Held for Orders Part 17

"A head-ender, eh?" croaked Benedict Morgan from the counter, and with a frightful oath. "A head-ender!"

"Shut up, you brute!" hissed Carhart. Duffy's hands were creeping queerly up the sides of his head.

"Sure," growled Benedict Morgan, loweringly, "sure. Shut up. Of course.

Shut up."

Carhart was a quick man. He started for the wrecker, but Duffy, springing, stopped him. "For G.o.d's sake, keep cool, everybody," he exclaimed, piteously. There was no one else to talk, to give the orders.

Bucks and Callahan both on the Special--maybe past order-giving now.

Only Martin Duffy to take the double load and the double shame. He stared, dazed again, into the faces around as he held to the fiery surgeon. "Morgan," he added steadily, looking at the surly wrecker, "get up your crew, quick. Doubleday, make up all the coaches in the yard for an ambulance train. Get every doctor in town to go with you. Tracy, clear the line."

The Master Mechanic and Benedict Morgan clattered down stairs. Carhart, running to the telephone, told Central to summon every medical man in the Bend, and hurried out. Before he had covered a block, roundhouse callers, like flaws of wind before a storm, were scurrying the streets, and from the tower of the fire-house sounded the harsh clang of the emergency gong for the wreckers.

Caught where they could be caught, out of saloons, beds, poker joints, Salvation barracks, churches,--the men of the wrecking crew ran down the silent streets, waking now fast into life. Congregations were dispersed, hymns cut, prayers forgotten, bars deserted, h.e.l.ls emptied, barracks raided at that call, the emergency gong call, fell as a fire-bell, for the Mountain Division wrecking gang.

While the yard crews shot up and down the spurs switching coaches into the relief train, Benedict Morgan with solid volleys of oaths was organizing his men and filling them at the lunch counters with huge schooners of coffee. Carhart pushed again through the jam of men and up to the despatchers' office. Before and behind him crowded the local physicians with instrument bags and bandages. The ominous baggage deposited on the office floor, they sat down about the room or hovered around Carhart asking for details. Doubleday, tall and grim, came over from the roundhouse. Benedict Morgan stamped up from the yard--the Mountain Division was ready.

All three despatchers were in the room. John Mallers, the day man, stood near Tracy, who had relieved Giddings. The line was clear for the relief run. Elcho had been notified of the impending disaster, and at Tracy's elbow sat the Chief looking fixedly at the key--taking the bob of the sounder with his eye. A dozen men in the room were talking; but they spoke as men who speaking wait on the life of a fuse. Duffy, with suspense deepening into frenzy, pushed Tracy's hand from the key and, sliding into the chair, began once more to call his brother at Rat River.

"R, T--R, T--R, T--R, T--" clicked the River call. "R, T--R, T--R, T--Bob--Bob--Bob," spelled the sender. "Answer me, answer, answer. R, T--R, T--R, T--R, T--"

And Barnes Tracy edged away and leaned back to where the shadow hid his face. And John Mallers, turning from the pleading of the current, stared gloomily out of the window across the yard s.h.i.+mmering under the double relay of arc lights; and young Giddings, who couldn't stand it--just _couldn't_ stand it--bending on his stool, shook with gulping sobs.

The others knew nothing of the heartbreaking in the little clicks. But they all knew the track--knew where the trains would meet; knew they could not by any possibility see each other till they whirled together on the curve of the Cinnamon cut or on the trestle west of it and they waited only for the breaking of the suspense that settled heavily over them.

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty minutes went, with Martin Duffy at intervals vainly calling. Then--as the crack opens in the field of ice, as the snow breaks in the mountain slide, as the sea gives up at last its dead, the sounder spoke--Rat River made the despatcher's call. And Martin Duffy, staring at the copper coil, pushed himself up in his chair like a man that chokes, caught smothering at his neck, and slipped wriggling to the floor.

Carhart caught him up, but Duffy's eyes stared meaningless past him. Rat River was calling him, but Martin Duffy was past the taking. Like the man next at the gun, Barnes Tracy sprang into the chair with the I, I, D. The surgeon, Giddings helping, dragged Duffy to the lounge in Callahan's room--his Chief was more to Giddings then than the fate of Special 326. But soon confused voices began to ring from where men were crowding around the despatchers' table. They echoed in to where the doctors worked over the raving Chief. And young Giddings, helping, began, too, to hear strange things from the other room.

"The moon--"

"The _moon_?"

"The MOON!"

"_What?_"

Barnes Tracy was trying to make himself heard:

"The moon, d.a.m.n it! MOON! That's English, ain't it? _Moon._"

"Who's talking at Rat River?" demanded Benedict Morgan, hoa.r.s.ely.

"Chick Neale, conductor of Third Eighty; their train is back at Rat River. G.o.d bless that man," stammered Barnes Tracy, wiping his forehead feverishly; "he's an old operator. He says Bob Duffy is missing--tell Martin, quick, there isn't any wreck--quick!"

"What does Neale say?" cried Doubleday with an explosion.

Tracy thought he had told them, but he hadn't. "He says his engineer, Abe Monsoon, was scared by the moon rising just as they cleared Kennel b.u.t.te," explained Tracy unsteadily. "He took it for the headlight of Special 326 and jumped from his engine. The fireman backed the train to Rat River--see?"

