Chapter II

We were handling trains then on the old single-order system. I mention this because in no other way could this particular thing have happened; but there's no especial point in that, since other particular things do happen all the time, single order, double order, or no order system.

The wind had dropped, and there was just a drizzle of rain falling through the mountains when I got down to the depot at seven o'clock that Sunday evening. I don't know how much sleep Blackburn had had during the day, but he had been at Fred Norman's bed most of the afternoon with Doubleday and Carhart, so he couldn't have had much. About half-past seven Maxwell sent me over there with a note and his storm-coat for him and the three men were in the room then. Boy-like, I hung around until it was time for Blackburn to take his trick, and then he and Doubleday and I walked over to the Wickiup together.

At sundown everything was shipshape. There hadn't been an engine failure in the district for twenty-four hours and every hand-car was running smoothly. Moreover, there were no extra sections marked up and only one Special on the Division card--a theatrical train eastbound with Henry Irving and company from 'Frisco to Chicago. The Irving Special was heavy, as it always is; that night there were five baggage cars, a coach and two sleepers. I am particular to lay all this out just as the night opened when Blackburn took his train sheet, because sometimes these things happen under extraordinary pressure on the line and sometimes they don't; sometimes they happen under pressure on the despatcher himself. It was all fixed, too, for Blackburn to handle not only his own trick but the first two hours of Fred's trick, which would carry till six o'clock in the morning. At six Maxwell was to double into a four-hour dog-watch, and Callahan was to sit in till noon.

There was nothing to hold the big fellows around the depot that night, and they began straggling home through the rain about nine o'clock. Before ten, Bucks and Callahan had left the office; by eleven, Neighbor had got away from the roundhouse; Doubleday had gone back to sit with Fred Norman.

The lights in the yard were low and the drizzle had eased into a mist; it was a nasty night, and yet one never promised better for quiet. Before midnight the switchmen were snug in the yard shanties; in the Wickiup there were the night ticket agent downstairs and the night baggageman. Up-stairs every door was locked and every room was dark, except the despatcher's office. In that, Blackburn sat at his key; nearby, but closer to the stove, sat the night caller for the train crews, trying to starch his hair with a ten-cent novel.

The westbound Overland passenger, Number One, was due to leave Ames at 12.40 A. M., and ordinarily would have met a Special like the Irving at Rosebud, which is a good bit west of the river. But Number One's engine had been steaming badly all the way from McCloud, and on her schedule, which was crazy fast all night, she did not make Ames till some fifty minutes late. While there were no special orders, it was understood we were to help the Irving train as much as possible anyway. Bucks had made the acquaintance of the great man and his fellows on the westbound run, and as they had paid us the particular compliment of a return trip, we were minded to give them the best of it--even against Number One, which was always rather sacred on the sheet. This, I say, was pretty generally understood; for when it was all over there was no criticism whatever on Blackburn's intention of making a meeting-point for the two trains, as they then stood, at O'Fallon's siding.

Between Ames and Rosebud, twenty miles apart, there are two sidings--O'Fallon's, west of the river, and Salt Rocks, east. There was no operator at either place. The train that leaves Ames westbound is in the open for twenty miles with only schedule rights or a despatcher's tissue between her and the worst of it. At one o'clock that morning Blackburn wired an order to Ames for Number One to hold at O'Fallon's for Special 202. A minute later he sent an order for Special 202 to run to O'Fallon's regardless of Number One. At least, he thought he sent such an order; but he didn't--he made a mistake.

When he had fixed the meeting-point, Blackburn rose from his chair and sat down by the stove. I lazily watched him, till, falling into a doze as I eyed him drowsily, he began to loom up in his chair and to curl and twist toward the roof like a signal column; then the front legs of his chair struck the floor, and with a start I woke, just as he stepped hurriedly back to his table and picked up the order book.

The first suspicion I had that anything was wrong was an exclamation from Blackburn as he stared at the book. Putting it down almost at once and holding the page open with his left hand, he plugged Callahan's house wire and began drumming his call. Callahan's "Aye, aye," came back inside of a minute, and Blackburn tapped right at him: "Come down." And I began to wonder what _was_ up.

There was an interval; then Callahan asked, "What's the matter?"

I got up and walked over to the water-tank for a drink. Blackburn again pressed the key, and repeated to Callahan precisely the words he had used before: "Come down."

His face was drawn into the very shape of fear and his eyes, bent hard on me, were looking through me and through the shivering window--I know it now--and through the storming night, horror-set, into the canon of the Peace River.

