Chapter V: Part 5

The morning broke with the steady downpour unabated. Everything ran water, and the rock cut was filled with it. Work was out of the question. Spirlaw ate his breakfast, that the dripping camp cook brought him, and then, putting on his rubber boots and coat, started over for the track. Number Eleven was due at the Canon at seven-thirty, and she would have the package of “hardware” he had asked Carleton for.

But though seven-thirty came, Number Eleven did not--neither did any other train, east or west. The hours passed from a long morning to drag through a longer afternoon. Something was wrong somewhere--and badly wrong at that. Spirlaw’s face was blacker than the storm. Twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, he started down the track in the direction of Keefer’s Siding, which was just what its name proclaimed it to be--a siding, no more, no less, only there was an operator there. Each time, however, he changed his mind after getting no further than a few yards. The Polacks could be no less alive to the fact than himself that something out of the ordinary was in the air, and second considerations swung strongly to the advisability of sticking close to the camp, so that his presence might have the effect of dampening the ardor of any mischief that might be brewing.

It was not until well on toward eight o’clock in the evening and the last of the twilight that the hoarse screech of a whistle sounded down the canon grade--a long blast and three short ones. It was belated Number Eleven whistling for the camp--she wouldn’t stop, just slow down to transact her business. Spirlaw, who was in his shanty at the time, snatched up his hat, dashed out of the door, and headed for the bend of the track. As he did so, out of the tail of his eye, he caught sight of the Polacks clustered with out-poked heads from the open doors of the bunk-houses.

As he reached the line, Number Eleven came round the curve, and the door of the express car swung back. The messenger dropped a package into his hand that the road boss received with a grim smile, and a word into his ear that caused Spirlaw’s jaw to drop--nor was that all that dropped, for, from the rear end, as the train rolled by--dropped Keating.

White-faced and shaky the boy looked--more so than usual. Spirlaw stared as though he had seen an apparition, stared for a minute in silence before he could lay tongue to words--then they came like the out-spout of a volcano.

“What the hell’s the meanin’ of this?” he roared.

“Who in the double-blanked blazes let you out of Big Cloud, h’m? I’ll have some----”

“Let’s get in out of the wet,” broke in Keating, smiling through a spell of coughing that racked him at that moment. “You can growl your head off then, if you like”--and he started on a run for the shack.

Once inside, Spirlaw rounded on the boy again, and he stopped only when he was out of breath.

“Didn’t Carleton tell you to stay where you was?” he finished bitterly.

“Oh yes,” said Keating, “that’s about the first thing he _did_ say after he had read your letter, when I gave it to him yesterday. Then I tumbled to why you had sent me out of camp. You’re about as square as they make them, Spirlaw. You needn’t blame Carle-ton, _he_ had about all he could do without paying any attention to me or any one else. Had any wires or news in here?”

Spirlaw shook his head.

“No; but I knew something was up, because Number Eleven is the first train in or out to-day. The express messenger just said they’d cut loose in Big Cloud and wrecked about everything in sight, but I guess he was puttin’ it on a bit.”

“He didn’t put on anything,” said Keating slowly. “My God, Spirlaw, it was an awful night! The freight-house and the shops and the roundhouse, what’s left of them, are ashes. They cut all the wires and then they cut loose themselves--the Polacks and that crowd, you know. Yes, they wrecked everything in sight, and there’s a dozen lives gone to pay for it.” Keating stopped suddenly, and again began to cough.

Spirlaw looked at the boy uneasily, and mechanically fumbled with the cords of the package he had laid upon the table. By the time he had removed the wrappers and disclosed two ugly, businesslike looking.45s and a half-dozen boxes of cartridges, Keating’s paroxysm had passed.

“I guess it was exciting enough for _me_, anyhow”--Keating tried hard to make his laugh ring true. “I’m a little weak from it yet.”

“If you weren’t sick,” Spirlaw burst out, “I’d make you sick for comin’ back here. You know well enough we’ll get it next--you knew so well you came back to help----”

“I told Carleton he ought to send some help down here,” Keating interrupted hastily; “and he just looked at me like a crazy man--he was half mad anyhow with the ruin of things. ‘Help!’ he flung out at me. ‘Where’s it coming from? Let Spirlaw yank up his stakes and pull out if things get looking bad!’”

“Pull out!” shouted Spirlaw, in a sudden roar. “Pull out! _Me!_ Not for all the cross-eyed, hamstrung Polacks on the system!”

“I think you’d better,” said Keating quietly. “After what I saw last night, I think you’d better. There was no holding them--they were like savages, and the further they went the worse they got. They were backed up by whisky and the worst element in town. I was in the station with Carleton, Regan, Harvey, Riley and Spence and some of the other dispatchers. It was a regular pitched battle, and in spite of their revolvers the station would have gone with the rest if, along toward morning, the striking trainmen and the Brotherhood hadn’t taken a hand and helped us out. I don’t know that it’s over yet, that it won’t break out again to-night; though I heard Carleton say there’d be a detachment of the police in town by four o’clock. I wish you would pull out, Spirlaw. You said yourself that all these fellows here needed to start them sticking their claws into you was a little encouragement from the other end. They’ve been afraid of you, but they hate you like poison. Once started, they’ll be worse than the crowd at Big Cloud for hate is a harder driver than whisky. Then besides, I really think you’d be of more use in Big Cloud. You could do some good there no matter what the end was, while here you’re alone and you stand to lose everything and gain nothing. I wish you would pull out, Spirlaw, won’t you?”

