The Night Operator Part 41

And Regan listened--and the story lost nothing in the telling because the faded eyes were wet, and the wrinkled lips quivered sometimes, and would not form the words.

At the end, big-hearted Regan reached into his back pocket for his plug, met his teeth in it, wrenched a piece away without looking at her, and cleared his throat--but he still shook his head.

"It's no use you talking, Mrs. MacQuigan," he said gruffly, to hide his emotion. "I'd fire any man on earth, 'tis no matter the who or why, for drinking in the cab on a run."

"But, Regan," she begged, catching at his arm, "he'll be leaving Big Cloud with his job gone."

"And what then?" said Regan. "Mabbe 'twould be the best thing--h'm?"

"Ah, Regan," she said, and her voice caught a little, "sure, 'twould be the end of Martin, don't you see? 'Tis me that knows him, and 'twill not last long, the spell, only till the worst of it is over--Martin is too fine for that, Regan. If I can keep him by me, Regan, d'ye mind?

If he goes away where there's n.o.body to give him a thought he'll--he'll--ah, Regan, faith, Regan, 'tis a lot you've thought of Martin Bradley the same as me."

Regan examined a crack in the planking of the station platform minutely, while Mrs. MacQuigan held tenaciously to his coat sleeve.

"I dunno," said Regan heavily. "I dunno. Mabbe I'll----"

"Ah, Regan!" she cried happily. "I knew 'twas----"

"Not in a cab!" interposed Regan hastily. "Not if he was the president of the road. But I'll see, Mrs. MacQuigan, I'll see."

And Regan saw--Thornley, the trainmaster. And after Thornley, he saw Reddy MacQuigan in the roundhouse.

"Reddy," said he, with a growl that wasn't real, "there's a vacancy in the engine crews--h'm?"

"Martin's?" said Reddy quickly.

"Yes," said Regan. "Do you want it?"

"No," said Reddy MacQuigan shortly.

"Good boy," said the fat little master mechanic. "Then I'll give it to you just the same. Martin's through in here; but he'll get a chance braking for Thornley. You'll run spare to begin with, and"--as Reddy stared a little numbly--"don't break your neck thanking me. Thank yourself for turning into a man. Your mother's a fine woman, Reddy. I guess you're beginning to find that out too--h'm?"

So Reddy MacQuigan went to firing where Martin Bradley had fired before, and his pay went up; and Bradley--no, don't get that idea--whatever else he may have done, Martin Bradley didn't make a beast of himself. Bradley took the job they offered him, neither gratefully nor ungratefully, took it with that spirit of utter indifference for anything and everything that seemed to have laid hold of him and got him in its grip--and off duty he spent most of his time in the emporiums along Main Street. He drank some, but never enough to snow him under; it was excitement that he seemed to crave, forgetfulness in anything that would absorb him for the moment. It was not drink so much; it was the faro tables and the roulette and the stud poker that, crooked from the drop of the hat, claimed him and cleaned him out night after night--all except Mrs. MacQuigan's board money, that they never got away from, him. Mrs. MacQuigan got that as regularly now that she didn't need it with Reddy to look after her as she had when she was practically dependent upon Bradley for it all.

Silent, grim, taciturn always, more so now than ever, Bradley went his way; indifferent to Regan when Regan b.u.t.tonholed him; indifferent to Thornley and his threats of dismissal, meant to jerk Bradley into the straight; indifferent to every mortal thing on earth. And the Hill Division, with Regan leading, shook its head. There wasn't a man but knew the story, and, big under the greasy jumpers and the oil-soaked shirts, they never judged him; but Bradley's eyes held no invitation for companionship, so they left him pretty much alone.

"I dunno," said Regan, tugging at his mustache, twiddling with his thumbs over his paunch, "I dunno--looks like the sc.r.a.p heap at the end of the run--h'm? I dunno."

But Mrs. MacQuigan said no.

"Wait," said she, with her patient smile. "It's me that knows Martin.

It's a sore, hurt heart the boy has now; but you wait and see--I'll win him through. It's proud yet you'll be to take your hats off to Martin Bradley!"

Martin Bradley--a game man--that's what they call him now. Mrs.

