Chapter D

When young Giddings sat in, the sun was dropping between the Tetons. In the yard the car-cleaners were polishing the plates on Bucks's private car and the darky cook was pulling chickens out of the refrigerator. Duffy had thirteen Conclaves moving smoothly on the middle trick. The final one was due, and the hostlers were steaming down with the double-header to pull it over the Pass. This, the last of the Commandery trains, was to bring DE MOLAY COMMANDERY NUMBER FOUR of Pittsburg, and the orders were to couple Bucks's car on to it for the run west. De Molay--and everybody had notice--was Bucks's old commandery back in Pennsylvania, and he was going to the end of the division that night with the cronies of his youth. Little fellows they were in railroading when he rode the goat with them, but now mostly, like him, big fellows. Half a dozen old salts had been pounding ahead at him all day over the wire. They were to join him and Mr. and Mrs. Callahan for supper in the private car, and the yellow cider lay on the thin-shaven ice and the mountain grouse curled on the grill irons when De Molay Four, Pittsburg, pulled into Medicine Bend.

We had seen a good many swell trains that day, the swellest that ever pounded _our_ fishplates, Pullmans solid, and the finest kind of people. Boston, Washington, New York, Philadelphia sent some pretty gorgeous trains. But with at least half the town on the platform, when De Molay Four rolled in it took their breath so they couldn't yell till the Sir Knights began pouring from the vestibules and gave Medicine Bend their own lordly cheer.

Mahogany vestibules they were and extension platforms; salon lamps and nickeled handrails; buffet smoker and private diner: a royal train and a royal company; olive green from tender to tail lights--De Molay Four, Pittsburg.

Bucks's old gang spied him. Modestly back under the portico, he stood near the ticket window, and they broke through at him solid. They pulled him and hauled him and mauled him and passed him from hand to hand. They stood him on his head and on his hands and on his feet again, and told him of something they wanted and wanted right off.

Bucks looked the least bit uncertain as he considered the opening request. It wasn't much in some ways, what they asked; in other ways it was a good deal. He laughed and bantered and joked them as long as they would stand it; then he called up to Martin Duffy, who was leaning out the despatchers' window, "We'll see how he talks," laughed Bucks in his great big way. "But, boys, it's up to the Chief. I'm not in it on the orders, you know. Martin," he called, as Duffy bent his head, "they want fifteen minutes here to stretch their legs. Say they've been roasted in the alkali all day. Can you do anything for the boys?"

The boys! Big fellows in fezes, Shriner style, and slim fellows in duck, sailor style, and bow-legged fellows in cheviot, any old style. Chaps in white flannel, and chaps in gray, and chaps in blue. Turkish whiskers and Key West cigars and Crusaders' togs--and, between them, Bucks, his head most of the time in chancery. It was the first time they had seen him since he had made our Jim Crow line into a system known from the Boston and Maine to the Mexican Central, and, bar none, run cleaner or better. The first time they had seen him since he had made a name for himself and for his road from Newport News to 'Frisco, and they meant now to kill him, dead.

You know about what it meant and about how it went, how it had to go. What could Martin say to the man who had made him all he was and who stood, now a boy again among the boys of his boyhood, and asked for fifteen minutes--a quarter of an hour for De Molay Number Four? It threw the little Chief completely off his schedules; just fifteen minutes was more than enough to do that. All the work was done, the anxiety nearly past--Martin had risen to rest his thumping head. But fifteen minutes; once in a lifetime--Bucks asking it.

Duffy turned to big Jack Moore standing at his side ready to pull De Molay over the Pass, and spoke him low. Jack nodded; everything went with Jack, even the turn-tables that stuck with other engineers. Martin in his shirt-sleeves leaned out the window and, looking down on the turbaned and turbulent mob, spoke so Bucks could hear.

"What is it?" demanded the most puissant commander of De Molay excitedly. "What does he say, Bucks?"

"What says the slave?" growled a second formidable crusader; "out with it!"

"All we want is fifteen minutes."

"You wouldn't turn us down on fifteen minutes this far from an oasis, would you, Bucks?" protested a glass-eyed Shriner.

Bucks looked around royally. "Fifteen minutes?" he drawled. "What's a quarter of an hour in a lifetime, Jackman, on the last oasis? Take off your clothes, you fellows, and take half an hour. Now will you be good?"