While Tracy talked, Mallers at the key was getting it all. "Look here,"

he exclaimed, "did you ever hear of such a mix-up in your life? The head brakeman of the freight was in the cab, Neale says. He and the engineer were talking about the last Conclave train, wondering where they were going to meet it, when the brakeman spied the moon coming up around Kennel b.u.t.te curve. 'There's the 326 Special!' he yelled, and lighted out the gangway. Monsoon reversed and jumped off after him so quick he knocked the fireman over in the coal. When the fireman got up--he hadn't heard a word of it all--he couldn't see anything ahead but the moon. So he stops the train and backs up for the two guys. When Neale and he picked them up they ran right back to Rat River for orders. They never got to Rock Point at all--why, they never got two miles east of Rat River."

"And where's Special 326?" cried Doubleday.

"At Rock Point, you loco. She must be there and waiting yet for Third Eighty. The stopping of the freight gave her plenty of time to make the meeting-point, don't you see, and there she is--sweating--yet. Neale is an old operator. By Heaven! Give me a man of the key against the the world. Praise G.o.d from whom all blessings flow!"

"Then there isn't to be any wreck?" ventured a shy little lady homeopathic physician, who had been crimped into the fray to help do up the mangled Knights and was modestly waiting her opportunity.

"Not to-night," announced Tracy with the dignity of a man temporarily in charge of the entire division.

A yell went out of the room like a tidal wave. Doubleday and Benedict Morgan had not spoken to each other since the night of the roundhouse fire--that was two years. They turned wonder-struck to each other.

Doubleday impulsively put out his hand and, before he could pull it in again, the wrecking boss grabbed it like a pay check. Carhart, who was catching the news from the rattle of young Giddings, went wild trying to repeat it to Duffy without losing it in his throat. The Chief was opening his eyes, trying to understand.

Medical men of violently differing schools, allopaths, homeopaths, osteopaths, eclectics--made their peace with a whoop. A red-headed druggist, who had rung himself in for a free ride to the horror, threw his emergency packets into the middle of the floor. The doctors caught the impulse: instrument cases were laid with solemn tenderness on the heap, and a dozen crazy men, joining hands around the pyred saws and gauze, struck up "Old Hundred."

Engineer Monsoon was a new man, who had been over the division only twice before in his life, both times in daylight. For that emergency Abe Monsoon was the man of all others, because it takes more than an ordinary moon to scare a thoroughbred West End engineer. But Monsoon and his moon headlight had between them saved De Molay Four from the sc.r.a.p.

The relief arrangements and Monsoon's headlight were the fun of it, but there was more. Martin Duffy lay eleven weeks with brain fever before they could say moon again to him. Bob had skipped into the mountains in the very hour that he had disgraced himself. He has never shown up at Medicine since; but Martin is still Chief, and they think more of him on the Mountain district than ever.

Bucks got the whole thing when De Molay Four reached Rat River that night. Bucks and Callahan and Moore and Oyster and Pat Francis got it and smiled grimly. n.o.body else on Special 326 even dreamed of leaving a bone that Sunday night in the Cinnamon cut. All the rest of the evening Bucks smiled just the same at the Knights and the Knightesses, and they thought him for a bachelor wonderfully entertaining.

A month later, when the old boys more or less ragged came straggling back from 'Frisco, Bucks's crowd stayed over a train, and he told his Pennsylvania cronies what they had slipped through in that delay at Rock Point.

"Just luck," laughed one of the Eastern superintendents, who wore on his watch chain an enormous Greek cross with "Our Trust is in G.o.d" engraved on it. "Just luck," he laughed, "wasn't it?"

"Maybe," murmured Bucks, looking through the Wickiup window at the Teton peaks. "That is--you might call it that--back on the Penn. Out here I guess they'd call it, Just G.o.d."

The Trainmaster's Story

OF THE OLD GUARD

I never found it very hard to get into trouble: as far back as I can remember that has come dead easy for me.

When this happened I hadn't been railroading a month and I was up with my conductor on the carpet, sweating from sheer grogginess and excitement. The job of front-end brakeman on a mountain division is no great stake for a man ordinarily, but it was one for me, just then. We knew when we went into the superintendent's office that somebody was to get fired; the only question was, who?--the train crew or the operator?

Our engine crew were out of it; it was up to the conductor and to me.

Had the operator displayed red signals? The conductor said, no; I said, no; the operator said, yes: but he lied. We couldn't prove it; we could only put our word against his: and what made it the worse for me, my conductor was something of a liar himself.

I stood beading in a cold sweat for I could see with half an eye it was going against us; the superintendent, an up-and-up railroad man every inch and all business, but suspicious, was leaning the operator's way the strongest kind.

There wasn't another soul in the little room as the three of us stood before the superintendent's desk except a pa.s.senger conductor, who sat behind me with his feet on the window ledge, looking out into the yard.

"Morrison's record in this office is clean," the superintendent was saying of the operator, who was doing us smooth as smokeless powder, "he has never to my knowledge lied in an investigation. But, Allbers,"

continued the superintendent speaking bluntly to my conductor, "you've never told a straight story about that Rat River switch matter yet. This man is a new man," he added, throwing a hard look at me. "Ordinarily I'd be inclined to take the word of two men against one, but I don't know one at all and the other has done me once. I can't see anything for it but to take Morrison's word and let you fellows both out. There wasn't any wreck, but that's not your fault; not for a minute."

"Mr. Rocksby," I protested, speaking up to the division boss in a clean funk--the prospect of losing my job that way, through a lying operator, took the heart clean out of me--"you don't know me, it is true, but I pledge you my word of honor--"