Chapter III: Part 3

In the ineffable perversity of things is the spice and variety of life. Tommy Regan, the master mechanic, was a man not easily jolted, not easily disturbed. He was very short, very broad, with little black eyes, and a long, scraggly, drooping-at-the-corners, brown mustache. Also, he was blessed with a well-defined, well-nourished paunch--which is a sign irrefutable of contentment, a calm and placid outlook upon life in general and particular, and a freedom from the ills of haste and worry. A man with a paunch is a man apart and greatly to be envied, even when that paunch, as was the case with Regan, is of Irish extraction, for then the accompanying touch of Celtic temper makes him more like an ordinary, cross-grained, irritable, everyday mortal and less of a temperamental curiosity. Regan was justly proud of both--his paunch and his nationality. Regan put it the other way--his nationality and his paunch. That, however, is a matter for individual decision and the relative importance of things is as one sees it; the main thing is that one permitted him to use fiery words on occasion, and the other enabled him to preserve, ordinarily, a much to be commended state of equanimity.

Perversity of perversities! It was Spitzer that jolted Regan--not once, more than once. And before he got through, jolted him so hard that Regan hasn’t got over the wonder of it yet.

“Think of it,” he’ll say, when the subject is brought up. “Think of it! You know Spitzer, h’m? Well, _think_ of it! SPITZER!” And if it’s summer he’ll mop his beady brow, and if it’s winter he’ll twiddle his thumbs with his fingers laced over his _embonpoint_, which is to say over the lower button of his waistcoat.

Regan’s first jolt came to him one morning as, after a critical inspection of his pets in the roundhouse--big six- and eight-wheeled mountain engines---he strolled out and leaned against the push-bar on the turntable, mentally debating the respective merits of a rust-joint and a straight patch as specifically applied to number 583 that had been run into the shops the day before for repairs.

A figure emerged from the engine doors at the far end of the roundhouse and came toward him. Regan’s eyes, attracted, barely glanced in that direction, and then went down again in meditation, as he kicked a little hole in the cinders with the toe of his boot--it was only Spitzer.

When he looked up again Spitzer was nearer, quite near. Spitzer had halted before him and was standing there patiently, an embarrassed flush on his cheeks, wiping his hands nervously on an exceedingly dirty piece of packing which in his abstraction, for Spitzer was plainly abstracted, he had picked up for a piece of waste.

“Huh!” said Regan, staring at Spitzer’s hands, “what you trying to do? Black up for a minstrel show?”

Spitzer dropped the packing as though it had been a handful of thistles, and rubbed his hands up and down the legs of his overalls.

“Well?” Regan invited.

Spitzer began to talk, rapidly, hurriedly--that is, his lips moved rapidly, hurriedly.

Regan listened attentively and with a strained and hopeless expression, as he strove to catch a word and hence the drift of Spitzer’s remarks.

“How?” he demanded, when he saw Spitzer was at an end. “Speak out, man. You won’t wake the baby up.”

Spitzer began all over again. This time he did a little better.

“A dollar twenty-five,” repeated the master mechanic numbly.

Spitzer brightened visibly, and nodded.

Regan stared, bewildered and dumfounded. Gradually, impossible, incomprehensible, incongruous as it appeared, it dawned on him that Spitzer, even Spitzer, _Spitzer_ was asking for a _raise!_

“A dollar twenty-five.” was all Regan could repeat over again, and the words came away with a gasp.

Spitzer, misinterpreting the tone, his face grew rueful and full of trouble. He was appalled at his own temerity in broaching the subject in the first place, but now he had overstepped the bounds--he had asked for too much!

“A dollar twenty,” he ventured, in timid compromise--Spitzer was getting a dollar fifteen.

“How long you been working here?” inquired Regan, recovering a little and beginning to get a grip on himself.

“Four years,” said Spitzer faintly.

“Good Lord!” mumbled Regan. “Four years. A dollar twenty-five, h’m? Well, I dunno, I guess we can manage that.” And then, as a new thought suddenly struck him: “What the blazes would _you_ do with more money, h’m?”

But Spitzer only grinned sheepishly as, after murmuring his thanks, he walked back and disappeared in the roundhouse.

“Good Lord!” muttered Regan, looking after him.

“Four years, and a dollar and a quarter, _and_ Spitzer! Good Lord!”

Regan went around more or less dazed all that day. He ordered the patch on 583 when he had definitely decided on the rust-joint as the best tonic for the engine’s complaint, and he figured out how much one dollar and fifteen cents a day came to for a year barring Sundays, then he did the same with a dollar twenty-five as the multiplicand and compared the results. Spitzer’s demand was not exorbitant, and it wasn’t much to upset any man--that was just it--it was Spitzer, and Spitzer wasn’t much. Effect, psychological or otherwise, is by no manner of means to be measured by the mere magnitude of the cause, it is the phenomenal and unusual that is to be treated with wholesome respect, and for safe handling requires a double-tracked, block system with the cautionary signals up from start to finish--the master mechanic found it that way anyhow, and he ought to know.

He unburdened himself that night after supper to Carleton and a few of the others over at division headquarters, which had been moved upstairs over the station, where the chiefs used to meet regularly each evening for a pipe, with a round of pedro thrown in to liven things up a bit--Big Cloud not being blessed with many attractions in the amusement line.

Carleton grinned.

“Bad company,” he suggested. “Hard lot, that of yours over in the roundhouse, Tommy. They’re spoiling his manners. Been a long time in coming, but you know the old story of the water and the stone. What?”

“What in blazes would _he_ do with more money?” inquired Spence, the chief dispatcher, in unfeigned astonishment.

