The Night Operator Part 22

"You see," said P. Walton to himself, as though summing up an argument dispa.s.sionately, "ditching a train travelling pretty near a mile a minute is apt to result in a few casualties, and Nulty might get hurt, and if he didn't, the first thing they'd do would be to pa.s.s him out for keeps, anyway, on Spud's account. They're not a very gentle lot--I remember the night back at Joliet that Larry and the Butcher walked out with the guards' clothes on, after cracking the guards' skulls.

They're not a very gentle lot, and I guess they've been to some little trouble fixing up for to-night--enough so's they won't feel pleasant at having it spoiled. I guess"--P. Walton coughed--"I won't need that ticket for the _heat_ of Northern Queensland. I guess"--he ended gravely--"I guess I'm going to h.e.l.l."

P. Walton put his head out through the window and listened--and nodded his head.

"Sound carries a long way out here in the foothills," he observed.

"They ought to hear it on the mail train as soon as we get close--and I guess we're close enough now to start it."

P. Walton got down, and, clutching at the cab-frame for support, lifted up the cover of the engineer's seat--there was sure to be something there among the tools that would do. P. Walton's hand came out with a heavy piece of cord. He turned then, pulled the whistle lever down, tied it down--and, screaming now like a lost soul, the 229 reeled on through the night.

The minutes pa.s.sed--and then the pace began to slacken. Dalheen was always rated a good fireman, and a wizard with the shovel, but even Dalheen had his limitations--and P. Walton hadn't helped him out any.

The steam was dropping pretty fast as the 229 started to climb a grade.

P. Walton stared anxiously about him. It must be eleven minutes now since he had started from the Big Cloud yards, but how far had he come?

Was he going to stop too soon after all? What was the matter? P.

Walton's eyes on the track ahead dilated suddenly, and, as suddenly, he reached for the throttle and slammed it shut--he was not going to stop too soon--perhaps not soon enough.

Larry, the Butcher, Big Tom, and Dago Pete had chosen their position well. A hundred yards ahead, the headlight played on a dismantled roadbed and torn-up rails, then shot off into nothingness over the embankment as the right of way swerved sharply to the right they had left no single loophole for Extra No. 34, not even a fighting chance--the mail train would swing the curve and be into the muck before the men in her cab would be able to touch a lever.

Screaming hoa.r.s.ely, the 229 slowed, b.u.mped her pony truck on the ties where there were no longer any rails jarred, bounced, and thumped along another half dozen yards--and brought up with a shock that sent P.

Walton reeling back on the coal in the tender.

A dark form, springing forward, bulked in the left-hand gangway--and P.

Walton recognized the Butcher.

"Keep out, Butch!" he coughed over the scream of the whistle--and the Butcher in his surprise sort of sagged mechanically back to the ground.

"It's de Dook!" he yelled, with a gasp; and then, as other forms joined him, he burst into a torrent of oaths. "What de blazes are you doin'!"

he bawled. "De train 'll be along in a minute, if you ain't queered it already--cut out that cursed whistle! Cut it out, d'ye hear, or we'll come in there an' do it for you in a way you won't like--have you gone nutty?"

"Try it," invited P. Walton--and coughed again. "You won't have far to come, but I'll drop you if you do. I've changed my mind--there isn't going to be any wreck to-night. You'd better use what time is left in making your getaway."

"So that's it, is it!" roared another voice. "You dirty pup, you'd squeal on your pals, would you, you white-livered snitch, you! Well, take that!"

There was a flash, a lane of light cut streaming through the darkness, and a bullet lodged with an angry spat on the coal behind P. Walton's head. Another and another followed. P. Walton smiled, and flattened himself down on the coal. A form leaped for the gangway--and P. Walton fired. There was a yell of pain and the man dropped back. Then P.

Walton heard some of them running around behind the tender, and they came at him from both sides, firing at an angle through both gangways.

