The Night Operator Part 30

Hands dug disconsolately in his pockets, playing mechanically with a bit of cord that was about their sole contents, Noodles sat there--and his faith in nickel thrillers was shaken to the core. Noodles'

thoughts were too complex for coherency--that is, for coherency in any but one of his thoughts--he hated Regan worse than ever, for he couldn't altogether expurgate the nickel thrillers from his mind on such a short notice, and he could hear Regan gloat and hiss "Foiled!"

in his ear.

Noodles' hands came out of his pocket--with the cord. He wound one end around the bannisters, and began to see-saw it back and forth aimlessly in the darkness. There wasn't any good of shadowing Regan any more--but he wasn't through with Regan. Noodles had a soul above discouragement. Only what was he to do? If the nickel thrillers had failed him in his hour of need, he would have to depend on himself--only what was he to do? Noodles stopped see-sawing the cord suddenly--and stared at it through the darkness, though he couldn't see it. Then he edged down another step, turned around on his knees, and knotted one end of the cord--it was a good stout one--to one side of the bannisters, about six inches from the level of the hall floor.

There was a bannister railing on each side, and he stretched the cord tightly across to the other bannister, and knotted it there. That would do for a beginning! It didn't promise as gory a denouement as he thirsted for, and he was a little ashamed of the colorlessness of his expedient compared with those he'd read about, but there wasn't anybody else likely to use those stairs before Regan did, and it would do for a beginning--Regan would get a jolt or two before he reached the bottom!

Noodles retreated down the stairs and retired to the rain barrel.

Waits had been long there before, but to-night the time dragged hopelessly--he didn't expect to see very much, but he would be able to hear Regan coming down the stairs, so he waited, curbing his impatience by biting anxiously on the ends of his finger nails.

Suddenly Noodles leaned head and shoulders far out from behind the rain barrel to miss no single detail of this, the initial act of his revenge, that he could drink in, his eyes fastened on the station door--the light in the window above had gone out. Very grim was Noodles' face, and his teeth were hard set together--there was no foolishness about this. The super's door upstairs opened and shut--Noodles leaned a little farther forward out from the rain barrel.

Meanwhile, Regan, upstairs, was not in a good humor. Regan, when alone, played a complicated and somewhat intricate species of solitaire, a matter of some pride to the master mechanic, and that evening he had had no luck--his combinations wouldn't work out. So, after something like fifteen abortive attempts that consumed the better part of an hour and a half, and victory still remaining an elusive thing, Regan chucked the cards back into Carleton's drawer in disgust, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, refilled the pipe for company homeward, and, growling a little to himself, blew out the super's lamp.

He walked across to the door, opened and shut it, and stepped out into the hall. Here, he halted and produced a match, both because his pipe was as yet unlighted, and because the stairs were dark. He struck the match, applied it to the tamped tobacco, puffed once--and his eyes, from the bowl of his pipe, focused suddenly downward on the head of the stairs. Regan's round, fat little face went a color that put the glowing end of the match, still held mechanically over the pipe bowl, to shame, and the fist that wasn't occupied with the match clenched with the wrath that engulfed him--_Noodles_!

For a moment, breathing heavily with rage, Regan glared at the cord--then the match, burning his fingers, did not soothe him any, and he dropped it hastily, swearing earnestly to himself. Then he bent down, cut away the cord with his knife, and in grim, laborious silence--Regan was a heavy man, and the stairs had a tendency to creak that was hard to suppress--descended step by step. Regan was consumed with but one desire for the present or the hereafter--to get his hands on Noodles.

Where Noodles had been stealthy, Regan was now positively devilish in his caution and cunning. Step by step he went down, testing each foothold much after the fashion of a cat that stretches out its paw, and, finding something not quite to its liking, draws it back, and, shaking it vigorously, tries again more warily--and the while a fire unquenchable burned within him.

He reached the door at the bottom, found the k.n.o.b, waited an instant--then suddenly flung the door wide open and sprang out on the platform. Noodles' form, projecting eagerly far out from the rain barrel not five yards away, was the first thing his eyes lighted upon.

Regan had no time to waste in words. He made a dash for the rain barrel--and Noodles, with a sort of surprised squeak of terror, turned and ran.

A fat man, ordinarily, cannot run very fast, and neither can a twelve-year-old boy; but, with vengeance supplying wings to the one, and terror imparting haste to the other, the time they made from the rain barrel along the platform past the baggage room and freight shed, off the platform to the ground, and up the track to the construction department's storehouse, a matter of a hundred and fifty yards, stands good to-day as a record in Big Cloud.