Regan glared disdainfully. He had put precisely the same question to Spitzer himself, but since then he had been brushing up his mathematics.

“Do with it!” he choked. “Thirty dollars and eighty cents--_a year_. Hell of a problem, ain’t it?”

“Well, you needn’t run off your schedule,” said Spence, a little tartly. “You’re the one that’s making most of the fuss over it.”

“Tell you what, Tommy,” remarked Carleton, still grinning, “you want to look out for Spitzer from now on. I guess his emancipation has begun--nothing like a start. Before you know it he’ll be running roughshod over the motive power department, including the master mechanic.”

“I give him the raise,” said Regan, more to himself than aloud. “‘Twas coming to him, what? Four years, and the first time I ever heard a yip out of him.”

“You’ll hear more,” prophesied Carleton; “even if he doesn’t talk very loud.”

“Think so?” said Regan, puckering up his eyes.

“I do,” said Carleton.

And Regan did.

Not at once, not for several weeks. But in the meantime a change came over Spitzer. He swept and wiped and reported at five minutes of seven every morning and kept himself just as much in the background, just as much out of everybody’s way, just as unobtrusive as he had before, but Spitzer was none the less changed.

It began the day after he got his raise. It was an indefinite, elusive, negative sort of a change, not the kind you could lay your hand on and describe in so many words. Regan tried to, and gave it up. The nearest he came to anything concrete was one day when he came around the tail-end of a tender and, unexpectedly, upon Spitzer. Spitzer was sweeping as usual, but Spitzer was also whistling--which was not usual. Regan, it is true, couldn’t puzzle very much out of that, but then Regan had his limitations.

Mindful of Carleton’s words, Regan kept his eye in a mildly curious kind of a way on the little faded, blueeyed drudge, and as he noticed the first change without being able to define it, he now, after a week or so, noticed a second, with the difference that this time the diagnosis was painfully obvious--Spitzer’s return to Spitzer’s normal self. Spitzer stopped whistling.

Regan began to catch Spitzer’s eyes fixed on him with a hesitating, irresolute, anxious gaze about every time he entered the roundhouse. And though he didn’t quite grasp it, something of the truth came to him. Spitzer was screwing up his courage to the sticking point preparatory to another step onward in his belated march toward emancipation.

It was a month to the day from the first interview when Spitzer tackled the master mechanic again, and as before, out by the turntable in front of the roundhouse, and, if anything, in a manner even more nervous and ill at ease than on the former occasion. He stammered once or twice in an effort to begin--and his effort was utter failure.

Regan eyed him in profound distrust. Once in four years wasn’t so much, and after all, even Spitzer, now that the shock was over, might be expected to do that. But again in a month--and from Spitzer! Something was wrong--perhaps Carleton was right.

“Well,” he snapped, “you got your raise. Ain’t you satisfied?”

Spitzer nodded dumbly.

“Well, then, what’s the matter with you if you’re satisfied?” exploded the master mechanic.

“I want to get------” the last word trailed off into tremulous, quavering incoherency.

“You want to get what?” growled Regan. “Don’t sputter as though you’d swallowed your teeth. What is it you want to get?”

“Firing,” blurted Spitzer after a desperate struggle.

Regan gasped for his breath. Spitzer! SPITZER--in a cab! He couldn’t have heard straight.

“Say it again,” whispered the master mechanic.

“Firing,” repeated Spitzer, with more confidence now that the plunge was taken.

“Yes,” said Regan weakly to himself. “That’s it. I got it right--firing! He wants to get _firing!_”

“I--I can do it,” faltered Spitzer. “I got to.”

“Eh? What’s that?” said Regan. “You got to? Say, you, Spitzer, what the devil’s the matter with you anyway?”

Spitzer wriggled like a worm on a hook, and his face went the color of a semaphore arm--a deep red one. Spitzer was suffering acutely.

“Well, well,” prodded Regan. “Release the air! Take the brakes off!”

“I’m,” began Spitzer shamefacedly, “I’m------” He gulped down his Adam’s apple hard, twice, and then it came away with a rush: “I’m going to get married to Merla Swenson.”

Regan’s jaw sagged like the broken limb of a tree, and his eyes fairly popped out and hung down over the roll of his cheeks. Then gradually, very gradually, he began to double up and unhandsome contortions afflicted his facial muscles. Spitzer! Spitzer was enough! But Spitzer _and_ Merla Swenson! Six-foot-heavy-boned-long-armed Swedish-maiden Merla! Oh, contrariety, variety, perversity of life!

“Haw!” he roared suddenly. “Haw, haw! Haw, haw, haw!” And again--only louder. The turner and a helper or two poked their noses out of the roundhouse doors to get a line on the disturbance.

Can a stone float? Can a feather sink? Astonishing, bewildering, dumfounding, impossible, oh, yes; but it was also very funny. It was the funniest thing that Regan had ever heard in his life.

“Haw, haw!” he screamed. “Ho, ho! Haw, haw!”

His paunch shook like jelly, and he held both hands to his sides to ease the pain. He straightened up preparatory to going off into another burst of guffaws, and then, with his mouth already opened to begin, he stopped as though he had been stunned. Spitzer was still standing before him, and Spitzer’s head was turned away, but Regan caught it, caught the two big tears that rolled slowly down the grimy cheeks. And in that moment he realized what neither he nor any other man on the Hill Division had ever realized before--that Spitzer, too, was _human_.

Regan coughed, choked, and cleared his throat. Here was Spitzer in a new light, but the Spitzer of years was not so readily to be consigned to the background of oblivion. Spitzer in a cab was as much an anomaly as ever, conjugal aspirations to the contrary.