MacQuigan was right--wasn't she? Not perhaps just in the way she thought she was--but right for all that. Call it luck or chance if you like, something more than that if it strikes you that way--but an accident in the yards one night, a month after Bradley had lost his engine, put one of the train crew of the Rat River Special out of commission with a torn hand, and sent a call boy streaking uptown for a subst.i.tute. Call it luck if you like, that the work train with a hybrid gang of a hundred-odd Polacks, Armenians, and Swedes, cooped up in a string of box cars converted into bunk houses, mess houses and commissariat, a window or two in them to take the curse off, and end doors connecting them for the sake of sociability, pulled out for the new Rat River trestle work with Reddy MacQuigan handling the shovel end of it for Bull Coussirat, who had been promoted in the cab--and Bradley as the subst.i.tute brakeman on the front end. Well, maybe it was luck--but that's not what they call it on the Hill Division.

Perhaps no one quite understood Bradley, even at the end, except Mrs.

MacQuigan; and possibly even she didn't get it all. Inconsistent, to put it mildly, that a man like Bradley would have let go at all? Well, it's an easy matter and a very human one, to judge another from the safe vantage ground of distance--isn't it? Some men take a thing one way, and some another; and in some the feelings take deeper root than in others--and find their expression in a different way. Ditched from the start, Bradley hadn't much to cling to, had he--only the baby girl he had dreamed about on the runs at night; only the little tot he had slaved for, who some day was to make a home for him? But about the Rat River Special----

It was midnight when they pulled out of Big Cloud; and Bradley, in the caboose, glanced at Heney's tissue, which, as a matter of form, the conductor gave him to read. The Special was to run twenty minutes behind No. 17, the westbound mail train, and make a meeting point with the through freight, No. 84, eastbound, at The Forks. The despatchers had seized the propitious moment to send the rolling camp through in the quiet hours of traffic, with an eye out to getting the foreigners promptly on the job in the morning for fear they might draw an extra hour or two of time--without working for it! The Special was due to make Rat River at four o'clock.

Bradley handed back the order without comment, picked up his lantern, and started for the door.

"No need of going forward to-night," said Heney, laying his arm on Bradley's arm. "We've only a short train, a dozen cars, and we can watch it well enough from the cupola. It's d.a.m.n cold out there."

"Oh, I guess it's all right, Heney," Bradley answered--and went out through the door.

There weren't any platforms to the box cars, just small end doors.

Once in camp, and stationary on a siding, the cars would be connected up with little wooden gangways, you understand? Bradley, from the platform of the caboose, stepped across the buffer, and made his way through several cars. One was pretty much like another; a stove going, and stuffy hot; the foreigners stretched out in their bunks, some of them; some of them playing cards on the floor; some asleep; some quarrelling, chattering, jabbering; a hard looking lot for the most part, black-visaged, scowling, unshaven, gold circlets dangling in their ears--bar the Swedes.

Bradley worked along with scarcely more than a glance at the occupants, until, in the fourth car, he halted suddenly and shoved his lamp into the face of a giant of a man, who squatted in the corner, sullen and apart, with muttering lips.

"What's wrong with you?" he demanded brusquely.

The man drew back with a growl that was like a beast's, lips curling back over the teeth. Bradley stared at him coolly, then turned inquiringly to the crowd in the car. He was greeted with a burst of unintelligible, polyglot words, and spontaneous, excitable gesticulations. Bradley shrugged his shoulders, and slammed the door behind him.

Outside on the buffer, he reached for the ladder, swung himself up the iron rungs to the top of the car, and, with his lantern hooked in his arm, sat down on the footboard, bracing himself against the brake wheel, and b.u.t.toned his reefer--there was another night--to think--ahead of him.

To think--if he could only forget! It was that fearful sense of impotency--impotency--impotency. It seemed to laugh and jeer and mock at him. It seemed to make a plaything of this father love of his.

There was nothing--nothing he could do to bring her back--that was it--nothing! Soul, life, mind and body, he would have given them all to have saved her--would give them now to bring her back--and there was only this ghastly impotency. It seemed at times that it would drive him mad--and he could not forget. And then the bitter, crushing grief; the rebellion, fierce, ungovernable, that his _all_ should have been taken from him, that the years he had planned should be turned to nothing but grinning mockery; and then that raging sense of impotency again, that rocked his turbulent soul as in an angry, storm-tossed sea.