Yells, oaths, revolver shots and the screech of the whistle filled the air--and again P. Walton smiled--he was. .h.i.t now, quite badly, somewhere in his side.

His brain grew sick and giddy. He fired once, twice more unsteadily--then the revolver slipped from his fingers. From somewhere came another whistle--they weren't firing at him any more, they were running away, and--P. Walton tried to rise--and pitched back unconscious.

Nulty, the first man out from the mail train, found him there, and, wondering, his face set and grim, carried P. Walton to the express car.

They made a mattress for him out of chair cushions, and laid him on the floor--and there, a few minutes later, Regan and Carleton, from the wrecker, after a look at the 229 and the wrecked track that spoke eloquently for itself, joined the group.

Carleton knelt and looked at P. Walton--then looked into Nulty's face.

Nulty, bending over P. Walton on the other side, shook his head.

"He's past all hope," he said gruffly.

P. Walton stirred, and his lips moved--he was talking to himself.

"If I were you, Nulty," he murmured, and they stooped to catch the words, "I'd look out for--for--that----"

The words trailed off into incoherency.

Regan, tugging at his mustache, swallowed a lump in his throat, and turned away his head.

"It's queer!" he muttered. "How'd he know--what? I wonder where he came from, and who he was?"

But P. Walton never said. P. Walton was dead.

VI

THE AGE LIMIT

As its scarred and battle-torn colors are the glory of a regiment, brave testimony of hard-fought fields where men were men, so to the Hill Division is its tradition. And there are names there, too, on the honor roll--not famous, not world-wide, not on every tongue, but names that in railroading will never die. The years have gone since men fought and conquered the sullen gray-walled Rockies and shackled them with steel and iron, and laid their lives on the altar of one of the mightiest engineering triumphs the world has ever known; but the years have dimmed no memory, have only brought achievement into clearer focus, and honor to its fullness where honor is due. They tell the stories of those days yet, as they always will tell them--at night in the round-house over the soft pur of steam, with the yellow flicker of the oil lamps on the group cl.u.s.tered around the pilot of a 1600-cla.s.s mountain greyhound--and the telling is as though men stood erect, bareheaded, at "salute" to the pa.s.sing of the Old Guard.

Heroes? They never called themselves that--never thought of themselves in that way, those old fellows who have left their stories. Their uniform was a suit of overalls, their "decorations" the grime that came with the day's work--just railroad men, hard-tongued, hard-fisted, hard-faced, rough, without much polish, perhaps, as some rank polish, with hearts that were right and big as a woman's--that was all.

MacCaffery, Dan MacCaffery, was one of these. This is old Dan MacCaffery's story.

MacCaffery? Dan was an engineer, one of the old-timers, blue-eyed, thin--but you'd never get old Dan that way, he wouldn't look natural!

You've got to put him in the cab of the 304, leaning out of the window, way out, thin as a bent toothpick, and pounding down the gorge and around into the straight making for the Big Cloud yards, with a string of buff-colored coaches jouncing after him, and himself bouncing up and down in his seat like an animated piece of rubber. n.o.body ever saw old Dan inside the cab, that is, all in--he always had his head out of the window--said he could see better, though the wind used to send the water trickling down from the old blue eyes, and generally there were two little white streaks on his cheeks where no grime or coal dust ever got a chance at a strangle hold on the skin crevices. For the rest, what you could see sticking out of the cab over the whirling rod as he came down the straight, was just a black, greasy peaked cap surmounting a scanty fringe of gray hair, and a wizened face, with a round little k.n.o.b in the center of it for a nose.

But that isn't altogether old Dan MacCaffery, either--there was Mrs.

MacCaffery. Everybody liked Dan, with his smile, and the cheery way he had of puckering up his lips sympathetically and pushing back his cap and scratching near his ear where the hair was, as he listened maybe to a hard-luck story; everybody liked Dan--but they swore by Mrs.