The sounder broke and he turned back, listened a moment; but it was stray stuff about time freight. He pushed the chair from behind him, still like a man listening--listening; then with an effort, plain even to me, he walked across the office, pushed open the door of Callahan's private room, and stood with his hand on the knob, looking back at the lamp. It was as if he still seemed to listen, for he stood undecided a moment; then he stepped into the dark room and closed the door behind him, leaving me alone and dumb with fear.

The mystery lay, I knew, in the order book. Curiosity gradually got the better of my fright, and I walked from the cooler over to the counter to get courage, and shoved the train register around noisily. I crossed to the despatchers' table and made a pretence of arranging the pads and blanks. The train order book was lying open where he had left it under the lamp. With my eyes bulging, I read the last two orders copied in it:

C. and E. No. One, Ames.
No. One, Eng. 871, will hold at O'Fallon's for Special 202.

C. and E. Special 202, Rosebud.
Special 202, Eng. 636, will run to Salt Rocks regardless of No.
One.

SALT ROCKS! I glared at the words and the letters of the words.

I re-read the first order and read again the second. O'Fallon's for Number One. That was right. O'Fallon's it should be for the Special 202, of course, to meet her. But it wasn't: it was the first station east of O'Fallon's he had ordered the Special to run to. It was a lap order. My scalp began to creep. A lap order for the Irving Special and the Number One passenger, and it doomed them to meet head on somewhere between O'Fallon's and the Salt Rocks, in the Peace River canon.

My mouth went sticking dry. The sleet outside had deepened into a hail that beat the west glass sharper and the window shook again in the wind. I asked myself, afraid to look around, what Blackburn could be doing in Callahan's room. The horror of the wreck impending through his mistake began to grow on me; I know what I suffered; I ask myself now what he suffered, inside, alone, in the dark.

Oh, you who lie down upon the rail at night to sleep, in a despatcher's hand, think you, ever, in your darkened berths of the cruel responsibility on the man who in the watches of the night holds you in his keeping?

Others may blunder; others may forget; others may fall and stand again: not the despatcher; a single mistake damns him. When he falls he falls forever.

Young as I was, I realized that night the meaning of the career to which my little ambition urged me. The soldier, the officer, the general, the statesman, the president, may make mistakes, do make mistakes, that cost a life or cost ten thousand lives. They redeem them and live honored. It is the obscure despatcher under the lamp who for a single lapse pays the penalty of eternal disgrace. I felt something of it even then, and from my boy's heart, in the face of the error, in the face of the slaughter, I pitied Blackburn.

Callahan's room door opened again and Blackburn came out of the dark. I had left the table and was standing in front of the stove. He looked at me almost eagerly; the expression of his face had completely changed. I never in my life saw such a change in so few minutes on any man's face, and, like all the rest, it alarmed me. It was not for me to speak if I had been able, and he did not. He walked straight over to the table, closed the order book, plugged Callahan's house wire again, and began calling him. The assistant superintendent answered, and Blackburn sent him just these words:

"You need not come down."

I heard Callahan reply with a question: "What is the matter?"

Blackburn stood calmly over the key, but he made no answer. Instead, he repeated only the words, "You need not come down."

Callahan, easily excitable always, was wrought up. "Blackburn," he asked over the wire, impatiently, "what in God's name is the matter?" But Blackburn only pulled the plug and cut him out, and sunk into the chair like a man wearied.

"Mr. Blackburn," I said, my heart thumping like an injector, "Mr. Blackburn?" He glanced vacantly around; seemed for the first time to see me. "Is there anything," I faltered, "I can do?"

Even if the words meant nothing, the offer must have touched him. "No, Jack," he answered quietly; "there isn't." With the words the hall door opened and Bucks, storm-beaten in his ulster, threw it wide and stood facing us both. The wind that swept in behind him blew out the lamps and left us in darkness.

"Jack, will you light up?"

It was Blackburn who spoke to me. But Bucks broke in instantly, speaking to him:

"Callahan called me over his house wire a few minutes ago, Blackburn, and told me to meet him here right away. Is anything wrong?" he asked, with anxiety restrained in his tone.

I struck a match. I was so nervous that I took hold of the hot chimney of the counter lamp and dropped it smash to the floor. No one said a word and that made me worse. I struck a second match, and a third, and with a fourth got the lamp on the despatchers' table lighted as Blackburn answered the superintendent. "Something serious has happened," he replied to Bucks. "I sent lap orders at one o'clock for Number One and the Irving Special."

Bucks stared at him.

"Instead of making a meeting-point at O'Fallon's I sent One an order to run to O'Fallon's and ordered the Special to run to Salt Rocks against One."

"Why, my God!" exclaimed Bucks, "that will bring them together in--the Peace canon--Blackburn!--Blackburn!--Blackburn!" he cried, tearing off his storm-coat. He walked to the table, seized the order book and steadied himself with one hand on the chair; I never saw him like that. But it looked as if the horror long averted, the trouble in the Peace River canon, had come. The sleet tore at the old depot like a wolf, and with the sash shivering, Bucks turned like an executioner on his subordinate.