De Molay put up a Templar yell. They always get the good things of life, those Pittsburg men; things other fellows couldn't begin to get. They passed the word through the sleepers, and the women began pouring from the vestibules. In two quick minutes out came the Duquesne band in red pompoms, duck trousers and military jackets, white corded with black. The crowd broke, the band marched down the platform and, striking up the "Washington Post," opened ranks on the grass plot above the Wickiup to receive the De Molay guard. One hundred Knights Templar in fatigue debouched into a bit of a park, and in the purple of the sunset gave a commandery drill to the honor of Bucks--Bucks and the West End.

It was Sunday night, and still as August could make it. The battalion moving silent and mobile as a streamer over the grass, marched, deployed and rested. They broke, to the clear-cut music, into crosses and squares and crescents and stars until small boys went cross-eyed, and wheeling at last on the line, they saluted Bucks--himself a past grand commander--and the railroad men yelled.

Meantime the General Manager's private car had been pasted on the tail-end of De Molay Four, and a pusher edging up, stuck its nose into the rear vestibule. On the head end Jack Moore and Oyster were backing down on the olive-green string with the two smoothest moguls on the division. Bucks and Neighbor had held back everything good all day for De Molay Four, down to engines and runners and conductor. Pat Francis carried the punch, and the little Chief sat again in the despatcher's chair for De Molay Four.

And while the lovely women strolled in the cool of the evening and the odor of mountain sweetness, and the guard drilled, and the band played, the Chief knit his brows over his train sheet. It looked now, re-arranged, re-ordered, re-adjusted and re-organized, as if a Gila Monster had crawled over it without wiping his feet. And when De Molay Four got ready to pull out, with Moore and Oyster on the throttles and old John Parker in the baggage, where he had absolutely nothing to do but drink cigars and smoke champagne and Pat Francis in the aisles, and Bucks, with Mr. and Mrs. Callahan and their crowd, in private Number Twelve--there was that much shouting and tooting and waving that Martin Duffy simply couldn't think for a few seconds; yet he held them all, for life or for death, every last one, in the curve of his fingers.

So they stood ready in the gorge while Duffy studied wearily how to handle First, Second, and Third Eighty against them.

First, Second, and Third Eighty! If they could only have been wiped off the face of the rails as easy as they might have been wiped off a train sheet! But there they were, three sections, and big ones, of the California fast freight. High-class stuff for Chicago and New York that couldn't be held or laid out that Sunday, not for a dozen Conclaves. All day First, Second, and Third Eighty had been feeling their way east through the mountains, trying to dodge the swell commanderies rolling by impudent as pay cars. But all the final plans to keep them out of everybody's way, out of the way of fez and turban and chapeau and Greek cross and crimson-splashed sleepers, were now dashed by thirty minutes at Medicine for De Molay Four.

Order after order went from under his hand. New meeting-points for First, Second, and Third Eighty and De Molay Four, otherwise Special 326.

Pat Francis snatched the tissues from Duffy's hand and, after the battalion had dispersed among their wives and sisters, and among the sisters of the other fellow; after the pomponed chaps had chucked the trombones and cymbals and drums at old John Parker's shins; after the last air-cock had been tested and the last laggard crusader thrown forcibly aboard by the provost guard, the double-header tooted, "Out!" and, with the flutter of an ocean liner, De Molay Four pulled up the gorge.

The orders buttoned in the reefers gave De Molay a free sweep to Elcho, and Jack Moore and Oyster were the men to take it, good and hard. Moreover, there was glory aboard. Pennsylvania nobs, way-up railroad men, waiting to see what for motive power we had in the Woolly West; how we climbed mountains and skirted canon walls, and crawled down two and three per cent grades. Then with Bucks himself in the private car--what wonder they let her out and swung De Molay through the gorge as maybe you've seen a particularly buoyant kite snake its tail out of the grass and drag it careening skyward. When they slowed for Elcho at nightfall, past First and Second Eighty, and Bucks named the mileage, the Pennsys refused to believe it for the hour's run. But fast as they had sped along the iron trail, Martin Duffy's work had sped ahead of them, and this order was waiting:

Telegraphic Train Order Number 79.

C. and E. Third No. 80, Rat River.

C. and E. Special 326, Elcho.

Third No. 80, Engine 210, and Special 326 will meet at Rock Point.

J. M. C.