“Firing?” said he, with grave consideration that he meant, by contrast, should serve as palliation for the sting of his mirth. “Firing? I’m afraid not. You’re not fit for it. You’re not big enough.”

Spitzer dashed his hands across his eyes.

“I _can_ fire,” he announced with a surprising show of spirit, “an’ I _got_ to. There’s smaller ones than me doing it.”

“What do you mean by ‘got to’?” demanded the master mechanic.

Spitzer shifted uneasily and kicked at the ground.

“Merla an’ me’s been making up for quite a while,” he stammered: “but she wouldn’t say nothing one way or the other till I got a raise.”

“Well, you got it,” said Regan.

Spitzer nodded miserably.

“Yes, an’ now she says ‘tain’t enough to get married on, an’--an’ we’ll have to wait till I get firing.”

“Good Lord!” murmured Regan, and he mopped his brow in deep perplexity. The destiny of mortals was in his hands--but so was the motive power department of the Hill Division. He could no more see Spitzer in a cab than he could see the time-honored camel passing through the eye of a needle. Then inspiration came to him.

“Look here, Spitzer,” said he, soothingly. “There ain’t any use talking about firing, and I ain’t going to let you build up any false hopes. But I’ll tell you what, you don’t need to feel glum about it. She loves you, don’t she?”

Spitzer’s lips moved.

“H’m?” inquired Regan solicitously, bending forward.

“Yes; she says she does,” repeated Spitzer in thin tones.

“Yes; well then, when you know women, and as much about ‘em as I do, you’ll know that nothing else counts--nothing but the love, I mean. It’s their nature, and they’re all alike. That’s the way it is with all of ‘em”--Regan waved his hand expansively.

“It’ll be all right. You’ll see. She won’t hold out on that line.”

Some men profit much by little experience, others profit little by much experience. Spitzer, possibly, had had little, very little, but the dejected droop of his shoulders, as he started back for the roundhouse, intimated that in the matter of knowledge as applied to the eternal feminine he was perhaps, in so far as it lay between himself and the master mechanic, the better qualified of the two to speak. And that, certainly, when concretely applied, which is to say applied to Merla Swenson.

Regan couldn’t have kept the story back to save his life, and it didn’t take long for the division to get it. They all got it--train crews and engine crews on way freights, stray freights, locals, extras and regulars, the staff, the shop hands, the track-walkers and the section gangs down to the last car-tink. At first the division looked incredulous, then it grinned, and then it howled, and its howl was the one word “Spitzer!” with seventeen exclamation points after it to make the tempo and rhythm hang out in a manner befitting and commensurate with the occasion.

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. Dutchy Damrosch did the business of his life--he did more business than he had ever dreamed of doing in his wildest flights of imagination, for Dutchy had the lunch counter rights at Big Cloud. What’s that got to do with Spitzer and his marital ambition? Well, a whole lot! Merla Swenson was second girl in Dutchy’s establishment, and Merla was the “fee-ancy” of Spitzer--which was a rotten bad pun of Spider Kelly’s, the conductor, and due more to the brogue-like twist of his tongue than to any malice aforethought.

To see any girl that was in love with Spitzer was worth the price of coffee and sinkers any old time. The lunch counter took on the air of a dime museum, and the visitors questioned Merla anxiously, a little suspicious that after all there might be a nigger in the woodpile somewhere in the shape of a “frame-up” with the hoax on themselves.

Merla settled all doubts on that score. Unruffled, calmly, stoically, dispassionately she answered the same question fifty times a day, and each time in the same way.

“Yah, I ban love Spitzer,” was her infallible reply, in a tone that made the bare possibility that she could have done anything else seem the very acme of absurdity. Merla’s inflexion struck deep at the root of things inevitable.

After that there was nothing to be said. A few, very few, and as the days went by their numbers thinned with amazing rapidity, had the temerity to snicker audibly. They only did it once, as with arms akimbo and hands on hips Merla advanced to the edge of the counter with a look in her steadfast, blue eyes, that was far from inviting, and inquired: “Him ban goot mans, I tank?”

It was put in the form of a question, it is true, but the “put” was of such cold uncompromise that the result was always the same. The offender hastily buried his nose in his coffee-cup, dug for a dime to square his account--with Dutchy--and made for the platform.

This was all very well, but unless Regan died and some one with a little less--or a little more, depending on how you look at it--imagination took his place, Spitzer’s chances of getting into a cab were as good as ever, which is to say that they were about as good as the goodness of a plugged nickel. And the trouble was that, as far as Spitzer could see, the master mechanic wasn’t sprouting out with any visible signs of premature decay. Furthermore, as he had suspicioned and now discovered, Regan _wasn’t_ the last word on women; not, perhaps, that Merla put firing before love, only she was uncommonly strong on firing. Spitzer was unhappy.

All things come to those who wait, they say. So they do, perhaps; but the way of their coming is sometimes not to be understood or fathomed. The story of a man who fell from the eighteenth story window of an office building, and, incidentally, broke his neck has no place here except in a general way. A friend who took a passing interest in the event was curious enough to investigate the cause, and he traced it back step by step, logically, surely, inevitably, beyond the possibility of refutation, to the fact that the second hook from the top on the back of the man’s wife’s dress--not the man’s dress, the dress of the man’s wife--was missing on the morning of the day of his untimely decease. The man--not the man’s friend--was an inventor. But no matter. It just shows. Regan being still alive, the chances are better than a thousand to one that Spitzer would have known a cold and forlorn old age, as Robert Louis puts it, and Merla would never have had a second edition of herself if it hadn’t been for a few measly, unripe crab-apples. What? Yes, that’s it--crab-apples. That’s the way Spitzer got where he is to-day--just crab-apples. Funny how things happen sometimes when you come to think of it, isn’t it? Spitzer and the man who broke his neck aren’t the only ones who’ve had their ups and downs that way, not by several. There isn’t any moral to this except that here and there you’ll find a man who isn’t as, modest about his own ability as he ought to be!