Spirlaw reached out his hand and laid it on Keating’s shoulder, as he shook his head.

“I’ve got a whole _lot_ to lose,” he answered, his hard face softening a little. “A whole lot. I can’t say things the way you do, but I guess you’ll understand. You got something that means a whole lot to you, that you’d risk anything for--what you want to do and what you want to leave behind you when it comes along time to cash in. Well, I guess most of us have in one way or another, though mabbe it don’t rank anywheres up to that. I reckon, too, a whole lot of us don’t never think to put it in words, an’ a whole lot of us couldn’t if we tried to, but it’s there with any man that’s any good. I’d rather go out for keeps than pull out--I’d rather they’d plant me. D’ye think I’d want to live an’ have to cross the street because I couldn’t look _even a Polack_ in the eyes--a man would be better dead, what?”

For a moment Keating did not answer, he seemed to be weighing the possibility of still shaking the determination of the road boss before accepting it as irrevocable: then, evidently coming to the conclusion that it was useless to argue further, he pointed to the revolvers.

“Then the sooner you load those the better,” he jerked out.

Spirlaw looked at him curiously, questioningly.

“Because,” went on Keating, answering the unspoken interrogation, “when I dropped off the train I saw that fellow Kuryla--he was pointed out to me in Big Cloud yesterday--and three or four more drop off on the other side. I didn’t know they were on the train until then, of course, or I would have had them put off. There isn’t much doubt about what they are here for, is there?”

“So that’s it, is it?” Spirlaw ripped out with an oath. “No, there ain’t much doubt!”

He snatched up a cartridge-box, slit the paper band with his thumb nail, and, breaking the revolvers, began to cram the cartridges into the cylinders. His face was twitching and the red that flushed it shaded to a deep purple. Not another word came from him--just a deadly quiet. He thrust the weapons into his pockets, strode to the door, opened it, stepped over the threshold--and stopped. An instant he hung there in indecision, then he came back, shut the door behind him, sat down on the edge of his bunk, and looked at Keating grimly.

“There’s been one train along, there’ll be another,” he snapped. “An’ the first one that comes you’ll get aboard of. I hate to keep those whinin’ coyotes waitin’, but----”

“I’ll take no train,” Keating cut in coolly; “but I’ll take a revolver.”

Spirlaw growled and shook his head.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Kuryla at first?” he demanded abruptly.

“You know why as well as I do,” smiled Keating. “I wanted to get you away from here if I could. There wouldn’t have been any use trying at all if I’d begun by telling you that. Wild horses wouldn’t have budged you then. As for a train, what’s the use of talking about it, there probably won’t be another one along under an hour. In the meantime, give me one of the guns.”

“Not m----”

Spirlaw’s refusal died half uttered on his lips, as he sprang suddenly to his feet; then he whipped out the revolvers and shoved one quickly into Keating’s hand.

Carried down with the sweep of the wind came the sound of many voices raised in shouts and discordant song. It grew louder, swelled, and broke into a high-pitched, defiant yell.

“Whisky!” gritted Spirlaw between his teeth.

“That devil Kuryla and the coyotes that came with him knew the best an’ quickest way to start the ball rollin’. Well, son, I reckon we’re in for it. The only thing I’m sorry about is that you’re here; but that can’t be helped now. You were white clean through to come--Holy Mother, listen to that!”--another yell broke louder, fiercer than before over the roar of the storm.

Spirlaw stepped to the door and peered out. It was already getting dark. The rain still poured in sheets, and the wind howled down the gorge in wild, furious, spasmodic gusts. Thin streaks of light strayed out from the doors of the bunk-houses, and around the doors were gathered shadowy groups. A moment more and the shadowy groups welded into a single dark mass. Came a mad, exultant yell from a single throat. It was caught up, flung back, echoed and reechoed by a score of voices--and the dark mass began to move.

“Guess you’d better put out that light, son,” said Spirlaw coolly. “There’s no use makin’ targets of our----”

Before he ended, before Keating had more than taken a step forward, a lump of rock shivered the little window and crashed into the lamp--it was out for keeps. A howl followed this exhibition of marksmanship, and, following that, a volley of stones smashed against the side of the shack thick and fast as hail--then the onrush of feet.

Spirlaw’s revolver cut the black with a long, blinding flash, then another, and another. Screams and shrieks answered him, but it did not halt the Polacks. In a mob they rushed the door. Spirlaw sprang back, trying to close it after him; instead, a dozen hands grasped and half wrenched it from its hinges.

“Lie down on the floor, Spirlaw, _quick!_”--it was Keating’s voice, punctuated with a cough. The next instant his gun barked, playing through the doorway like a gatling.

From the floor the road boss joined in. The mob wavered, pitched swaying this way and that, then broke and ran, struggling with each other to get out of the line of fire.

“Hurrah!” cried Keating. “I guess that will hold them.”

“‘Tain’t begun,” was Spirlaw’s grim response. “Where’s them cartridges?”

“On the table--got them?”

“Yes,” said Spirlaw, after a minute’s groping. “Here, put a box in your pocket.”

“What are they up to now?” asked Keating as, in the silence that had fallen, they reloaded and listened.

“God knows,” growled Spirlaw; “but I guess we’ll find out quick enough.”

As he spoke, from a little distance away, came the splintering crash of woodwork--then silence again.

“That’s the storehouse,” Spirlaw snarled. “They’re after the bars an’ anything else they can lay their hands on. Guess they weren’t countin’ on our havin’ anything more than our fists to fight with, guess they weren’t.”