"What have you done to meet it?" He drew his watch, and his words came sharp as doom. "Where's your wreckers? Where's your relief? What have you done? What are you doing? _Nothing?_ Why don't you speak? Will you kill two trainloads of people without an effort to do anything?"

His voice rang absolute terror to me; I looked toward Blackburn perfectly helpless.

"Bucks, there will be no wreck," he answered steadily.

"Be no wreck!" thundered Bucks, towering in the dingy room dark as the sweep of the wind. "Be no wreck? Two passenger trains meet in hell and be no wreck? Are you crazy?"

The despatcher's hands clutched at the table. "No," he persisted steadily, "I am not crazy, Bucks. Don't make me so. I tell you there will not be a wreck."

Bucks, uncertain with amazement, stared at him again.

"Blackburn, if you're sane I don't know what you mean. Don't stand there like that. Do you know what you have done?" The superintendent advanced toward him as he spoke; there was a trace of pity in his words that seemed to open Blackburn's pent heart more than all the bitterness.

"Bucks," he struggled, putting out a hand toward his chief, "I am sure of what I say. There will be no wreck. When I saw what I had done--knew it was too late to undo it--I begged God that my hands might not be stained with their blood." Sweat oozed from the wretched man's forehead. Every word wrung its bead of agony. "I was answered," he exclaimed with a strange confidence, "there will be no wreck. I cannot see what will happen. I do not know what; but there will be no wreck, believe me or not--it is so."

His steadfast manner staggered the superintendent. I could imagine what he was debating as he looked at Blackburn--wondering, maybe, whether the man's mind was gone. Bucks was staggered; he looked it, and as he collected himself to speak again the hall door opened like an uncanny thing, and we all started as Callahan burst in on us.

"What's so?" he echoed. "What's up here? What did it mean, Blackburn? There's been trouble, hasn't there? What's the matter with you all? Bucks? Is everybody struck dumb?"

Bucks spoke. "There's a lap order out on One and the theatrical Special, Callahan. We don't know what's happened," said Bucks sullenly. "Blackburn here has gone crazy--or he knows--somehow--there won't be any wreck," added the superintendent slowly and bewilderedly. "It's between O'Fallon's and Salt Rocks somewhere. Callahan, take the key," he cried of a sudden. "There's a call now. Despatcher! Don't speak; ask no questions. Get that message," he exclaimed sharply, pointing to the instrument. "It may be news."

And it was news: news from Ames Station reporting the Irving Special _in_ at 1.52 A. M.--out at 1.54! We all heard it together, or it might not have been believed. The Irving Special, eastbound, safely past Number One, westbound, on a single track when their meeting orders had lapped! Past without a word of danger or of accident, or even that they had seen Number One and stopped in time to avoid a collision? Exactly; not a word; nothing. In at 52; out at 54. And the actors hard asleep in the berths--and on about its business the Irving Special--that's what we got from Ames.

Callahan looked around. "Gentlemen, what does this mean? Somebody here is insane. I don't know whether it's me or you, Blackburn. Are you horsing me?" he exclaimed, raising his voice angrily. "If you are, I want to say I consider it a damned shabby joke."

Bucks put up a hand and without a word of comment repeated Blackburn's story just as the despatcher had told it. "In any event there's nothing to do now; it's on us or we're past it. Let us wait for Number One to report."

Callahan pored over the order book. "Maybe," he asked after a while, "didn't you send the orders right and copy them wrong in the book, Blackburn?"

The despatcher shook his head. "They went as they stand. The orders lapped, Callahan. Wait till we hear from Number One. I feel sure she is safe. Wait."

Bucks was pacing the floor. Callahan stuck silent to the key, taking what little work came, for I saw neither of the chiefs wanted to trust Blackburn at the key. He sat, looking, for the most part, vacantly into the fire. Callahan meantime had the orders repeated back from Ames and Rosebud. It was as Blackburn had said; they did lap; they had been sent just as the order book showed. There was nothing for it but to wait for Rosebud to hear from Number One. When the night operator there called the despatcher again it brought Blackburn out of his gloom like a thunderclap.

"Give me the key!" he exclaimed. "There is Rosebud." Callahan pushed back and Blackburn, dropping into the chair, took the message from the night operator at Rosebud.

"Number One, in, 2.03 A. M."

Blackburn answered him, and strangely, with all the easy confidence of his ordinary sending. He sat and took and sent like one again master of the situation.

"Ask Engineer Sampson to come to the wire," said he to Rosebud. Sampson, not Maje, but his brother Arnold, was pulling Number One that night.