Spitzer’s nocturnal habits, that were a matter of so much unconcern and of which the railroad crowd at Big Cloud were so densely in ignorance, have a part in this. The truth is that between the lunch-counter and the station is the baggage and freight-shed, and behind the freight-shed it is very dark; and also, not less pertinent, is the fact that Merla was possessed of no other quarters than those shared by her sister-inarms in Dutchy’s employ--which were neither propitious nor commodious. Hence--but the connection is obvious.

On Merla’s night off at eight o’clock, Spitzer sneaked down through the fields and across the platform, weather permitting, and on those nights Merla donned her bonnet “for a walk”--at the same hour. When the station-clock struck ten and, coincidentally, Number One’s mellow chime sounded down the gorge, Merla retraced her steps to the upstairs rear of the lunch-counter, and Spitzer retraced his across the platform to the fields in the direction of the town and his boarding-house; only, of late, Spitzer had taken to lingering on the platform way up at the far end where it was also very dark and equally as deserted.

Here he would gaze wistfully at the big mogul with valves popping and the steam drumming at her gauges, as she waited on the siding just in front of him--‘Big Cloud being a divisional point where the engines were changed--to back down onto Number One for the first stretch of the mountain run--Burke’s run with 503, and big Jim MacAloon looking after the shovel end of it.

There wasn’t anything novel in the sight, but it didn’t seem to strike Spitzer as monotonous although, when it was all over and he watched the vanishing tail lights, he always sighed. It was just the same performance each time. Ten minutes or so before Number One, westbound, was due, MacAloon would run 503 out of the roundhouse, over the turntable, up the line, and back onto the siding. Then Burke would appear on the scene, light a torch, and poke around with a long-spouted oil can.

Spitzer would usually reach his position up the platform in time to see the engineer’s final jab with the torch between the drivers or into the link-motion before swinging himself through the gangway into the cab, as the Limited with snapping trucks and screeching brake-shoes rolled into the station; but one night it fell out a little differently. The station clock had struck ten, Merla had hastened to her domicile, and Spitzer to the far end of the platform as usual, but Number One was late.

Suddenly Spitzer jumped and his heart seemed to shoot into his mouth. There was a wild, piercing scream of agony. It came again. The blood left Spitzer’s cheeks. He saw Burke fly around the end of the pilot, the torch dancing in his hand, and make for the cab. Spitzer involuntarily leaped from the platform to the track and ran in the same direction, then the safety-valve popped with a terrific roar, drowning out all other sounds. He clambered cautiously into the cab. On the floor MacAloon was going through a performance that would have beggared the efforts of a writhing python, and the while he groaned and yelled.

As Spitzer watched, Burke, who was bending over MacAloon with an anxious face, suddenly reached forward and picked up a little round object that rolled from the pocket of the fireman’s jumper, then another and another. Spitzer instinctively craned forward, and in so doing attracted Burke’s notice for the first time. Burke’s look of anxiety gave way to a grin and he held out the objects to Spitzer, just as if it wasn’t Spitzer at all but an ordinary man--humor, like death, is a great leveler, but no matter, let that go. Burke held them out to Spitzer, Spitzer took them, and even Spitzer grinned. It didn’t need any doctor to diagnose MacAloon’s complaint--and the complaint wasn’t poetic! Cramps, old-fashioned, unadulterated cramps--just plain cramps and green crab-apples! Some things lay a man out worse perhaps--but there aren’t many.

Burke’s grin didn’t last long, for at that moment came Number One’s long, clear siren note, and back over the tender a streak of light shot out in a wide circle from around a butte and then danced along the rails and began to light up the platform, as the Limited thundered, five minutes late, into the straight stretch.

“Holy fishplates!” yelled Burke. “I’ve got to get a man to fire. Spitzer, you run like hell to the roundhouse and----”

Burke stopped. Spitzer stopped him. There are moments in everybody’s life when they rise above themselves, above habit, above environment, above everything, if even for only a brief instant. A chance like this would never come again. If he could fire one trip maybe Regan would change his mind. Spitzer grasped at it frantically, despairingly.

“Burke, I _can_ fire,” he fairly screamed. “Give me a chance, Burke. I’ll never get one if you don’t.” Burke gasped for a moment like a man with his breath knocked out of him, then something like a dry chuckle sounded in his throat. No one knows but Burke what decided him. It might have been either of two things, or a combination of them both--Spitzer’s pleading face, or the desire to take a rise out of Regan--Burke and Regan not having been on the best of terms since the last general elections. Be that as it may, Burke pointed at the squirming fireman. “Take his feet,” he grunted.

Together they lifted and dragged the stricken Mac-Aloon out of the cab and to the ground. 1108, pulling Number One, had come to a stop abreast of them by now, and Burke shouted at the engine crew.

“Here!” he bawled. “Lend a hand!”

And as both men stuck their heads out of the gangway, he and Spitzer boosted the fireman up to them.

“Got cramps,” explained Burke tersely. “You’ll be able to fix him up in the roundhouse. Five minutes late, h’m? Well, hurry, you’re clear. There’s your ‘go-ahead.’ Pull out and let me get hold.”

Burke turned to Spitzer, as 1108 slipped away from the baggage-car and moved up the track, and pointed to the gangway of his own engine.

“Get in,” he said grimly. “You’ll get a chance to fire, and, take it from me, you’ll never get a chance to do that or anything else again this side of the happy hunting-grounds, my bucko, if you throw me down.”