Keating’s only reply was a cough.

The minutes passed, two, three, five of them. Once outside sounded what might have been the stealthy scuffle of feet or only a storm-sound so construed by the imagination. Then, from the direction of the riverbed, sudden, sharp, came a terrific roar.

“My God!” yelled Spirlaw. “There’s the trestle gone--they’ve blown it up! They’re sure to have laid a fuse here, too. Get out of here quick! Fool that I was, I might have known it was the _dynamite_ they were after.”

Both men were scrambling for the door as he spoke. They reached it not an instant too soon. The ground behind them lifted, heaved; the walls, the roof of the shack rose, cracked like eggshells, and scattered in flying pieces--and the mighty, deafening detonation of the explosion echoed up and down the gorge, echoed again--and died away.

The mob caught sight of them as they ran and, foiled for the moment, sent up a yell of rage--then started in pursuit.

“Make for the cut,” shouted Spirlaw. “We can hold them off there behind the rocks.”

Keating had no breath for words. Panting, sick, his head swimming, a fleck of blood upon his lips, he struggled after the giant form of the road boss; while, behind, coming ever closer, ringing in his ears, were the wild cries of the maddened Polacks. The splash of water revived him a little as they plunged along the old right of way where the river, flooded by the storm, had again claimed its own. The worst of it was up to his armpits. A grip on his shoulder and a pull from Spirlaw helped him over. They gained the other side with a bare two yards separating them from the mob behind, went on again--and then Spirlaw caught his foot, tripped and pitched headlong, causing Keating, at his heels, to stumble and fall over him.

Like wild beasts the Polacks surged upon them. Keating tried to regain his feet--but he got no further than his knees as a swinging blow from a pick-handle caught him on his head. Half-stunned, he sank back and, as consciousness left him, he heard Spirlaw’s great voice roar out like the maddened bellow of a bull, saw the giant form rise with, it seemed, a dozen Polacks clinging to neck and shoulders, legs and body, saw him shake them off and the massive arms rise and fall--and all was a blur, all darkness.

The road boss lay stretched out a yard away from him when he opened his eyes. He was very weak. He raised himself on his elbow. From the camp down the line he could see the lights in the bunk-houses, hear drunken, chorused shouts. He crept to Spirlaw, called him, shook him--the big road boss never moved. The Polacks had evidently left both of them for dead--and one, it seemed, was. He slid his hand inside the other’s vest for the heart beat. So faint it was at first he could not feel it, then he got it, and, realizing that Spirlaw was still alive he straightened up and looked helplessly around--and, in a flash, like the knell of doom, Spirlaw’s words came back to him: “_There’s the trestle gone!_”

Sick the boy was with his clotting lungs, deathly sick, weak from the blow on his head, dizzy, and his brain swam. _There’s the trestle gone!_”--he coughed it out between blue lips.

“_There’s the trestle gone!_”

Keefer’s Siding was a mile away. Somehow he must reach it, must get the word along the line that the _trestle was out_, get the word along before the stalled traffic moved, before the first train east or west crashed through to death, before more wreck and ruin was added to the tale that had gone before. He bent to Spirlaw’s ear and three times called him frantically: “Spirlaw! Spirlaw! _Spirlaw!_” There was no response. He tried to lift him, tried to drag him--the great bulk was far beyond his strength. And the minutes were flying by, each marking the one perhaps when it would be too late, too late to warn any one that the trestle was out.

Just up past the rock cut, a bare twenty yards away where the leads to the temporary track swung into the straight of the main line, was the platform handcar they had used for carrying tools and the odds and ends of supplies between the storehouse and the work--if he could only get Spirlaw there!

He called him again, shook him, breathing a prayer for help. The road boss stirred, raised himself a little, and sank down again with a moan.

“Spirlaw, _Spirlaw_, for God’s sake, man, try to get up! I’ll help you. You must, do you hear, _you must!_”--he was dragging at the road boss’s collar.

Keating’s voice seemed to reach the other’s consciousness, for, weakly, dazed, without sense, blindly, Spirlaw got upon his knees, then to his feet, and, staggering, reeling like a drunken man, his arm around Keating’s neck, his weight almost crushing to the ground the one sicker than himself, the two stumbled, pitched, and, at the end, _crawled_ those twenty yards.

“The handcar, Spirlaw, the handcar!” gasped Keating. “Get on it. You must! Try! Try!”

Spirlaw straightened, lurched forward, and fell half across the car with out-flung arms--unconscious again.

The rest Keating managed somehow, enough so that the dangling legs freed the ground by a few inches; then, with bursting lungs, far spent, he unblocked the wheels, pushed the car down the little spur, swung the switch, dragged himself aboard, and began to pump his way west toward Keefer’s Siding.

No man may tell the details of that mile, every inch of which was wrung from blood that oozed from parted, quivering lips; no man may question from Whom came the strength to the frail body, where strength was not; the reprieve to the broken lungs, that long since should have done their worst--only Keating knew that the years were ended forever, that with every stroke of the pump-handle the time was shorter. The few minutes to win through--that was the last stake!

At the end he choked--fighting for his consciousness, as, like dancing points, switch lights swam before him. He checked with the brake, reeled from the car, fell, tried to rise and fell back again. Then, on his hands and knees, he crept toward the station door. It had come at last. The hemorrhage that he had fought back with all his strength was upon him. He beat upon the door. It opened, a lantern was flashed upon him, and he fell inside.

“The trestle’s out at the Glacier--hold trains both ways--Polacks--Spirlaw on--handcar--I------”

That was all. Keating never spoke again.