"Engineer Sampson here," came from Rosebud presently.

"Ask Sampson where he met Special 202 to-night."

We waited, wrought up, for in that reply must come the answer to all the mystery. There was a hitch at the other end of the wire; then Rosebud answered:

"Sampson says he will tell you all about it in the morning."

"That will not do," tapped the despatcher. "This is Blackburn. Superintendent Bucks and Callahan are here. They want the facts. Where did you meet Special 202?"

There was another wearing delay. When the answer came it was slowly, at the engineer's dictation.

"My orders were to hold at O'Fallon's for Special 202," clicked the sounder, repeating the engineer's halting statement. "When we cleared Salt Rocks siding and got down among the Quakers, I was cutting along pretty hard to make the canon when I saw, or thought I saw, a headlight flash between the buttes across the river. It startled me, for I knew the 202 Special could not be very far west of us. Anyway, I made a quick stop, and reversed and backed tight as I could make it for Salt Rocks siding. Before we had got a mile I saw the headlight again, and I knew the 202 was against our order. We got into the clear just as the Special went by humming. Nobody but our train crew and my fireman knows anything about this."

The three men in front of me made no comment as they looked at each other. How was it possible for one train to have seen the headlight of another among the buttes of the Peace River country?

It was--possible. Just possible. But to figure once in how many times a vista would have opened for a single second so one engineer could see the light of another would stagger a multiplying machine. Chance? Well, yes, perhaps. But there were no suggestions of that nature that night under the despatcher's lamp at the Wickiup, with the storm driving down the pass as it drove that night; and yet at Peace River, where the clouds never rested, that night was clear. Blackburn, getting up, steadied himself on his feet.

"Go in there and lie down," said Callahan to him. "You're used up, old fellow, I can see that. I'll take the key. Don't say a word."

"Not a word, Blackburn," put in Bucks, resting his big hand on the despatcher's shoulder. "There's no harm done; nobody knows it. Bury the thing right here to-night. You're broke up. Go in there and lie down."

He took their hands; started to speak; but they pushed him into Callahan's room; they didn't want to hear anything.

All the night it stormed at the Wickiup. In the morning the Irving Special, flying toward Chicago, was far down the Platte. Number One was steaming west, deep in the heart of the Rockies; Blackburn lay in Callahan's room. It was nine o'clock, and the sun was streaming through the east windows when Fred Norman opened the office door. Fred could do those things even when he was sickest. Have a hemorrhage one day, scare everybody to death, and go back to his trick the next. He asked right away for Kit, as he called Blackburn, and when they pointed to Callahan's door Fred pushed it open and went in. A cry brought the operators to him. Blackburn was stretched on his knees half on the floor, half face downward on the sofa. His head had fallen between his arms, which were stretched above it. In his hands, clasped tight, they found his watch with the picture of his wife and his baby. Had he asked, when he first went into that room that night--when he wrestled like Jacob of old in his agony of prayer--that his life be taken if only their lives, the lives of those in his keeping, might be spared? I do not know. They found him dead.

The Nightman's Story

BULLHEAD

His full name was James Gillespie Blaine Lyons; but his real name was Bullhead--just plain Bullhead.

When he began passenger braking the trainmaster put him on with Pat Francis. The very first trip he made, a man in the smoking car asked him where the drinking water was. Bullhead, though sufficiently gaudy in his new uniform, was not prepared for any question that might be thrown at him. He pulled out his book of rules, which he had been told to consult in case of doubt, and after some study referred his inquirer to the fire-bucket hanging at the front end of the car. The passenger happened to be a foreigner and very thirsty. He climbed up on the Baker heater, according to directions, and did at some risk get hold of the bucket--but it was empty.

"Iss no vater hier," cried the second-class man. Bullhead sat half way back in the car, still studying the rules. He looked up surprised but turning around pointed with confidence to the firepail at the hind end of the smoker.

"Try the other bucket, Johnnie," he said, calmly. At that every man in the car began to choke; and the German, thinking the new brakeman was making funny of him, wanted to fight. Now Bullhead would rather fight than go to Sunday-school any day, and without parley he engaged the insulted homesteader. Pat Francis parted them after some hard words on his part; and Kenyon, the trainmaster, gave Bullhead three months to study up where the water cooler was located in Standard, A pattern, smoking cars. Bullhead's own mother, who did Callahan's washing, refused to believe her son was so stupid as not to know; but Bullhead, who now tells the story himself, claims he did not know.