And while Regan quarreled amiably over a game of pedro upstairs in the station with Carleton, 503, with Spitzer, touzled-haired, mild-eyed, heart-beating-like-a-trip-hammer Spitzer, in the cab, backed down on the Imperial Limited and coupled on for the mountain run. There was a quick testing of the “air,” a hurried running up and down the platform, and then Burke, leaning from the window with his arms stretched out inside the cab and fingers on the throttle, opened a notch, and the platform began to slide past them.

Spitzer wrinkled his face and stared at the gauge needle--two hundred and ten pounds, all the way, all the time--two hundred and ten pounds. It was up to him. With a jerk of the chain, he swung the furnace door wide and a shovelful of coal shot, neatly scattered, over the grate.

There is art in all things; there is the quintessence of art in the prosaic and laborious task of firing an engine. Spitzer was not without art, for in a way he had had years of experience; but banking a fire in the roundhouse, and nursing a roaring pit of flame to its highest degree of efficiency in a swaying, lurching cab, are two different and distinct operations that are in no way to be confounded. 503 began to lurch and sway. Notch by notch Burke was opening her out, and the bark of her exhaust was coming like the quick crackle of a gatling. Five minutes late in the mountains on a time schedule already marked up to a dizzy height that called for more chances than the passengers paid for is--well, it’s five minutes, just _five minutes_, that’s all. Some men would have left it for the Pacific Division crowd the next day on a level track and a straight sweep--but not Burke.

Spitzer’s initiation was in ample form and he got the full benefit of all the rites and ceremonies with every detail of the ritual worked in--and no favors shown. So far all was well, the rough country was all in front of the pilot, and Spitzer was all business. His pulse was beating in tune to only one thing--the dancing needle on the gauge. Again he swung the door open, and the red flare lighted up the heavens and played on features that Regan would never have known for Spitzer’s--they were set, grim and determined, covered with little sweat beads that glistened like diamonds. The singing sweep of the wind was in his ears as he poised his shovel. There was a sickening slur. 503 shot round a tangent--and the shovelful of coal shot like bullets all over the cab, and, including Burke, hit about everything in sight but the objective point aimed at. Simultaneously, Spitzer promptly performed a gyration that resembled something like a back hand-spring and landed well up on the tender, to roll back to the floor of the cab again with an accompanying avalanche of coal.

He picked himself up and glanced apprehensively at the engineer. There was not a scowl, not even a grin on Burke’s face, just an encouraging flirt of the hand--but the flirt was momentous. Wise and full of guile was Burke, for with that little act Spitzer, biblically speaking, girded up his loins and got his second wind.

They were well into the foothills now, and the right of way was an amazing wonder. Diving, twisting, curving, it circled and bored and trestled its way, and buttes, canons, gorges and coulees roared past like flights of fancy.

The speed was terrific. To Spitzer it was all a wild, mad medley of things he had never known before, of things that had neither beginning nor end. The giddy slew as the big mountain racer hit the curves, the crunching grind of the flanges as for an instant she lifted from her wheel-base, the pitch, the roll, the staggering reel, the gasp for breath, the beat of the trucks, the whir of the racing drivers, the rush of the wind, the echoing thunder of the flying coaches behind--it was all there, all separate, all welded into one, a creation, new, vernal, life, the life of the rail, that beat at his eardrums and quickened the pounding throb of his heart.

At first, from time to time, Burke leaned over his levers to glance at the pressure gauge, but after a bit he crouched a little further forward in his seat and his eyes held on the track ahead where the beam of the electric headlight flooded the glittering ribbons of steel. He was getting what MacAloon or no other man had ever given him before--two hundred and ten pounds _all_ the way. SPITZER was firing Number One, the Imperial Limited, westbound, on the mountain run, _three_ minutes late!

The sweat was rolling in streams from the little fellow now, and he clung in the gangway for a moment’s breathing spell, leaning out, staring ahead at a few shining lights in the distance. Came the hoarse scream of the whistle, the clattering crash as they shattered the yard switches, a blurred vision of dark outlines dotted with tiny scintillating points, and station, yard, lights, switches and all were behind him.

Spitzer drew his sleeve across his forehead, and turned again to his work as they thundered over a long steel trestle--Thief Creek. Spitzer knew the road well enough at second hand, if not from personal experience. Just ahead was The Pass--Sucker Pass--straight enough for its quarter-mile stretch, but where the rock walls rose up on either side so close as to almost scratch the paint off the rolling stock. Eased for a moment in scant deference to switches and trestle just passed, Spitzer felt the forward leap of the racer as Burke threw her wide open again. He bent for his shovel--and then, quick as the winking of an eye, sudden as doom, came a tearing, rending crash, a scream from Burke, and the right-hand side of the cab seemed literally torn in two.

A flying piece of woodwork that struck him across the eyes, a terrific jolt as the engine lifted and fell back, sent Spitzer headlong to the floor of the cab. Dazed, half mad with the pain, the blood streaming from his forehead, he staggered to his feet. Burke lay coiled in an inert heap just in front of him by the furnace door. A whizzing piece of steel rose up, crunched, slithered, gashed a track of ruin for itself, and was gone. It had missed Burke only by a hair’s-breadth--next time there might not be even that limit of safety. With a cry, Spitzer leaped forward and dragged the unconscious engineer across the cab. Again the jolt, the slur, the stagger, the desperate wrench. It seemed like years, like eternity to Spitzer. He was living a lifetime in the passing of a second--it had been no more than that, no more than two or three at most.