It was pretty near a dead heat. Noodles had five yards' start when he left the rain barrel; and when he reached the end of the storehouse he had five yards' lead--no more. A premonition of disaster began to twine itself around Noodles' heart in a sickly, dispiriting way. He dashed along beside the wall of the building--and after him lunged Regan, grunting like a grampus, a threat in every grunt.

It was a long, low, windowless building, and halfway up its length was the door--Noodles had known the door to be unlocked at nights for the purpose of loading rush material for the bridge gangs in the mountains to go out by the early morning freight west at 4.10--and his hope lay in the door being open now. The place was full to the ceiling with boxes, bales, casks, barrels and kegs, and amongst them in the darkness, being of small dimensions himself, he could soon lose Regan.

He reached the door, s.n.a.t.c.hed at the latch--the door was unlocked--and with an uplift immeasurable upon his young soul, that gave vent to itself in a hoot of derision, Noodles flung himself inside.

Regan, still panting earnestly, the beads on his brow now embryonic fountain-heads that sent trickling streams down his face, lurched, pretty well winded, through the door five yards behind Noodles--and then Regan stopped--and the thought of Noodles was swept from Regan's mind in a flash.

The smell of smoke was in his nostrils, and like a white, misty cloud in the darkness it hung around him--and through it, up toward the far end of the shed, a fire showed yellow and ugly, that with a curious, hissing, sibilant sound flared suddenly bright, then died to yellow ugliness again.

Grim-faced now, his jaws clamped hard, Regan sprang forward toward the upper end of the shed. What was afire, he did not know, nor what had caused it--though the latter, probably, by a match dropped maybe hours ago by a careless Polack, that had caught and set something smoldering, and that was now breaking into flame. All Regan knew, all Regan thought of then, was the--_powder_. There were fifty kegs of giant blasting powder ma.s.sed together there somewhere ahead, and just beyond where the fire was flinging out its challenge to him--enough to wreck not only the shed, but half the railroad property in Big Cloud as well.

Up the little handcar tracks between the high-piled stores Regan ran--and halted where a spurt of flame, ending in a vicious puff of smoke, shot out beside him, low down on the ground. It was light enough now, and in a glance the master mechanic caught the black grains of powder strewing the floor where a broken keg had been rolled along.

A little alleyway had been left here running to the wall, and the fire itself was bursting from a case in the rear and bottom tier of stores on one side of this; on the other side were piled the powder kegs--and the s.p.a.ce between, the width of the alleyway, was no more than a bare five or six feet.

There was no time to wait for help, the powder grains crunched under his feet, and ran little zigzag, fizzy lines of fire like a miniature inferno as the sparks caught them; at any moment it might reach the kegs, and then--Regan flung himself along the alleyway to the rear tier of cases, they were small ones here, though piled twice the height of his head--if he could wrench them away, he could get at the burning case below! Regan bent, strained at the cases--they were light and moved--he heaved again to topple them over--and then, as a rasping, ripping sound reached him from above, he let go his hold to jump back--too late. A heavy casting, that had been placed on top of the cases, evidently for economy of s.p.a.ce, came hurtling downward, struck Regan on the head, glanced to his shoulder and arm, slid with a thump to the ground--and Regan dropped like a log.

A minute, perhaps two, it had all taken--no more. Noodles, crouched down against a case just inside the door, had seen the master mechanic rush by him; and Noodles, too, had seen the flame and smelt the smoke.

Noodles' first impulse was to make his escape, his next to see if he could not turn this unexpected intervention of fate to his own account anent the master mechanic. Noodles heard Regan moving about, and he stole silently in that direction; then Noodles heard the heavy thump of iron, the softer thud of Regan's fall, and something inside him seemed to stop suddenly, and his face went very white.

"Mr. Regan! Mr. Regan!" he stammered out.

There was no answer--no sound--save an ominous crackle of burning wood.

Noodles stole further forward--and then, as he reached the spot where Regan lay, he stood stock-still for a second, petrified with fear--but the next instant, screaming at the top of his voice for help, he threw himself upon Regan, pounding frantically with the flat of his hands at the master mechanic's shoulder, where the other's coat was beginning to blaze. Somehow, Noodles got this out, and then, still screaming for help, began to drag Regan away from the side of the blazing case.

But Regan was a heavy man--almost too much for Noodles. Noodles, choking with the smoke, his eyes fascinated with horror as they fixed, now on the powder kegs--whose unloading, in company with a dozen other awe-struck boys, he had watched a few days before--now on the sparkling, fizzing grains of powder upon the floor, tugged, and wriggled, and pulled at the master mechanic.

