention of Hailey. Hailey promoted, transferred, a.s.signed--but there was no further mention of Hailey in G. O. Number Fourteen. Bucks threw down the order in a silence. Ed Peeto broke out first.

"Who's H. P. Canoe?"

"Agnew."

"Who the h.e.l.l is he?" roared Ed. n.o.body answered: n.o.body knew. Bucks attempted to talk; Callahan lit his lighted pipe; but Ed Peeto stared at Hailey like a drunken man.

"Did you hear that?" he snorted at his superior.

Hailey nodded.

"You're out!" stormed Peeto.

Hailey nodded. The bridge foreman took his pipe from his mouth and dashed it into the stove. He got up and stamped across to the window and was like to have sworn the gla.s.s out before Hailey spoke.

"I'm glad we're up to high water at the Spider, Bucks," said he at last.

"When they get in the Peace River work, the division will run itself for a year."

"Hailey," Bucks spoke slowly, "I don't need to tell you what I think of it, do I? It's a d.a.m.ned shame. But it's what I've said for a year--n.o.body ever knows what Omaha will do next."

Hailey rose to his feet. "Where you going, Phil?" asked Bucks.

"Going back to the Spider on Number Two."

"Not going back this morning--why don't you wait for Four, to-night?"

suggested Bucks.