There are some things worse, much worse, in railroading than a broken crank-pin and a rod amuck, but not when it comes in The Pass, where derailment at their racing speed spelt death, quick and sudden. There was just one chance for the trailing string of coaches, just one for every last soul aboard--Spitzer. But between Spitzer and the throttle and the air-latch was a thing of steel that rose and fell, now swinging a splintering, murderous arc through the shattered side of the cab, now grinding into the ties land roadbed, threatening with every revolution to pitch 503 and the train behind her headlong from the rails to crumple like flimsy egg-shells against the narrow rocky walls that lined The Pass. Just one chance for the train crew and passengers--_just one in a thousand for Spitzer_. And little five-foot-five Spitzer, diffident, retiring, self-effaced, unobtrusive Spitzer, with a dry, choking sob in his throat, flung himself forward to stop the train. His hands clutched desperately at the levers, there was a hiss, the vicious eventualities, and that’s the way it was with about nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand colonists. The company, of course, did take _some_ risk--they took a chance on the one-thousandth man. The company had sporting blood.

V--SHANLEY’S LUCK

If Shanley had only known what was going to happen, he could have saved some of his money on that ticket. As it stands now, he has still got transportation coming to him from Little Dance on the Hill Division to Bubble Creek, B. C. That may be an asset, or it may not--Shanley never asked for it.

Third class, colonist, no stop over allowed, redhaired, freckle-faced, an uptilt to the nose, a jaw as square as the side of a house, shoulders like a bull’s, and a fist that would fell an ox--that was Shanley. That was Shanley until the sprung rail that ditched the train at Little Dance caused him the loss of two things--his erstwhile status in the general passenger agent’s department, and a well-beloved and reeking brier.

Both were lost forever--his status partly on account of the reasons before mentioned, and partly because Shanley wasn’t particularly interested in Bubble Creek; his brier because it became a part, an integral part, of that memorable wreck, as Shanley, who was peacefully smoking in the front-end compartment of the colonist coach when the trouble happened, left the pipe behind while he catapulted through the open door--it was summer and sizzling hot--and landed, a very much dazed, bewildered, but not otherwise hurt Shanley, halfway up the embankment on the off side of a scene of most amazing disorder.

The potentialties that lie in a sprung rail are something to marvel at. Up ahead, the engine had promptly turned turtle, and, as promptly giving vent to its displeasure at the indignity heaped upon it, had incased itself in an angry, hissing cloud of steam; behind, the baggage and mail cars seemed to have vied with each other in affectionate regard for the tender. Only the brass-polished, nickel-plated Pullmans at the rear still held the rails; the rest was just a crazy, slewed-edge-ways, up-canted, toppled-over string of cars, already beginning to smoke as the flames licked into them.

The shouts of those who had made their escape, the screams of those still imprisoned within the wreckage, the sight of others crawling through the doors and windows brought Shanley back to his senses. He rose to his feet, blinked furiously, as was his habit on all untoward occasions, and the next instant he was down the embankment and into the game--to begin his career as a railroad man. That’s where he started--in the wreck at Little Dance.

In and out of the blazing pyre, after a woman or a child; the crash of his ax through splintering woodwork; the scorching heat; prying away some poor devil wedged down beneath the débris; tinkling glass as the heat cracked the windows or he beat through a pane with his fist--it was all hazy, all a dream to Shanley as, hours afterward, a grim, gaunt figure with blackened, bleeding face, his clothes hanging in ribbons, he rode into the Big Cloud yards on the derrick car.

Some men would have hit up the claim agent for a stake; Shanley hit up Carleton for a job. But for modesty’s sake, previous to presenting himself before the superintendent’s desk, he borrowed from one of the wrecking crew the only available article of wearing apparel at hand--a very dirty and disreputable pair of overalls. Dirty and disreputable, but--whole.

“I want a job, Mr. Carleton,” said he bluntly, when he had gained admittance to the super.

“You do, eh?” replied Carleton, looking him up and down. “You do, eh? You’re a pretty hard-looking nut, h’m?”

Shanley blinked, but, being painfully aware that he undoubtedly did look all if not more than that, and being, too, not quite sure what to make of the super, he contented himself with the remark:

“I ain’t a picture, I suppose.”

“H’m!” said Carleton. “Been up at the wreck, I hear--what?”

“Yes,” said Shanley shortly. No long story, no tale of what he’d done, no anything--just “Yes,” and that was what caught Carleton.

“What can you do?” demanded the super.

“Anything. I’m not fussy,” replied Chanley.

“H’m!” said Carleton. “You don’t look it.” And he favored Shanley with another prolonged stare.

Shanley, at first uncomfortable, shifted nervously from one foot to the other; then, as the stare continued, he began to get irritated.

“Look here,” he flung out suddenly. “I ain’t on exhibition. I come for a job. I ain’t got any letters of recommendation from pastors of churches in the East. I ain’t got anything. My name’s Shanley, an’ I haven’t even got anything to prove _that_.”

“You’ve got your nerve,” said Carleton, leaning back in his swivel chair and tucking a thumb in the armhole of his vest. “Ever worked on a railroad?”

“No,” answered Shanley, a little less assertively, as he saw his chances of a job vanishing into thin air, and already regretting his hasty speech--a few odd nickels wasn’t a very big stake for a man starting out in a new country, and that represented the sum total of Shanley’s worldly wealth. “No, I never worked on a railroad.”

“H’m,” continued Carleton. “Well, my friend, you can report to the trainmaster in the morning and tell him I said to put you on breaking. Get out!”