“I dunno as you’d call him a builder,” says Clarihue, the night turner, when _he_ tells the story in the darkened roundhouse in the shadow of the big ten-wheelers on the pits, while the steam purrs softly at the gauges and sometimes a pop-valve lifts with a catchy sob, “I dunno as you would. It depends on the way you look at it. Accordin’ to him, he was. He left something behind him, what?”

VII--THE GUARDIAN OF THE DEVIL’S SLIDE

There is one bad piece of track on the Hill Division, particularly bad, which is the same as saying that it is the worst piece of track, bar none, on the American Continent. Not that the engineers were to blame--they weren’t. It was Dame Nature in the shape of the Rockies--Dame Nature and the directors.

Sir Ivers Clayborn, gray-haired and grizzled, a man schooled in the practical school of many lands and many years, who was chief consulting engineer when the road was building, advised a double-looped tunnel that, according to his sketch, looked something like the figure 8 canted over sideways. The directors poised their glasses and examined the sketch with interest until they caught sight of the penciled estimate in the corner. That settled it. They did not even take the trouble to vote. They asked for an alternative--and they got it. They got the Devil’s Slide.

First and last, it has euchred more money out of the treasury of the Transcontinental than it would have taken to build things Sir Ivers’ way to begin with; and it has taken some years, a good many of them, for the directors to learn their lesson. The old board never did, for that matter; but, thanks perhaps to younger blood, they’ve begun now to build as they should have built in the first place. It isn’t finished yet, that double-looped tunnel, it won’t be for years, but, no matter, it’s begun, and some day a good many more than a few men will sleep the easier because of it.

From Carleton, the super, to the last section hand and track-walker, the Devil’s Slide was a nightmare. The dispatchers, under their green-shaded lamps, cursed it in the gray hours of dawn; the traffic department cursed it spasmodically, but at such times so whole-heartedly and with such genuine fervor and abandon that its occasional lapses into silence were overlooked; the motive power department in the shape of Regan, the master mechanic, cursed it all the time, and did it breathlessly. It had only one friend--the passenger agent’s department. The passenger agent’s department swore _by_ it--on account of the scenery.

“Scenery!” gulped the dispatchers, and the white showed under their nail tips as their fingers tightened on their keys.

“Scenery!” howled the traffic department, and reached for the claim file.

“Scenery!”--Regan didn’t say it--he choked. Just choked, and spat the exclamation point in a stream of black-strap.

“Scenery!” murmured Mr. General Passenger Agent esthetically, waving a soft and diamond bedecked hand from the platform of Carleton’s private car. “Wonderful! Grand! Magnificent! We’ve got them all beaten into a coma. No other road has anything like it anywhere in the world.”

“They have not,” agreed Carleton, and the bitterness of his soul was in his words.

Everybody was right.

The general passenger agent was right--the scenic grandeur was beyond compare, and he made the most of it in booklets, in leaflets, in pamphlets, and in a score of pages in a score of different magazines.

The others were right--the Devil’s Slide was everything that the ethics of engineering said it shouldn’t be. It was neither level nor straight. In its marvelous two miles from the summit of the pass to the canon below, its nearest approach to the ethical was three percent drop. There wasn’t much of that--most of it was a straight five! It twisted, it turned, it slid, it slithered, and it dove around projecting mountain-sides at scandalous tangents and with indecent abruptness.

Chick Coogan swore, with a grin, that he could see his own headlight coming at him about half the time every trip he made up or down. That, of course, is exaggerating a little--but not much! Coogan sized up the Devil’s Slide pretty well when he said that, all things considered, pretty well--there wasn’t much chance to mistake what he meant, or what the Devil’s Slide was, or what he thought of it. Anyway, be that as it may, Coogan’s description gave the division the only chance they ever had to crack a smile when the Devil’s Slide was in question.

They smiled then, those railroaders of the Rockies, but they’ll look at you queerly now if you mention the two together--Coogan and the Devil’s Slide. Fate is a pretty grim player sometimes.

Any one on the Hill Division can tell you the story--they’ve reason to know it, and they do--to the last man. If you’d rather get it first hand in a roundhouse, or between trains from the operator at some lone station that’s no more than a siding, or in the caboose of a way freight--if you are a big enough man to ride there, and that means being bigger than most men--or anywhere your choice or circumstance leads you from the super’s office to a track-walker’s shanty, if you’d rather get it that way, and you’ll get it better, far better, than you will here, don’t try any jolly business to make the boys talk--just say a good word for Coogan, Chick Coogan. That’s the “open sesame”--and the only one.

There’s no use talking about the logical or the illogical, the rational or the irrational, when it comes to Coo-gan’s story. Coogan’s story is just Coogan’s story, that’s all there is to it. What one man does another doesn’t. You can’t cancel the human equation because there’s nothing to cancel it with; it’s there all the time swaying, compelling, dominating every act in a man’s life. The higher branches of mathematics go far, and to some men three dimensions are but elemental, but there is one problem even they have never solved and never will solve--the human equation. What Coogan did, you might not do--or you might.

Coogan didn’t come to the Transcontinental a fullblown engineer from some other road as a good many of the boys have, though that’s nothing against them; Coogan was a product of the Hill Division pure and simple. He began as a kid almost before the steel was spiked home, and certainly before the right of way was shaken down enough to begin to look like business. He started at the bottom and he went up. Call-boy, sweeper, wiper, fireman--one after the other. Promotion came fast in the early days, for, the Rockies once bridged, business came fast, too; and Coogan had his engine at twenty-one, and at twenty-four he was pulling the Imperial Limited.