When he got back to work he tried the freight trains. They put him on the Number Twenty-nine, local, and one day they were drifting into the yard at Goose River Junction when there came from the cab a sharp call for brakes. Instead of climbing out and grabbing a brakewheel for dear life, Bullhead looked out the window to see what the excitement was. By the time he had decided what rule covered the emergency his train had driven a stray flat half way through the eating house east of the depot. Kenyon, after hearing Bullhead's own candid statement of fact, coughed apologetically and said three years; whereupon Bullhead resigned permanently from the train service and applied for a job in the roundhouse.

But the roundhouse--for a boy like Bullhead. It would hardly do. He was put at helping Pete Beezer, the boiler washer. One night Pete was snatching his customary nap in the pit when the hose got away from Bullhead and struck his boss. In the confusion, Peter, who was nearly drowned, lost a set of teeth; that was sufficient in that department of the motive power; Bullhead moved on, suddenly. Neighbor thought he might do for a wiper. After the boy had learned something about wiping he tried one day to back an engine out on the turn-table just to see whether it was easy. It was; dead easy; but the turn-table happened to be arranged wrong for the experiment; and Neighbor, before calling in the wrecking gang, took occasion to kick Bullhead out of the roundhouse bodily.

Nevertheless, Bullhead, like every Medicine Bend boy, wanted to railroad. Some fellows can't be shut off. He was offered the presidency of a Cincinnati bank by a private detective agency which had just sent up the active head of the institution for ten years; but as Bullhead could not arrange transportation east of the river he was obliged to let the opportunity pass.

When the widow Lyons asked Callahan to put Jamie at telegraphing the assistant superintendent nearly fell off his chair. Mrs. Lyons, however, was in earnest, as the red-haired man soon found by the way his shirts were starched. Her son, meantime, had gotten hold of a sounder, and was studying telegraphy, corresponding at the same time with the Cincinnati detective agency for the town and county rights to all "hidden and undiscovered crime," on the Mountain Division--rights offered at the very reasonable price of ten dollars by registered mail, bank draft or express money order; currency at sender's risk. The only obligations imposed by this deal were secrecy and a German silver star; and Bullhead, after holding his trusting mother up for the ten, became a regularly installed detective with proprietary rights to local misdeeds. Days he plied his sounder, and nights he lay awake trying to mix up Pete Beezer and Neighbor with the disappearance of various bunches of horses from the Bar M ranch.

About the same time he became interested in dentistry; not that there is any obvious connection between railroading and detective work and filling teeth--but his thoughts just turned that way and following the advice of a local dentist, who didn't want altogether to discourage him, Bullhead borrowed a pair of forceps and pulled all the teeth out of a circular saw to get his arm into practice. Before the dentist pronounced him proficient, though, his mother had Callahan reduced to terms, and the assistant superintendent put Bullhead among the operators.

That was a great day for Bullhead. He had to take the worst of it, of course; sweeping the office and that; but whatever his faults, the boy did as he was told. Only one vicious habit clung to him--he had a passion for reading the rules. In spite of this, however, he steadily mastered the taking, and, as for sending, he could do that before he got out of the cuspidor department. Everybody around the Wickiup bullied him, and maybe that was his salvation. He got used to expecting the worst of it, and nerved himself to take it, which in railroading is half the battle.

A few months after he became competent to handle a key the nightman at Goose River Junction went wrong. When Callahan told Bullhead he thought about giving him the job, the boy went wild with excitement, and in a burst of confidence showed Callahan his star. It was the best thing that ever happened, for the assistant head of the division had an impulsive way of swearing the nonsense out of a boy's head, and when Bullhead confessed to being a detective a fiery stream was poured on him. The foolishness couldn't quite all be driven out in one round; but Jamie Lyons went to Goose River fairly well informed as to how much of a fool he was.

Goose River Junction is not a lively place. It has been claimed that even the buzzards at Goose River Junction play solitaire. But apart from the utter loneliness it was hard to hold operators there on account of Nellie Cassidy. A man rarely stayed at Goose River past the second pay-check. When he got money enough to resign he resigned; and all because Nellie Cassidy despised operators.

The lunch counter that Matt Cassidy, Nellie's father, ran at the Junction was just an adjunct for feeding train crews and the few miners who wandered down from the Glencoe spur. Matt himself took the night turn, but days it was Nellie who heated the Goose River coffee and dispensed the pie--contract pie made at Medicine Bend, and sent by local freight classified as ammunition, loaded and released, O. R.

It was Nellie's cruelty that made the frequent shifts at Goose River. Not that she was unimpressible, or had no heroes. She had plenty of them in the engine and the train service. It was the smart-uniformed young conductors and the kerchiefed juvenile engineers on the fast runs to whom Nellie paid deference, and for whom she served the preferred doughnuts.