It came so suddenly and unexpectedly that it took Shanley’s breath. Carleton’s ways were not Shanley’s ways, or ways that Shanley by any peradventure had been accustomed to. A moment before he wouldn’t have exchanged one of his nickels for his chances of a job, therefore his reply resolved itself into a sheepish grin; moreover--but of this hereafter--Shanley back East was decidedly more in the habit of having his applications refused with scant ceremony than he was to receiving favorable consideration, which was another reason for his failure to rise to the occasion with appropriate words of thanks.

Incidentally, Shanley, like a select few of his fellow creatures, had his failings; concretely, his particular strayings from the straight and narrow way, not having been hidden under a bushel, were responsible, with the advice and assistance of a distant relative or two--advice being always cheap, and assistance, in this case, a marked-down bargain--for his migration to the West, as far West as the funds in hand would take him--Bubble Creek, B. C, the distant relatives saw to that. They bought the ticket.

Shanley, still smiling sheepishly and in obedience to the super’s instruction to “get out,” was halfway to the door when Carleton halted him.

“Shanley!”

“Yes, sir?” said Shanley, finding his voice and swinging around.

“Got any money?”

Shanley’s hand mechanically dove through the overalls and rummaged in the pocket of his torn and ribboned trousers--the pocket had not been spared--the nickels, every last one of them, were gone. The look on his face evidently needed no interpretation.

Carleton was holding out two bills--two tens.

“Cleaned out, eh? Well, I wouldn’t blame any one if they asked you for your board bill in advance. Here, I guess you’ll need this. You can pay it back later on. There’s a fellow keeps a clothing store up the street that it wouldn’t do you any harm to visit--h’m?”

With gratitude in his heart and the best of resolutions exuding from every pore--he was always long on resolutions--Shanley being embarrassed, and therefore awkward, made a somewhat ungraceful exit from the super’s presence.

But neither gratitude nor resolutions, even of steelplate, double-riveted variety, are of much avail against circumstances and conditions over which one has absolutely, undeniably, and emphatically no control. If Dinkelman’s clothing emporium had occupied a site between the station and MacGuire’s Blazing Star saloon, instead of the said Blazing Star saloon occupying that altogether inappropriate position itself, and if Spider Kelly, the conductor of the wrecked train, had not run into Shanley before he had fairly got ten yards from the super’s office, things undoubtedly would have been very different. Shanley took that view of it afterward, and certainly he was justified. It is on record that he had no hand in the laying out of Big Cloud nor in the control of its real estate, rentals, or leases.

Railroad men are by no stretch of the imagination to be regarded as hero worshipers, but if a man does a decent thing they are not averse to telling him so. Shanley had done several very decent things at the wreck. Spider Kelly invited him into the Blazing Star.

Shanley demurred. “I’ve got to get some clothes,” he explained.

“Get ‘em afterward,” said Kelly; “plenty of time. Come on; it’s just supper-time, and there’ll be a lot of the boys in there. They’ll be glad to meet you. If you’re hungry you’ll find the best free layout on the division. There’s nothing small about MacGuire.”

Shanley hesitated, and, proverbially, was lost.

An intimate and particular description of the events of that night are on no account to be written. They would not have shocked, surprised, or astonished Shanley’s distant relatives--but everybody is not a distant relative. Shanley remembered it in spots--only in spots. He fought and whipped Spider Kelly, who was a much bigger man than himself, and thereby cemented an undying friendship; he partook of the hospitality showered upon him and returned it with a lavish hand--as long as Carleton’s twenty lasted; he made speeches, many of them, touching wrecks and the nature of wrecks and his own particular participation therein--which was seemly, since at the end, about three o’clock in the morning, he slid with some dignity under the table, and, with the fond belief that he was once more clutching an ax and doing heroic and noble service, wound his arms grimly, remorselessly, tenaciously, like an octopus, around the table leg--and slept.

MacGuire before bolting the front door studied the situation carefully, and left him there--for the sake of the table.

The sunlight next morning was not charitable to Shanley. Where yesterday he had borne the marks of one wreck, he now bore the marks of two--his own on top of the company’s. Up the street Dinkelman’s clothing emporium flaunted a canvas sign announcing unusual bargains in men’s apparel. This seemed to Shanley an unkindly act that could be expressed in no better terms than “rubbing it in.” He gazed at the sign with an aggrieved expression on his face, blinked furiously, and started, with a step that lacked something of assurance, for the railroad yards and the trainmaster’s office.

He was by no means confident of the reception that awaited him. If there is one characteristic over and above any other that is common to human nature, it is the faculty, though that’s rather an imposing word, of worrying like sin over something that _may_ happen--but never does. Shanley might just as well have saved himself the mental worry anent the trainmaster’s possible attitude. He did not report to the trainmaster that morning, never saw that gentleman until long, very long afterward. Instead, he reported to Carleton--at the latter’s urgent solicitation in the shape of a grinning call-boy, who intercepted his march of progress toward the station.

“Hi, you, there, cherub face!” bawled the urchin politely. “The super wants you--on the hop!”

Shanley stopped short, and, resorting to his favorite habit, blinked.

“Carleton. Get it? Carleton,” repeated the messenger, evidently by no means sure that he was thoroughly understood; and then, for a parting shot as he sailed gayly up the street: “Gee, but you’re pretty!”

Carleton! Shanley had forgotten all about Carleton for the moment. His hand instinctively went into his pocket--and then he groaned. He remembered Carleton. But worst of all, he remembered Carleton’s twenty.

There were two courses open to him. He could sneak out of town with all possible modesty and dispatch, or he could face the music. Not that Shanley debated the question--the occasion had never yet arisen when he hadn’t faced the music--he simply experienced the temptation to “crawl,” that was all.