“Good goods,” said Regan. “That’s what he is. The best ever.”

Nobody questioned that, not only because there was no one on the division who could put anything over Coogan in a cab, but also because, and perhaps even more pertinent a reason, every one liked Coogan--some of them did more than that.

Straight as a string, clean as a whistle was Coogan, six feet in his stockings with a body that played up to every inch of his height, black hair, jet black, black eyes that laughed with you, never _at_ you, a smile and a cheery nod always--the kind of a man that makes you feel every time you see them that the world isn’t such an eternal dismal grind after all. That was Chick Coogan--all except his heart. Coogan had a heart like a woman’s, and a hard luck story from a ‘bo stealing a ride, a railroad man, or any one else for that matter, never failed to make him poorer by a generous percentage of what happened to be in his pocket at the time. Who wouldn’t like him! Queer how things happen.

It was the day Coogan got married that Regan gave him 505 and the Limited run as a sort of wedding present; and that night Big Cloud turned itself completely inside out doing honor and justice to the occasion.

Big Cloud has had other celebrations, before and since, but none quite so unanimous as that one. Restraint never did run an overwhelmingly strong favorite with the town, but that night it was hung up higher than the arms on the telegraph poles. Men that the community used to hide behind and push forward as hostages of righteousness, when it was on its good behavior and wanted to put on a front, cut loose and outshone the best--or the worst, if you like that better---of the crowd that never made any bones about being on the other side of the fence. They burned red flares, very many of them, that Carleton neglected to imagine had any connection with the storekeeper and the supply account; they committed indiscretions, mostly of a liquid nature, that any one but the trainmaster, who was temporarily blind in both eyes, could have seen; and, as a result, the Hill Division the next day was an eminently paralytic and feeble affair. This is a very general description of the event, because sometimes it is not wise to particularize--this is a case in point.

Coogan’s send-off was a send-off no other man, be he king, prince, president, sho-gun, or high mucky-muck of whatever degree, could have got--except Coogan. Coogan got it because he was Coogan, just Coogan--and the night was a night to wonder at.

Regan summarized it the next evening over the usual game of pedro with Carleton, upstairs over the station in the superb office.

“Apart from Coogan and me,” said the master mechanic, in a voice that was still suspiciously husky, “apart from Coogan and me and _mabbe_ the minister--” the rest was a wave of his hand. Regan could wave his hand with a wealth of eloquence that was astounding. .

“Quite so,” agreed Carleton, with a grin. “Too bad to drag _them_ into it, though. Both ‘peds’ to me, Tommy. It’s a good thing for the discipline of the division that bigamy is against the law, what?”

“They’ll be talking of it,” said Regan reminiscently, “when you and me are on the scrap heap, Carleton.”

“I guess that’s right,” admitted the super. “Play on, Tommy.”

But it wasn’t. They only talked of Coogan’s wedding for about a year--no, they don’t talk about it now. We’ll get to that presently.

The Imperial Limited was the star run on the division--Regan gave Coogan the thirty-third degree when he gave him that--that and 505, which was the last word in machine design. And Coogan took them, took them and the schedule rights that pertained thereto, which were a clear and a clean-swept track, and day after day, up hill and down, Number One or Number Two, as the case might be, pulled into division on the dot. Coogan’s stock soared--if that were possible; but not Coogan. The youngest engineer on the road and top of them all, would have been excuse enough for him to show his oats and, within decent limits, no one would have thought the worse of him for it--Coogan never turned a hair. He was still the friend of the ‘bo and the man in trouble, still the Coogan that had been a wiper in the roundhouse; and yet, perhaps, not quite the same, for two new loves had come into his life--his love for Annie Coogan, and his love, the love of the master craftsman, for 505. In the little house at home he talked to Annie of the big mountain racer and Annie, being an engineer’s daughter as well as an engineer’s wife, listened with understanding and a smile, and in the smile was pride and love; in the cab Coogan talked of Annie, always Annie, and one day he told his fireman a secret that made big Jim Dahleen grin sheepishly and stick out a grimy paw.

Fate is a pretty grim player sometimes--and always, it seems, the cards are stacked.

The days and the weeks and the months went by, and then there came a morning when a sober-, serious-faced group of men stood gathered in the super’s office, as Number Two’s whistle, in from the Eastbound run, sounded down the gorge. They looked at Regan. Slowly, the master mechanic turned, went out of the room and down the stairs to the platform, as 505 shot round the bend and rolled into the station. For a moment Regan stood irresolute, then he started for the front-end. He went no further than the colonist coach, that was coupled behind the mail car. Here he stopped, made a step forward, changed his mind, climbed over the colonist’s platform, dropped down on the other side of the track, and began to walk toward the roundhouse--they changed engines at Big Cloud and 505, already uncoupled, was scooting up for the spur to back down for the’table.

The soles of Regan’s boots seemed like plates of lead as he went along, and he mopped his forehead nervously. There was a general air of desertion about the roundhouse. The’table was set and ready for 505, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. Regan nodded to himself in sympathetic understanding. He crossed the turntable, walked around the half circle, and entered the roundhouse through the engine doors by the far pit--the one next to that which belonged to 505. Here, just inside, he waited, as the big mogul came slowly down the track, took the’table with a slight jolt, and stopped. He saw Coogan, big, brawny, swing out of the cab like an athlete, and then he heard the engineer speak to his fireman.