Inch by inch, Noodles won Regan to safety--and then, on his hands and knees, he went back to sweep the grains away from the edge of the kegs.

They burnt his hands as he brushed them along the floor, and he moaned with the pain between his screams for aid. It was hot in the narrow place, so narrow that the breath of flame swept his face from the case--but there was still some powder on the floor to brush back out of the way, little heaps of it. Weak, and swaying on his knees, Noodles brushed at it desperately. It seemed to spurt into his face, and he couldn't breathe any more, and he couldn't see, and his head was swirling around queerly. He staggered to his feet as there came a rush of men, and Clarihue, the turner, with the night crew of the roundhouse came racing up the shed.

"Good G.o.d, what's this!" cried Clarihue.

"It's--it's a fire," said Noodles, with a sob--and fell into Clarihue's arms.

They told Regan about it the next day when they had got his head patched up and his arm set. Regan didn't say very much as he lay in his bed, but he asked somebody to go to Maguire's and ask old Bill to come down.

And an hour later Maguire entered the room--but he halted a good yard away from the foot of Regan's bed.

"Yez sint for me, Regan," observed the little hostler, in noncommittal, far-away tones.

"I did, Maguire," said Regan diplomatically. "Things haven't been going as smooth as they might have over in the roundhouse since you left, and I want you to come back. What do you say?"

"'Tis not fwhat _I_ say," said Maguire, and he moved no nearer to the bed. "'Tis whether yez unsay fwhat yez said yersilf. Do yez take ut back, Regan?"

"I do," said Regan in grave tones--but his hand reached up to help the bandages hide his grin. "I take it all back, Maguire--every word of it."

"Thot's all right, thin," said the little hostler, not arrogantly, but as one justified. "I'm sorry to see yez are sick, Regan, an' I'm glad to see yez are better--but did I not warn yez, Regan? 'Twas the wrath av G.o.d, Regan, thot's the cause av this."

"Mabbe," said Regan softly. "Mabbe--but to my thinking 'twas the devil and all his works."

"Fwhat's thot?" inquired Maguire, bending forward. "I didn't catch fwhat yez said, Regan."

"I said," said Regan, choking a little, "that Noodles is a G.o.dson any G.o.dfather would be proud to have."

"Sure he is," said Noodles' father cordially. "He is thot."

VIII

ON THE NIGHT WIRE

Tommy Regan speaks of it yet; so does Carleton; and so, for the matter of that, does the Hill Division generally--and there's a bit of a smile goes with it, too, but the smile comes through as a sort of feeble thing from the grim set of their lips. They remember it--it is one of the things they have never forgotten--Dan McGrew and the Kid, and the night the Circus Special pulled out of Big Cloud with Bull Coussirat and Fatty Hogan in the cab.

Neither the Kid nor McGrew were what you might call born to the Hill Division; neither of them had been brought up with it, so to speak.

The Kid came from an Eastern system--and McGrew came from G.o.d-knows-where. To pin McGrew down to anything definite or specific in that regard was something just a little beyond the ability of the Hill Division, but it was fairly evident that where railroads were there McGrew had been--he was old enough, anyway--and he knew his business. When McGrew was sober he was a wizard on the key--but McGrew's shame was drink.

McGrew dropped off at Big Cloud one day, casually, from nowhere, and asked for a job despatching. A man in those days out in the new West wasn't expected to carry around his birth certificate in his vest pocket--he made good or he didn't in the clothes he stood in, that was all there was to it. They gave him a job a.s.sisting the latest new man on the early morning trick as a sort of test, found that he was better, a long way better than the latest new man, gave him a regular despatcher's trick of his own--and thought they had a treasure.

For a month they were warranted in their belief, for all that McGrew personally appeared to be a rather rough card--and then McGrew cut loose. He went into the Blazing Star Saloon one afternoon--and he left it only when deposited outside on the sidewalk as it closed up at four o'clock on the following morning. This was the hour McGrew was supposed to sit in for his trick at the key; but McGrew was quite oblivious to all such considerations. A freight crew, just in and coming up from the yards, carried him home to his boarding house.

McGrew got his powers of locomotion back far enough by late afternoon to reach the Blazing Star again--and the performance was repeated--McGrew went the limit. He ended up with a week in the hands of little Doctor McTurk.

McTurk was scientific from the soles of his feet up, and earnestly professional all the rest of the way. When McGrew began to get a glimmering of intelligence again, McTurk went at him red-headed.

"Your heart's bad," the little doctor flung at McGrew, and there was no fooling in his voice. "So's your liver--cirrhosis. But mostly your heart. You'll try this just once too often--and you'll go out like a collapsed balloon, out like the snuffing of a candle wick."