But this was nothing to Bullhead. He had his head so full of things when he took his new position that he failed to observe Nellie's contempt. He was just passing out of the private detective stage; just getting over dental beginnings; just rising to the responsibility of the key, and a month devoted to his immediate work and the study of the rules passed like a limited train. Previous to the coming of Bullhead, no Goose River man had tried study of the rules as a remedy for loneliness; it proved a great scheme; but it aroused the unmeasured contempt of Nellie Cassidy. She scorned Bullhead unspeakably, and her only uneasiness was that he seemed unconscious of it.

However, the little Goose River girl had no idea of letting him escape that way. When scorn became clearly useless she tried cajolery--she smiled on Bullhead. Not till then did he give up; her smile was his undoing. It was so absolutely novel to Bullhead--Bullhead, who had never got anything but kicks and curses and frowns. Before Nellie's smiles, judiciously administered, Bullhead melted like the sugar she began to sprinkle in his coffee. That was what she wanted; when he was fairly dissolved, Nellie like the coffee went gradually cold. Bullhead became miserable, and to her life at Goose River was once more endurable.

It was then that Bullhead began to sit up all day, after working all night, to get a single smile from the direction of the pie rack. He hung, utterly miserable, around the lunch room all day, while Nellie made impersonal remarks about the colorless life of a mere operator as compared with life in the cab of a ten-wheeler. She admired the engineer, Nellie--was there ever a doughnut girl who didn't? And when One or Two rose smoking out of the alkali east or the alkali west, and the mogul engine checked its gray string of sleepers at the Junction platform, and Bat Mullen climbed down to oil 'round--as he always did--there were the liveliest kind of heels behind the counter.

Such were the moments when Bullhead sat in the lunch room, unnoticed, somewhat back where the flies were bad, and helped himself aimlessly to the sizzling maple syrup--Nellie rustling back and forth for Engineer Mullen, who ran in for a quick cup, and consulted, after each swallow, a dazzling open-faced gold watch, thin as a double eagle; for Bat at twenty-one was pulling the fast trains and carried the best. And with Bullhead feeding on flannel cakes and despair, and Nellie Cassidy looking quite her smartest, Mullen would drink his coffee in an impassive rush, never even glancing Bullhead's way--absolutely ignoring Bullhead. What was he but a nightman, anyway? Then Mullen would take as much as a minute of his running time to walk forward to the engine with Miss Cassidy, and stand in the lee of the drivers chatting with her, while Bullhead went completely frantic.

It was being ignored in that way, after her smiles had once been his, that crushed the night operator. It filled his head with schemes for obtaining recognition at all hazards. He began by quarrelling violently with Nellie, and things were coming to a serious pass around the depot when the Klondike business struck the Mountain Division. It came with a rush and when they began running through freight extras by way of the Goose River short line, day and night, the Junction station caught the thick of it. It was something new altogether for the short line rails and the short line operators, and Bullhead's night trick, with nothing to do but poke the fire and pop at coyotes, became straightway a busy and important post. The added work kept him jumping from sundown till dawn, and kept him from loafing daytimes around the lunch counter and ruining himself on fermented syrup.

On a certain night, windier than all the November nights that had gone before, the night operator sat alone in the office facing a resolve. Goose River had become intolerable. Medicine Bend was not to be thought of, for Bullhead now had a suspicion, due to Callahan, that he was a good deal of a chump, and he wanted to get away from the ridicule that had always and everywhere made life a burden. There appeared to Bullhead nothing for it but the Klondike. On the table before the moody operator lay his letter of resignation, addressed in due form to J. S. Bucks, superintendent. Near it, under the lamp, lay a well-thumbed copy of the book of rules, open at the chapter on Resignations, with subheads on--

Resign, who should.

Resign, how to.

Resign, when to. (See also Time.)

The fact was it had at last painfully forced itself on Bullhead that he was not fitted for the railroad business. Pat Francis had unfeelingly told him so. Callahan had told him so; Neighbor had told him so; Bucks had told him so. On that point the leading West End authorities were agreed. Yet in spite of these discouragements he had persisted and at last made a show. Who was it now that had shaken his stubborn conviction? Bullhead hardly dared confess. But it was undoubtedly one who put up to be no authority whatever on Motive Power or Train Service or Operating--it was Matt Cassidy's girl.

While he re-read his formal letter and compared on spelling with his pocket Webster, a train whistled. Bullhead looked at the clock: 11.40 P. M. It was the local freight, Thirty, coming in from the West, working back to Medicine. From the East, Number One had not arrived; she was six hours late, and Bullhead looked out at his light, for he had orders for the freight. It was not often that such a thing happened, because One rarely went off schedule badly enough to throw her into his turn. He had his orders copied and O.K.'d, and waited only to deliver them.

