The Night Operator Part 16

Dorsay opened another notch. He laughed a grim, hard laugh.

"I _know_," he shouted over the roar. "I know. Leave it to me, Flannagan."

The bark of the exhaust came quicker and quicker, swelled and rose into the full, deep-toned thunder of a single note. Notch by notch, Dorsay opened out the 1014, notch by notch, and the big mountain racer, answering like a mettlesome steed to the touch of the whip, leapt forward, ever faster, into the night.

Now the headlight played on shining steel ahead; now suddenly threw a path of light across the short, yellow stubble of a rising b.u.t.te, and Dorsay checked grudgingly for an instant as they swung the curve--just for an instant--then into the straight again, with wide-flung throttle.

It was mad work, and in that reeling, dizzy cab no man spoke. The sweep of the singing wind, the wild tattoo of beating trucks, the sullen whir of flying drivers was in their ears; while behind, the derrick crane, the tool car and the coaches writhed and wriggled, swayed and lurched, tearing at their couplings, bouncing on their trucks, jerking viciously as each slue took up the axle play, rolling, pitching crazily like c.o.c.klesh.e.l.ls tossed on an angry sea.

Now they tore through a cut, and the walls took up the deafening roar and echoed and reechoed it back in volume a thousandfold; now into the open, and the sudden contrast was like the gasping breath of an imprisoned thing escaped; now over culverts, trestles, spans, hollow, reverberating--the speed was terrific.

Over his levers, bounding on his seat, Dorsay, tense and strained, leaned far forward following the leaping headlight's glare; while staggering like a drunken man to keep his balance, the sweat standing out in glistening beads upon his grimy face, Stan Willard watched the flickering needle on the gauge, and his shovel clanged and swung; and in the corner, back of Dorsay, bent low to brace himself, thrown backward and forward with every lurch, in the fantastic, dancing light like some tigerish, outraged animal crouched to spring, Flannagan, with head drawn into his shoulders, jaws outthrust, stared over the engineer's back, stared with never a look to right or left, stared through the cab gla.s.s to the right of way ahead--stared toward Spider Cut.

Again and again, with sickening, giddy shock, wheel-base lifted from the swing, the 1014 struck the tangents, hung a breathless s.p.a.ce, and, with a screech of crunching f.l.a.n.g.es, found the rails once more.

Again and again--but the story of that ride is the doctors' story--they tell it best. Dorsay made the run that night from Big Cloud to Spider Cut, twenty-one point seven miles, in _nineteen_ minutes.

There have been bad spills on the Hill Division, bad spills--but there have never been worse than on that Friday night when the 505 jumped the rails at the foot of the curve coming down the grade just east of Spider Cut, shot over the embankment and piled the Coast Express, mahogany sleepers and all, into splintered wreckage forty feet below the right of way.

As Dorsay checked and with screaming brake-shoes the 1014 slowed, Flannagan, with a wild cry, leaped from the cab and dashed up the track ahead of the still-moving pilot. It was light enough--the cars of the wreck nearest him, the mail and baggage cars, had caught, and, fanned by the wind into yellow flames, were blazing like a huge bonfire.

Shouts arose from below; cries, anguished, piercing, from those imprisoned in the wreck; figures, those of the crew and pa.s.sengers who had made their escape, were moving hither and thither, working as best they might, pulling others through shattered windows and up-canted doors, laying those who were past all knowing beside the long row of silent forms already tenderly stretched upon the edge of the embankment.

A man, with face cut and bleeding, came running toward Flannagan. It was Kingsley, conductor of Number Eighty. Flannagan jumped for him, grasped him by the shoulders and stared without a word into his face.

But Kingsley shook his head.

"I don't know, Flannagan," he choked. "She was in the first-cla.s.s just ahead of the Pullmans. There's--there's no one come out of that car yet"--he turned away his head--"we couldn't get to it."

"Couldn't get to it"--Flannagan's lips repeated the phrase mechanically. Then he looked--and understood the grim significance of the words. He laughed suddenly, jarring hoa.r.s.e, as it is not good to hear men laugh--and with that laugh Flannagan went into the fight.

The details of that night no one man knows. There in the shadow of the gray-walled Rockies, men, flint-hearted, calloused, rough and ready though they were, sobbed as they toiled; and while the derrick tackles creaked and moaned, axe and pick and bar swung and crashed and tore through splintering gla.s.s and ripping timber.

What men could do they did--and through the hours Flannagan led them.

Tough, grizzled men, more than one dropped from sheer weariness; but ever Flannagan's great arms rose and fell, ever his mighty shoulders heaved, ever he led them on. What men could do they did--but it was graying dawn before they opened a way to the heart of the wreck--the first-cla.s.s coach that once ahead of the Pullmans was _under_ them now.

Flannagan, gaunt, burned and bleeding, a madman with reeling brain, staggered toward the jagged hole that they had torn in the flooring of the car. They tried to hold him back, the man who had spurred them through the night alternately with lashing curse and piteous prayer, the man who had worked with demon strength as no three men among them had worked, the man who was tottering now at the end in mind and body, they tried to hold him back--_for mercy's sake_. But Flannagan shook them off and went--went laughing again the same fearful laugh with which he had begun the fight.