“Looks like a graveyard around here, Jim. Wonder where the boys are. I won’t wait to swing the’table, they’ll be around in a minute, I guess. I want to get up to the little woman.”

“All right,” Dahleen answered. “Leave her to me, I’ll run her in. Good luck to you, Chick.”

Coogan was starting across the yards with a stride that was almost a run. Regan opened his mouth to shout--and swallowed a lump in his throat instead. Twice he made as though to follow the engineer, and twice something stronger than himself held him back; and then, as though he had been a thief, the master mechanic stole out from behind the doors, went back across the tracks, climbed the stairs to Carleton’s room with lagging steps, and entered.

The rest were still there: Carleton in his swivel chair, Harvey, the division engineer, Spence, the chief dispatcher, and Riley, the trainmaster. Regan shook his head and dropped into a seat.

“I couldn’t,” he said in a husky voice. “My God, I _couldn’t_” he repeated, and swept out his arms.

A bitter oath sprang from Carleton’s lips, lips that were not often profane, and his teeth snapped through the amber of his briar. The others just looked out of the window.

MacVicar, a spare man, took the Limited out that night, and it was three days before Coogan reported again. Maybe it was the fit of the black store-clothes and perhaps the coat didn’t hang just right, but as he entered the roundhouse he didn’t look as straight as he used to look and there was a queer inward slope to his shoulders and he walked like a man who didn’t see anything. The springy swing through the gangway was gone. He climbed to the cab as an old man climbs--painfully. The boys hung back and didn’t say anything, just swore under their breaths with full hearts as men do. There wasn’t anything _to_ say--nothing that would do any good.

Coogan took 505 and the Limited out that night, took it out the night after and the nights that followed, only he didn’t talk any more, and the slope of the shoulders got a little more pronounced, a little more noticeable, a little beyond the cut of any coat. And on the afternoons of the lay-overs at Big Cloud, Coogan walked out behind the town to where on the slope of the butte were two fresh mounds--one larger than the other. That was all.

Regan, short, paunchy, big-hearted Regan, tackled Jim Dahleen, Coogan’s fireman.

“What’s he say on the run, Jim, h’m?”

“He ain’t talkative,” Dahleen answered shortly.

“What the hell,” growled the master mechanic deep in his throat, to conceal his emotion. “‘Tain’t doing him any good going up there afternoons. God knows it’s natural enough, but ‘tain’t doing him any good, not a mite--nor them either, as far as I can see, h’m? You got to _make_ him talk, Jim. Wake him up.”

“Why don’t _you_ talk to him?” demanded the fireman.

“H’m, yes. So I will. I sure will,” Regan answered.

And he meant to, meant to, honestly. But, somehow, Coogan’s eyes and Coogan’s face said “no” to him as they did to every other man, and as the days passed, almost a month of them, Regan shook his head, perplexed and troubled, for he was fond of Coogan.

Then, one night, it happened.

Regan and Carleton were alone over their pedro at headquarters, except for Spence, the dispatcher, in the next room. It was getting close on to eleven-thirty. The Imperial Limited, West-bound, with Coogan in the cab, had pulled out on time an hour and a half before. The game was lagging, and, as usual, the conversation had got around to the engineer, introduced, as it always was, by the master mechanic.

“I sure don’t know what to do for the boy,” said he. “I’d like to do something. Talking don’t amount to anything, does it, h’m?--even if you _can_ talk. I can’t talk to him, what?”

“A man’s got to work a thing like that out for himself, Tommy,” Carleton answered, “and it takes time. That’s the only thing that will ever help him--time. I know you’re pretty fond of Coogan, even more than the rest of us and that’s saying a good deal, but you’re thinking too much about it yourself.”

Regan shook his head.

“I can’t help it, Carleton. It’s got _me_. Time, and that sort of thing, may be all right, but it ain’t very promising when a man broods the way he does. I ain’t superstitious or anything like that, but I’ve a feeling I can’t just explain that somehow something’s going to break. Kind of premonition. Ever have anything like that? It gets on your mind and you can’t shake it off. It’s on me to-night worse than it’s ever been.”

“Nonsense,” Carleton laughed. “Premonitions are out of date, because they’ve been traced back to their origin. Out here, I should say it was a case of too much of Dutchy’s lunch-counter pie. You ought to diet anyway, Tommy, you’re getting too fat. Hand over that fine-cut of yours, I------”

He stopped as a sharp cry came from the dispatcher’s room, followed by an instant’s silence, then the crash of a chair sounded as, hastily pushed back, it fell to the floor. Quick steps echoed across the room, and the next moment Spence, with a white face and holding a sheet of tissue in his hand, burst in upon them.

Carleton sprang to his feet.

“What’s the matter, Spence?” he demanded sharply.

“Number One,” the dispatcher jerked out, and extended the sheet on which he had scribbled the message as it came in off the sounder.

Carleton snatched the paper, and Regan, leaping from his chair, looked over his shoulder.

“Number One, engine 505, jumped track east of switch-back number two in Devil’s Slide. Report three known to be killed, others missing. Engineer Coogan and fireman Dahleen both hurt,” they read.

Carleton was ever the man of action, and his voice rang hard as chilled steel.

“Clear the line, Spence. Get your relief and wrecker out at once. Wire Dreamer Butte for their wrecker as well, so they can work from both ends. Now then, Tommy--my God, what’s the matter with you, are you crazy?”

Regan was leaning over the back of his chair, his face strained, his arm outstretched, finger pointing to the wall.

“I knew it,” he muttered hoarsely. “I knew it. That’s what it is.”