It was fearfully windy. The 266 engine, pulling Thirty that night, wheezed in the gale like a man with the apoplexy. She had a new fireman on, who was burning the life out of her, and as she puffed painfully down on the scrap rails of the first siding and took the Y, her overloaded safety gasped violently.

When the conductor of the Number Thirty train opened the station door, the wind followed him like a catamount. The stove puffed open with a down draft, and shot the room full of stinging smoke. The lamp blaze flew up the chimney--out--and left the nightman and the conductor in darkness. The trainman with a swear shoved-to the door, and Bullhead, the patient, turned over his letter of resignation quick in the dark, felt for a match and relighted his lamp. Swearing again at Bullhead, the freight conductor swaggered over to his table, felt in all the operator's pockets for a cigar, tumbled all the papers around, and once more, on general principles, swore.

Bullhead took things uncomplainingly, but he watched close, and was determined to fight if the brute discovered his letter of resignation. When the trainman could think of no further indignities he took his orders, to meet Number One at Sackley, the second station east of Goose River. After he had signed, Bullhead asked him about the depot fire at Bear Dance that had been going over the wires for two hours, reminded him of the slow order for the number nine culvert and as the rude visitor slammed the door behind him, held his hand over the lamp. Then he sat down again and turned over his letter of resignation.

To make it binding it lacked only his signature--James Gillespie Blaine Lyons--now, himself, of the opinion of every one else on the West End: that he was just a natural born blooming fool. He lifted his pen to sign off the aspirations of a young lifetime when the sounder began to snap and sputter his call. It was the despatcher, and he asked hurriedly if Number Thirty was there.

"Number Thirty is on the Y," answered Bullhead.

Then came a train order. "Hold Number Thirty till Number One arrives."

Bullhead repeated the order, and got back the O. K. He grabbed his hat and hurried out of the door to deliver the new order to the local freight before it should pull out.

To reach the train Bullhead had to cross the short line tracks. The wind was scouring the flats, and as he tacked up the platform the dust swept dead into him. At the switch he sprang across the rails, thinking of nothing but reaching the engine cab of the local--forgetting about the track he was crossing. Before he could think or see or jump, a through freight on the short line, wild, from the West, storming down the grade behind him, struck Bullhead as a grizzly would a gnat--hurled him, doubling, fifty feet out on the spur--and stormed on into the East without a quiver out of the ordinary. One fatality followed another. The engineer of the short line train did not see the man he had hit, and with the nightman lying unconscious in the ditch, the local freight pulled out for Sackley.

Bullhead never knew just how long he lay under the stars. When his head began to whirl the wind was blowing cool and strong on him, and the alkali dust was eddying into his open mouth. It was only a matter of seconds, though it seemed hours, to pull himself together and to put up his hand unsteadily to feel what it was soaking warm and sticky into his hair; then to realize that he had been struck by a short line train; to think of what a failure he had lately acknowledged himself to be; and of what it was he was clutching so tightly in his right hand--the holding order for Number Thirty. He raised his reeling head; there was a drift of starlight through the dust cloud, but no train in sight; Number Thirty was gone. With that consciousness came a recollection--he had forgotten to put out his red light.

His red light wasn't out. He kept repeating that to himself to put the picture of what it meant before him. He had started to deliver an order without putting out his light, and Number Thirty was gone; against Number One--a head end collision staring the freight and the belated passenger in the face. Number Thirty, running hard on her order to make Sackley for the meeting, and One, running furiously, as she always ran--to-night worse than ever.

He lifted his head, enraged with himself; enraged. He thought about the rules, and he grew enraged. Only himself he blamed, nobody else--studying the rules for a lifetime and just when it would mean the death of a trainload of people forgetting his red signal. He lifted his head; it was sick, deadly sick. But up it must come, Thirty gone, and it wabbled, swooning sick and groggy as he stared around and tried to locate himself. One thing he could see, the faint outline of the station and his lamp blazing smoky in the window. Bullhead figured a second; then he began to crawl. If he could reach the lamp before his head went off again, before he went completely silly, he might yet save himself and Number One.

It wasn't in him to crawl till he thought of his own mistake; but there was a spur in the sweep of that through his head. His brain, he knew, was wabbling, but he could crawl; and he stuck fainting to that one idea, and crawled for the light of his lamp.

It is a bare hundred feet across to the Y. Bullhead taped every foot of the hundred with blood. There was no one to call on for help; he just stuck to the crawl, grinding his teeth in bitter self-reproach. They traced him, next morning when he was past the telling of it, and his struggle looked the track of a wounded bear. Dragging along one crushed leg and half crazed by the crack on his forehead, Bullhead climbed to the platform, across, and dragged himself to the door. He can tell yet about rolling his broken leg under him and raising himself to grasp the thumb latch. Not until he tried to open it did he remember it was a spring lock and that he was outside. He felt in his pocket for his keys--but his keys were gone.