Time pa.s.sed, and he sat there motionless, save for the jolting of the train that b.u.mped him this way and that against the brake wheel. They were into the mountains now; and the snowy summits, moon-touched, reared themselves in white, grotesque, fanciful shapes, and seemed, cold in their beauty, to bring an added chill to the frosty night.

Ahead, far ahead, the headlight's ray swept now the track, now the gray rock side, now, softly green, a clump of pines, as the right of way curved and twisted and turned; now, slowing up a grade, the heavy, growling bark of the exhaust came with long intervals between, and now, on the level, it was quick as the tattoo of a snare drum, with the short stack belching a myriad fiery sparks insolently skyward in a steady stream; around him was the sweep of the wind, the roar of the train, the pound of the trucks beating the fish-plates, the sway, the jerk, the recovery of the slewing cars, and, curiously, the deep, brooding silence of the mountains, frowning, it seemed, at this sacrilege of noise; behind, showed the yellow glimmer from the caboose, the dark, indistinct outline of a watching figure in the cupola.

Suddenly, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the brake wheel to help him up, Bradley sprang erect. From directly underneath his feet came a strange, confused, m.u.f.fled sound, like a rush of men from one end of the car to the other.

Then there broke a perfect bedlam of cries, yells, shouts and screams--and then a revolver shot.

In an instant Bradley was scrambling down the ladder to investigate--they could not hear the row, whatever it was, in the caboose--and in another he had kicked the car door open and plunged inside. A faint, bluish haze of smoke undulated in the air, creeping to the roof of the car; and there was the acrid smell of powder--but there was no sign of a fight, no man, killed or wounded, sprawling on the floor. But the twenty men who filled the car were crouched in groups and singly against the car sides; or sat upright in their bunks, their faces white, frightened--only their volubility unchecked, for all screamed and talked and waved their arms at once.

They made a rush for Bradley, explaining in half a dozen languages what had happened. Bradley pushed them roughly away from him.

"Speak English!" he snapped. "What's wrong here? Can't any of you speak English?"

An Italian grabbed his arm and pointed through the door Bradley had left open behind him to the next car forward. "Pietro!" he shouted out wildly. "Gotta da craze--mad--gotta da gun!"

"Well, go on!" prodded Bradley. "He's run into the next car. I understand that--but what happened here? Who's Pietro?"

But the man's knowledge, like his English, was limited. He did not know much--Pietro was not one of them--Pietro had come only that morning to Big Cloud from the East--Pietro had gone suddenly mad--no man had done anything to make Pietro mad.

And then suddenly into Bradley's mind leaped the story that he had read in the papers a few days before of an Italian, a homicidal maniac, who had escaped from an asylum somewhere East, and had disappeared. The description of the man, as he remembered it, particularly the great size of the man, tallied, now that he thought of it, with the fellow who had been in the car when he had first pa.s.sed through. He glanced quickly around--the man was gone. So that was Pietro!

Bradley started on the run for the next car ahead; and, subconsciously, as he ran, he felt the speed of the train quicken. But that was natural enough--they had been crawling to the summit of Mitre Peak, and, over that now, before them lay a four-percent grade to the level below, one of the nastiest bits of track on the division, curves all the way--only Bull Coussirat was. .h.i.tting it up pretty hard for a starter.

In the next car the same scene was repeated--the smell of powder smoke, the blue haze hanging listless near the roof out of the air currents; the crouched, terrified foreigners, one with a broken wrist, dangling, where a bullet had shattered it. Pietro, Berserker fashion, was shooting his way through the train.

Bradley went forward more cautiously now, more warily. Strange the way the speed was quickening! The cars were rocking now with short, vicious slews. He thought he heard a shout from the track-side without, but he could not be sure of that.

Through the next car and the next he went, trailing the maniac; and then he started to run again. Stumbling feet, trying to hold their footing, came to him from the top of the car. With every instant now the speed of the train was increasing--past the limit of safety--past the point where he would have hesitated to use the emergency brakes, if there had been any to use--a luxury as yet extended only to the pa.s.senger equipment in those days. The Polacks, the Armenians, and the Swedes were beginning to yell with another terror, at the frantic pitching of the cars, making a wild, unearthly chorus that echoed up and down the length of the train.