Carleton’s eyes traveled from the master mechanic to the wall and back again in amazed bewilderment, then he shook Regan by the shoulder.

“That’s what, what is?” he questioned brusquely. “Are you mad, man?”

“The date,” whispered Regan, still pointing to where a large single-day calendar with big figures on it hung behind the super’s desk. “It’s the twenty-eighth.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Tommy,”--Carleton’s voice was quiet, restrained.

“Mean!” Regan burst out, with a hard laugh. “I don’t mean anything, do I? ‘tain’t anything to do with it, it’s just coincidence, mabbe, and mabbe it’s not. _It’s a year ago to-night Coogan was married._”

For a moment Carleton did not speak; like Regan, he stared at the wall.

“You think that----”

“No, I don’t”--Regan caught him up roughly--“I don’t think anything at all. I only know it’s queer, ghastly queer.”

Carleton nodded his head slowly. Steps were coming up the stairs. The voice of Flannagan, the wrecking boss, reached them, other voices excited and loud joined in. He slapped the master mechanic on the back.

“I don’t wonder it caught you, Tommy,” he said. “It’s almost creepy. But there’s no time for that now. Come on.”

Regan laughed, the same hard laugh, as he followed the chief into the dispatcher’s room.

“East of number two switch-back, eh?” he swore. “If there’s any choice for hellishness anywhere on that cursed stretch of track, that’s it. My God, it’s come, and it’s come good and hard--good and hard.”

It had. It was a bad mess, a nasty mess--but, like everything else, it might have been worse. Instead of plunging to the right and dropping to the canon eighteen hundred feet below, 505 chose the inward side and rammed her nose into the gray mass of rock that made the mountain wall. The wreckers from Dreamer Butte and the wreckers from Big Cloud tell of it to this day. For twenty-four hours they worked and then they dropped--and fresh men took their places. There was no room to work--just the narrow ledge of the right of way on a circular sweep with the jutting cliff of Old Piebald Mountain sticking in between, hiding one of the gangs from the other, and around which the big wrecking cranes groped dangling arms and chains like fishers angling for a bite. It was a mauled and tangled snarl, and the worst of it went over the canon’s edge in pieces, as axes, sledges, wedges, bars and cranes ripped and tore their way to the heart of it. And as they worked, those hard-faced, grimy, sweating men of the wrecking crews, they wondered--wondered that any one had come out of it alive.

Back at headquarters in Big Cloud they wondered at it, too--and they wondered also at the cause. Every one that by any possible chance could throw any light upon it went on the carpet in the super’s office. Everybody testified--everybody except Dahleen, the fireman, and Coogan, the engineer; and they didn’t testify because they couldn’t. Coogan was in the hospital with queer, inconsequent words upon his tongue and a welt across his forehead that had laid bare the bone from eye to the hair-line of his skull; and Dahleen was there also, not so bad, just generally jellied up, but still too bad to talk. And the testimony was of little use.

The tender of switch-back number one reported that the Limited had passed him at perhaps a little greater speed than usual--which was the speed of a man’s walk, for trains crawl down the Devil’s Slide with fear and caution--but not fast enough to cause him to think anything about it.

Hardy, the conductor, testified. Hardy said it was the “air;” that the train began to slide faster and faster after the first switch-back was passed and that her speed kept on increasing up to the moment that the crash came. He figured that it couldn’t be anything else--just the “air”--it wouldn’t work and the control of the train was lost. That was all he knew.

And while Regan swore and fumed, Carleton’s face set grim and hard--and he waited for Dahleen.

It was a week before the fireman faced Carleton across the super’s desk, but when that time came Carle-ton opened on him straight from the shoulder, not even a word of sympathy, not so much as “glad to see you’re out again,” just straight to the point, hard and quick.

“Dahleen,” he snapped, “I want to know what happened in the cab that night, and I want a straight story. No other kind of talking will do you any good.”

Dahleen’s face, white with the pallor of his illness, flushed suddenly red.

“You’re jumping a man pretty hard, aren’t you, Mr. Carleton?” he said resentfully.

“Maybe I’ve reason to,” replied Carleton. “Well, I’m waiting for that story.”

“There is no story that I know of,” said Dahleen evenly. “After we passed switch-back number one we lost control of the train--the ‘air’ wouldn’t work.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“You don’t seem to,” retorted Dahleen, with a set jaw.

“What did you do to stop her?”

“What I could,” said Dahleen, with terse finality.

Carleton sprang to his feet, and his fist crashed down upon the desk.

“You are lying!” he thundered. “That wreck and the lives that are lost are at your door, and if I could prove it!”--he shook his fist at the fireman. “As it is I can only fire you for violation of the rules. I thought at first it was Coogan and that he’d gone off his head a bit, and you are cur enough to let the blame go there if you could, to let me and every other man think so!”

Dahleen’s fists clenched, and he took a step forward.

“That’s enough!” he cried hoarsely. “Enough from you or any other man!”

Carleton rounded on him more furiously than before.

“I’ve given you a chance to tell a straight story and you wouldn’t. God knows what you did that night. I believe you were fighting drunk. I believe that gash in Coogan’s head wasn’t from the wreck. If I knew I’d fix you.” He wrenched open a drawer of his desk, whipped out a metal whisky flask, and shook it before Dahleen’s eyes. “_When you were picked up this was in the pocket of your jumper!_”

The color fled from Dahleen’s face leaving it whiter than when he had entered the room. He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. All the bluster, all the fight was gone. He stared mutely, a startled, frightened look in his eyes, at the damning evidence in the super’s hand.