There were no rules to consult then. No way on earth of getting into the office in time to do anything; to drag himself to the lunch room, twice further than the station, was out of the question. But there was a way to reach his key in spite of all bad things, and Bullhead knew the way. He struggled fast around to the window. Raising himself with a frightful twinge on one knee, he beat at the glass with his fist. Clutching the sash, he drew himself up with a hand, and with the other tore away the muntin, stuck his head and shoulders through the opening, got his hand on the key, and called the first station east, Blaisdell, with the 19. Life and death that call meant; the 19, the despatcher's call--hanging over the key, stammering the 19 over the wire, and baptizing the call in his own blood--that is the way Bullhead learned to be a railroad man.

For Blaisdell got him and his warning, and had Number One on the siding just as the freight tore around the west curve, headed for Sackley. While it was all going on, Bullhead lay on the wind-swept platform at Goose River with a hole in his head that would have killed anybody on the West End, or, for that matter on earth except James Gillespie Blaine Lyons.

After Number Thirty had passed so impudently, Number One felt her way rather cautiously to Goose River, because the despatchers couldn't get the blamed station. They decided, of course, that Bullhead was asleep, and fixed everything at the Wickiup to send a new man up there on Three in the morning and fire him for good.

But about one o'clock Number One rolled, bad-tempered, into Goose River Junction, and Bat Mullen, stopping his train, strode angrily to the station. It was dark as a pocket inside. Bat smashed in the door with his heel, and the trainmen swarmed in and began looking with their lanterns for the nightman. The stove was red-hot, but he was not asleep in the arm-chair, nor napping under the counter on the supplies. They turned to his table and discovered the broken window, and thought of a hold-up. They saw where the nightman had spilled something that looked like ink over the table, over the order book, over the clip, and there was a hand print that looked inky on an open letter addressed to the superintendent--and a little pool of something like ink under the key.

Somebody said suicide; but Bat Mullen suddenly stuck his lamp out of the broken window, put his head through after it, and cried out. Setting his lantern down on the platform, he crawled through the broken sash and picked up Bullhead.

Next morning it was all over the West End.

"And Bullhead!" cried everybody. "That's what gets me. Who'd have thought it of _Bullhead_!"

When they all got up there and saw what Bullhead had done, everybody agreed that nobody but Bullhead could have done it.

The pilot bar of the short line mogul, in swiping Bullhead unmercifully, had really made a railroad man of him. It had let a great light in on the situation. Whereas before every one else on the line had been to blame for his failures, Bullhead now saw that he himself had been to blame, and was man enough to stand up and say so. When the big fellows, Callahan and Kenyon and Pat Francis, saw his trail next morning, saw the blood smeared over the table, and saw Bullhead's letter of resignation signed in his own blood manual, and heard his straight-out story days afterward, they said never a word.

But that morning, the morning after, Callahan picked up the letter and put it just as it was between the leaves of the order book and locked both in his grip. It was some weeks before he had a talk with Bullhead, and he spoke then only a few words, because the nightman fainted before he got through. Callahan made him understand, though, that as soon as he was able he could have any key on that division he wanted as long as _he_ was running it--and Callahan is running that division yet.

It all came easy after he got well. Instead of getting the worst of it from everybody, Bullhead began to get the best of it, even from pretty Nellie Cassidy. But Nellie had missed her opening. She tried tenderness while the boy was being nursed at the Junction. Bullhead looked grim and far-off through his bulging bandages, and asked his mother to put the sugar in his coffee for him; Bullhead was getting sense.

Besides, what need has a young man with a heavy crescent-shaped scar on his forehead, that people inquire about and who within a year after the Goose River affair was made a train despatcher under Barnes Tracy at Medicine Bend--what need has he of a coquette's smiles? His mother, who has honorably retired from hard work, says half the girls at the Bend are after him, and his mother ought to know, for she keeps house for him.

Bullhead's letter of resignation with the print of his hand on it hangs framed over Callahan's desk, and is shown to railroad big fellows who are accorded the courtesies of the Wickiup. But when they ask Bullhead about it, he just laughs and says some railroad men have to have sense pounded into them.

The Master Mechanic's Story

DELAROO

"You tell it. I can't tell it," growled Neighbor.

"Oh, no. No. That's your story, Neighbor."

"I ain't no story-teller--"

"Just an able-jawed liar," suggested Callahan through a benevolent bluish haze.

"Delaroo's story wasn't any lie, though," muttered Neighbor. "But a fellow would think it was to hear it; now he would, for a fact, wouldn't he?"