MacCaffery. Leaving out the railroaders who worshipped her anyway, even the worst characters in Big Cloud, and there were some pretty bad ones in those early days, hangers-on and touts for the gambling h.e.l.ls and dives, used to speak of the little old lady in the lace cap with a sort of veneration.

Lace cap? Yes. Sounds queer, doesn't it? An engineer's wife, keeping his shanty in a rough and ready, half baked bit of an uncivilized town in the shadow of the Rockies, and a lace cap don't go together very often, that's a fact. But it is equally a fact that Mrs. MacCaffery wore a lace cap--and somehow none of the other women ever had a word to say about her being "stuck up" either. There was something patrician about Mrs. MacCaffery--not the cold, stand-offish effect that's only make-believe, but the real thing. The Lord knows, she had to work hard enough, but you never saw her rinsing the washtub suds from her hands and coming to the door with her sleeves rolled up--not at all. The last thing you'd ever think there was in the house was a washtub.

Little lace cap over smoothly-parted gray hair, little black dress with a little white frill around the throat, and just a glad look on her face whether she'd ever seen you before or not--that was Mrs.

MacCaffery.

As far back as any one could remember she had always looked like that, always a little old lady--never a young woman, although she and Dan had come there years before, even before the operating department had got the steel shaken down into anything that might with justice be called a permanent right of way. Perhaps it was the gray hair--Mrs.

MacCaffery's hair had been gray then, when it ought to have been the glossy, luxuriant brown that the old-fashioned daguerreotype, hanging in the shanty's combination dining and silting room, proclaimed that it once was.

Big Cloud, of course, didn't call her patrician--because they didn't talk that way out there. They said there was "some cla.s.s" to Mrs.

MacCaffery--and if their expression was inelegant, what they meant by it wasn't. Not that they ranked her any finer than Dan, for the last one of them ranked Dan as one of G.o.d's own n.o.blemen, and there's nothing finer than that, only they figured, at least the women did, that back in the Old Country she'd been brought up to things that Dan MacCaffery hadn't.

Maybe that accounted for their sending young Dan East, and pinching themselves pretty near down to bed rock to give the boy an education and a start. Not that Mrs. MacCaffery had any notions that railroading and overalls and dirt was plebeian and beneath her--far from it! She was proud of old Dan, proud of his work, proud of his record; she'd talk about Dan's engine to you by the hour just as though it were alive, just as Dan would, and she would have hung chintz curtains on the cab windows and put flower pots on the running boards if they had let her. It wasn't that--Mrs. MacCaffery wasn't that kind. Only there were limitations to a cab, and she didn't want the boy, he was the only one they had, to start out with limitations of any kind that would put a slow order on his reaching the goal her mother's heart dreamed of.

What goal? Who knows? Mothers always dream of their boy's future in that gentle, loving, all-conquering, up-in-the-clouds kind of a way, don't they? She wanted young Dan to do something, make a name for himself some day.

And young Dan did. He handed a jolt to the theory of heredity that should, if it didn't, have sent the disciples of that creed to the mat for the full count. When he got through his education, he got into a bank and backed the brain development, the old couple had scrimped to the bone to give him, against the market--with five thousand dollars of the bank's money. Old Dan and Mrs. MacCaffery got him off--Mrs.

MacCaffery with her sweet old face, and Dan with his grim old honesty.

The bank didn't prosecute. The boy was drowned in a ferryboat accident the year after. And old Dan had been paying up ever since.

He was always paying up. Five thousand dollars, even in instalments for a whole lot of years, didn't leave much to come and go on from his monthly pay check. He talked some of dropping the benefit orders he belonged to, and he belonged to most of them, but Mrs. MacCaffery talked him out of that on account of the insurance, she said, but really because she knew that Dan and his lodge rooms and his regalias and his worshipful t.i.tles were just part and parcel of each other, and that he either was, or was just going to be, Supreme High Chief Ill.u.s.trious Something-or-other of every Order in town. Besides, after all, it didn't cost much compared with the other, just meant pinching a tiny bit harder--and so they pinched.