“Forgotten about it, had you?” Carleton flung out grimly. “Well, have you anything to say?”

Dahleen shook his head.

“Ain’t anything to say, is there?”--his voice was low with just a hint of the former defiance. “It’s mine, but you can’t _prove_ anything. You can’t prove I drank it. D’ye think I’d be fool enough to do anything but keep my mouth shut?”

“No; I can’t _prove_ it”--Carleton’s voice was deadly cold. “You’re out! I’ll give you twelve hours to get out of the mountains. The boys, for Coogan’s sake alone if for no other, would tear you to pieces if they knew the story. No one knows it yet but the man who found this in your pocket and myself. I’m not going to tell you again what I think of you--_get out!_”

Dahleen, without a word, swung slowly on his heel and started for the door.

“Wait!” said Carleton suddenly. “Here’s a pass East for you. I don’t want your blood on my hands, as I would have if Coogan’s friends, and that’s every last soul out here, got hold of you. You’ve got twelve hours--after that they’ll know--to set Coogan straight.”

Dahleen hesitated, came back, took the slip of paper with a mirthless, half-choked laugh, turned again, and the door closed behind him.

Dahleen was out.

Carleton kept his word--twelve hours--and then from the division rose a cry like the cry of savage beasts; but Regan was like a madman.

“Curse him!” he swore bitterly, breaking into a seething torrent of oaths. “What did you let him go for, Carleton? You’d no business to. You should have held him until Coogan could talk, and then we’d have had him.”

“Tommy”--Carleton laid his hand quietly on the master mechanic’s shoulder--“we’re too young out in this country for much law. I don’t think Coogan knows or ever will know again what happened in the cab that night. The doctors don’t seem quite able to call the turn on him themselves, so they’ve said to you and said to me. But whether he does or not, it doesn’t make any difference as far as Dahleen goes. It would have been murder to keep him here. And if Coogan ever can talk he’ll never put a mate in bad no matter what the consequences to himself. There’s nothing against Dahleen except that he had liquor in his possession while on duty. That’s what I fired him for--that’s the only story that’s gone out of this office. You and I and the rest are free to put the construction on it that suits us best, and there it ends. If I was wrong to let him go, I was wrong. I did what I thought was right--that’s all I can ever do.”

“Mabbe,” growled Regan, “mabbe; but, damn him, he _ought_ to be murdered. I’d like to have had ‘em done it! It’s that smash on the head put Coogan to the bad. You’re right about one thing, I guess, he’ll never be the same Coogan again.”

And in a way this was so; in another it wasn’t. It was not the wound that was to blame, the doctors were positive about that; but Coogan, it was pitifully evident, was not the same. Physically, at the end of a month, he left the hospital apparently as well as he had ever been in his life; but mentally, somewhere, a cog had slipped. His brain seemed warped and weakened, simple as a child’s in its workings; his memory fogged and dazed, full of indefinite, intangible snatches, vague, indeterminate glimpses of his life before. One thing seemed to cling to him, to predominate, to sway him--the Devil’s Slide.

Regan and Carleton talked to him, trying to guide his thoughts and stimulate his memory.

“You remember you used to drive an engine, don’t you, Chick?” asked Carleton.

“Engine?” Coogan nodded. “Yes; in the Devil’s Slide.”

“505,” said Regan quickly. “You know old 505.”

Coogan shook his head.

Carleton tried another tack.

“You were in a bad accident, Coogan, one night. You were in the cab of the engine when she went to smash. Do you remember that?”

“The smash was on the Devil’s Slide,” said Coogan.

“That’s it,” cried Carleton. “I knew you’d remember.”

“They’re always there,” said Coogan simply, “always there. It is a bad track. I’m a railroad man and I know. It’s not properly guarded. I’m going to work there and take care of it.”

“Work there?” said Regan, the tears almost in his eyes. “What kind of work? What do you want to do, Chick?”

“Just work there,” said Coogan. “Take care of the Devil’s Slide.”

The super and the master mechanic looked at each other--and averted their eyes. Then they took Coogan up to his boarding-house, where he had moved after Annie and the little one died.

“He’ll never put his finger on a throttle again,” said Regan with a choke in his voice, as they came out. “The best man that ever pulled a latch, the best man that ever drew a pay-check on the Hill Division. It’s hell, Carleton, that’s what it is. I don’t think he really knew you or me. He don’t seem to remember much of anything, though he’s natural enough and able enough to take care of himself in all other ways. Just kind of simple-like. It’s queer the way that Devil’s Slide has got him, what? We can’t let him go out there.”

“I wonder if he remembers Annie,” said Carleton. “I was afraid to ask him. I didn’t know what effect it might have. No; we can’t let him go out on the Devil’s Slide.”

But the doctors said yes. They went further and said it was about the only chance he had. The thing was on his mind. It was better to humor him, and that, with the outdoor mountain life, in time might bring him around again.

And so, while Regan growled and swore, and Carleton knitted his brows in perplexed protest, the doctors had their way--and Coogan, Chick Coogan, went to the Devil’s Slide. Officially, he was on the pay-roll as a section hand; but Millrae, the section boss, had his own orders.

“Let Coogan alone. Let him do what he likes, only see that he doesn’t come to any harm,” wired the super.

And Coogan, when Millrae asked him what he wanted to do, answered simply: “I’m going to take care of the Devil’s Slide.”

“All right, Chick,” the section boss agreed cheerily. “It’s up to you. Fire ahead.”