He found her there--found her with a little bundle lying in the crook of her outstretched arm. She moaned and held it toward him--but Flannagan had gone his limit, his work was done, the tension broke.

And when they worked their way to the far end of the car after him, those hard, grim-visaged followers of Flannagan, they found a man squatted on an up-ended seat, a woman beside him, death and desolation and huddled shapes around him, dandling a tiny infant in his arms, crooning a lullaby through cracked lips, crooning a lullaby--to a little one long hushed already in its last sleep.

Opinions differ. But Big Cloud to-day sides about solid with Regan.

"Flannagan?" says the master mechanic. "Flannagan's a pretty good wrecking boss, pretty good, I don't know of any better--since the Almighty had him on the carpet. He's got a plot up on the b.u.t.te behind the town, he and Daisy, with a little mound on it. They go up there together every Sunday--never've known 'em to miss. A man ain't likely to fall off the right of way again as long as he does that, is he?

Well, then, forget it, he's been doing that for a year now--what?"

V

THE MAN WHO SQUEALED

Back in the early days the payroll of the Hill Division was full of J.

Smiths, T. Browns and H. Something-or-others--just as it is to-day.

But to-day there is a difference. The years have brought a certain amount of inevitable pedigree, as it were--a certain amount of gossip, so to speak, over the back fences of Big Cloud. It's natural enough.

There's a possibility, as a precedent, that one or two of the pa.s.sengers on the _Mayflower_ didn't have as much blue blood when they started on the voyage as their descendants have got now--it's possible.

The old hooker, from all accounts, had a pretty full pa.s.senger list, and there may have been some who secured accommodations with few questions asked, and a subsequent coat of glorified whitewash that they couldn't have got if they'd stayed at home where they were intimately known--that is, they couldn't have got the coat of glorified whitewash.

It's true that there's a few years between the landing of the _Mayflower_ and the inception of Big Cloud, but the interval doesn't count--the principle is the same. Out in the mountains on the Hill Division, "Who's Who" begins with the founding of Big Cloud--it is verbose, unprofitable and extremely bad taste to go back any farther than that--even if it were possible. There's quite a bit known about the J. Smiths, the T. Browns and the H. Something-or-others now, with the enlightenment of years upon them--but there wasn't then. There were a good many men who immigrated West to help build the road through the Rockies, and run it afterwards--for reasons of their own. There weren't any questions asked. Plain J. Smith, T. Brown or H.

Something-or-other went--that was all there was to it.

He said his name was Walton--P. Walton. He was tall, hollow-cheeked, with skin of an unhealthy, colorless white, and black eyes under thin, black brows that were unnaturally bright. He dropped off at Big Cloud one afternoon--in the early days--from No. 1, the Limited from the East, climbed upstairs in the station to the super's room, and coughed out a request to Carleton for a job.

Carleton, "Royal" Carleton, the squarest man that ever held down a divisional swivel chair, looked P. Walton over for a moment before he spoke. P. Walton didn't size up much like a day's work anyway you looked at him.

"What can you do?" inquired Carleton.

"Anything," said P. Walton--and coughed.

Carleton reached for his pipe and struck a match.

"If you could," said he, sucking at the amber mouthpiece between words, "there wouldn't be any trouble about it. For instance, the construction gangs want men to----"

"I'll go--I'll do anything," cut in P. Walton eagerly. "Just give me a chance."

"Nope!" said Carleton with a grin. "I'm not hankering to break the Sixth Commandment--know what that is?"

P. Walton licked dry lips with the tip of his tongue.

"Murder," said he. "But you might as well let it come that way as any other. I'm pretty bad here"--he jerked his thumb toward his lungs--"and I'm broke here"--he turned an empty trouser's pocket inside out.

"H'm!" observed Carleton reflectively. There was something in the other that touched his sympathy, and something apart from that that appealed to him--a sort of grim, philosophical grit in the man with the infected lungs.

"I came out," said P. Walton, looking through the window, and kind of talking to himself, "because I thought it would be healthier for me out here than back East."

"I dare say," said Carleton kindly; "but not if you start in by swinging a pick. Maybe we can find something else for you to do. Ever done any railroading?"

Walton shook his head.

"No," he answered. "I've always worked on books. I'm called pretty good at figures, if you've got anything in that line."

"Clerk, eh? Well, I don't know," said Carleton slowly. "I guess, perhaps, we can give you a chance. My own clerk's doing double shift just at present; you might help him out temporarily. And if you're what you say you are, we'll find something better for you before the summer's over. Thirty dollars a month--it's not much of a stake--what do you say?"

"It's a pretty big stake for me," said P. Walton, and his face lighted up as he turned it upon Carleton.

"All right," said Carleton. "You'd better spend the rest of the afternoon then in hunting up some place to stay. And here"--he dug into his pocket and handed P. Walton two five-dollar gold pieces--"this may come in handy till you're on your feet."

"Say," said P. Walton huskily, "I----" he stopped suddenly, as the door opened and Regan, the master mechanic, came in.