“It looks to me,” he ruminated ruefully, “as though I was up against it for fair. Just my luck, just my blasted luck, always the same kind of luck, that’s what. ‘Tain’t my fault neither, is it? I ain’t responsible for that darned wreck--if ‘twasn’t for that I wouldn’t be here. An’ Kelly, Spider he said his name was, if ‘twasn’t for him I wouldn’t be here neither. What the blazes did _I_ have to do with it? I always have to stand for the other cuss. That’s me every time, I guess. An’ that’s logic.”

It was. Neither was there any flaw in it as at first sight might appear, for the last test of logic is its power of conviction. Shanley, from being a man with some reasonable cause for qualms of conscience, became, in his own mind, one deeply sinned against, one injured and crushed down by the load of others he was forced to bear.

He explained this to Carleton while the thought of his burning wrongs was still at white heat, and before the super had a chance to get in a word. He began as he opened the office door, continued as he crossed the room, and finished as he stood before the super’s desk.

The scowl that had settled on Carleton’s face, as he looked up at the other’s entrance, gradually gave way to a hint of humor lurking around the corners of his mouth, and he leaned back in his chair and listened with an exaggerated air of profound attention.

“Just so, just so,” said he, when Shanley finally came to a breathless halt. “Now perhaps you will allow _me_ to say a word. It may not have occurred to you that I sent for you in order that _I_ might do the talking--h’m?”

This really seemed to require no answer, so Shanley made none.

“Yesterday,” went on Carleton, “you came to me for a job, and I gave you one, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” admitted Shanley, licking his lips.

“Just so,” said Carleton mildly. “I hired you then. I fire you now. Pretty quick work, what?”

“You’re the doctor,” said Shanley evenly enough. He had, for all his logic, expected no more nor less--he was too firm a believer in his own particular and exclusive brand of luck. “You’re the doctor,” he repeated. “There’s a matter of twenty bucks------

“I was coming to that,” interrupted Carleton; “but I’m glad _you_ mentioned it. I’ll be honest enough to admit that I hardly expected you would. A man who acts as you’ve acted doesn’t generally--h’m?”

“I told you ‘twasn’t my fault,” said Shanley stubbornly.

Carleton reached for his pipe, and struck a match, surveying Shanley the while with a gaze that was half perplexed, half quizzical.

“You’re a queer card,” he remarked at last. “Why don’t you cut out the booze?”

“‘Twasn’t my fault, I tell you,” persisted Shanley. “You’re a pretty good hand with your fists, what?” said Carleton irrelevantly. “Kelly’s no slouch himself.”

Shanley blinked. It appeared that the super was as intimately posted on the events of the preceding evening as he was himself. The remark suggested an inspection of the fists in question. They were grimy and dirty, and most of the knuckles were barked; closed, they resembled a pair of miniature battering-rams.

“Pretty good,” he admitted modestly.

“H’m! About that twenty. You intend to pay it back, don’t you?”

“I’m not a thief, whatever else I am,” snapped Shanley. “Of course, I’ll pay it back. You needn’t worry.”

“When?” insisted Carleton coolly.

“When I get a job.”

“I’ll give you one,” said Carleton--“Royal” Carle-ton the boys called him, the squarest man that ever held down a division. “I’ll give you one where your fists will be kept out of mischief, and where you can’t hit the high joints quite as hard as you did last night. But I want you to understand this, Shanley, and understand it good and plenty and once for all, it’s your last chance. You made a fool of yourself last night, but you acted like a man yesterday--that’s why you’re getting a new deal. You’re going up to Glacier Canon with McCann on the construction work. You won’t find it anyways luxurious, and maybe you’ll like McCann and maybe you won’t--he’s been squealing for a white man to live with. You can help him boss Italians at one seventy-five a day, and you can go up on Twenty-nine this morning, that’ll take care of your transportation. What do you say?”

Shanley couldn’t say anything. He looked at the super and blinked; then he looked at his fists speculatively--and blinked.

Carleton was scribbling on a piece of paper.

“All right, h’m?” he said, looking up and handing over the paper. “There’s an order on Dinkelman, only get some one else to show you the way this time, and take the other side of the street going up. Understand?”

“Mr. Carleton,” Shanley blurted out, “if ever I get full again, you----”

“I will!” said Carleton grimly. “I’ll fire you so hard and fast you’ll be out of breath for a month. Don’t make any mistake about that. No man gets more than two chances with me. The next time you get drunk will finish your railroad career for keeps, I promise you that.”

“Yes,” said Shanley humbly; and then, after a moment’s nervous hesitation: “About Kelly, Mr. Carleton. I don’t want to get him in bad on this. You see, it was this way. He left early--that’s what started the fight. I called him a--a--quitter--or something like that.”

“H’m, yes; or something like that,” repeated Carleton dryly. “So I believe. I’ve had a talk with Kelly. You needn’t let the incomprehensible workings of that conscience of yours prick you any on his account. Kelly knows when to stop. His record is O. K. in this office. Kelly doesn’t get drunk. If he did, he’d be fired just as fast as you will be if it ever happens again.”

“If I’m never fired for anything but that,” exclaimed Shanley in a burst of fervent emotion, “I’ve got a job for life. I’ll prove it to you, Mr. Carleton. I’m going to make good. You see if I don’t.”

“Very well,” said Carleton. “I hope you will. That’s all, Shanley. I’ll let McCann know you’re coming.”

Shanley’s second exit from the super’s presence was different from the first. He walked out with a firm tread and squared shoulders. He was rejuvenated and buoyant. He was on his mettle--quite another matter, entirely another matter, and distinctly apart from the paltry consideration of a mere job. He had told Carleton that he would make good. Well, he would--and he did. Carleton himself said so, and Carleton wasn’t in the habit of making many breaks when it came to sizing up a man--not many. He did sometimes, but not often.