Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life

But our men had the job to do with one half the money they needed. The lines to run, the grades to figure, the culverts to put in, the fills to make, the blasting to do, the tunnel to bore, the bridge to build – in a limit; that was the curse of it – the limit. And they did the best they could. But I will be candid: if a section and elevation of Rosamond's bower and a section and elevation of our Peace River work were put up to stand for a prize at a civil engineers' cake-walk the decision would go, and quick, to the Peace River track. There are only eight miles of it; but our men would back it against any eighty on earth for whipping curves, tough grades, villainous approaches, and railroad tangle generally.

The directors always have promised to improve it; and they are promising yet. Thanks to what Hailey taught them, there's a good bridge there now – pneumatic caissons sunk to the bed. It's the more pity they haven't eliminated the dread main line curves that approach it, through a valley which I brief as a cañon and the Mauvaises Terres rolled into one single proposition.

Yet, we do lots of business along that stretch. Our engineers thread the cuts and are glad to get safely through them. Our roadmasters keep up the elevations, hoping some night the blooming right of way will tumble into perdition. Our despatchers, studying under shaded lamps, think of it with their teeth clinched and hope there never will be any trouble on that stretch. Trouble is our portion and trouble we must get; but not there. Let it come; but let it come anywhere except on the Peace.

It was in the golden days of the battered old Wickiup that the story opens; when Blackburn sat in the night chair. The days when the Old Guard were still there; before Death and Fame and Circumstance had stolen our first commanders and left only us little fellows, forgotten by every better fate, to tell their greater stories.

Hailey had the bridges then, and Wetmore the locating, and Neighbor the roundhouses, and Bucks the superintendency, and Callahan, so he claimed, the work, and Blackburn had the night trick.

I

When Blackburn came from the plains he brought a record clean as the book of life. Four years on a station key; then eight years at Omaha despatching, with never a blunder or a break to the eight years. But it was at Omaha that Blackburn lost the wife whose face he carried in his watch. I never heard the story, only some rumor of how young she was and how pretty, and how he buried her and the wee baby together. It was all Blackburn brought to the West End mountains, his record and the little face in the watch. They said he had no kith or kin on earth, besides the wife and the baby back on the bluffs of the Missouri; and so he came on the night trick to us.

I was just a boy around the Wickiup then, but I remember the crowd; who could forget them? They were jolly good fellows; sometimes there were very high jinks. I don't mean anybody drunk or that sort; but good tobacco to smoke and good songs to sing and good stories to tell – and Lord! how they could tell them. And when the pins slipped, as they would, and things went wrong, as they will, there were clear heads and pretty wits and stout hearts to put things right.

Blackburn, as much as I can remember, always enjoyed it; but in a different way. He had such times a manner like nobody else's – a silent, beaming manner. When Bucks would roll a great white Pan-Handle yarn over his fresh linen shirt-front and down his cool clean white arms, one of them always bared to the elbow – sanding his points with the ash of a San Francisco cigar – and Neighbor would begin to heave from the middle up like a hippopotamus, and Callahan would laugh his whiskers full of dew, and Hailey would yell with delight, and the slaves in the next room would double up on the dead at the story, Blackburn would sit with his laugh all in a smile, but never a noise or a word. He enjoyed it all; not a doubt of that; only it was all tempered, I reckon, by something that had gone before. At least, that's the way it now strikes me, and I watched those big fellows pretty close – the fellows who were to turn, while I was growing up among them, into managers and presidents and magnates; and some of them from every day catch-as-catch-can men with the common alkali flecking their boots into dead men for whom marble never rose white enough or high enough.

Blackburn was four years at the Wickiup on the night trick; it wouldn't have seemed natural to see him there in daylight. It needed the yellow gloom of the old kerosene lamp in the room; the specked, knotted, warped, smoky pine ceiling losing itself in black and cobwebbed corners; the smoldering murk of the soft-coal fire brooding in the shabby old salamander, and, outside in the darkness, the wind screwing down the gorge and rattling the shrunken casements, to raise Blackburn in the despatcher's chair. Blackburn and the lamp and the stove and the ceiling and the gloom – in a word, Blackburn and the night trick – they went together.

Before the Short line was opened the Number One and Number Five trains caught practically all the coast passenger business. They were immensely heavy trains; month after month we sent out two and three sections of them each way, and they always ran into our division on the night trick. Blackburn handled all that main line business with a mileage of eight hundred and five, besides the mountain branches, say four hundred more; and the passenger connections came off them, mostly at night, for One and Five.

Now, three men wrestle with Blackburn's mileage; but that was before they found out that despatchers, although something tougher than steel, do wear out. Moreover, we were then a good way from civilization and extra men. If a despatcher took sick there was no handy way of filling in; it was just double up and do the best you could.

One lad in the office those days everybody loved: Fred Norman. He was off the Burlington. A kid of a fellow who looked more like a choir boy than a train despatcher. But he was all lightning – a laughing, restless, artless boy, open as a book and quick as a current. There was a better reason still, though, why they loved Fred: the boy had consumption; that's why he was out in the mountains, and his mother in Detroit used to write Bucks asking about him, and she used to send us all things in Fred's box. His flesh was as white and as pink as mountain snow, and he had brown eyes; he was a good boy, and I called him handsome. I reckon they all did. Fred brought out a tennis set with him, the first we ever saw in Medicine Bend, and before he had been playing an hour he had Neighbor, big as a grizzly, and Callahan, with a pipe in one hand and a tennis guide in the other, chasing all over the yard after balls; and Hailey trying to figure forty love, while Fred taught Bucks the Lawford drive. I don't say what he was to me; only that he taught me all I ever knew or ever will know about handling trains; and, though I was carrying messages then, and he was signing orders, we were really like kids together.

Fred for a long time had the early trick. He came on at four in the morning and caught most of the through freights that got away from the River behind the passenger trains. There was no use trying to move them in the night trick. Between the stock trains eastbound and the both-way passenger trains, if a westbound freight got caught in the mountains at night the engine might as well be standing in the house saving fuel – there wasn't time to get from one siding to another. So Fred Norman took the freights as they came and he handled them like a ringmaster. When Fred's whip cracked, by Joe! a train had to dance right along, grade or no grade. Fred gave them the rights and they had the rest to do – or business to do with the superintendent or with Doubleday, Neighbor's assistant in the motive power.

There was only one tendency in Fred Norman's despatching that anybody could criticise: he never seemed, after handling trains on the plains, to appreciate what our mountain grades really meant, and when they pushed him he sent his trains out pretty close together. It never bothered him to handle a heavy traffic; he would get the business through the mountains just as fast as they could put it at the Division; but occasionally there were some hair-curling experiences among the freights on Norman's trick trying to keep off each other's coat-tails. One night in July there was a great press moving eight or nine trains of Montana grassers over the main line on some kind of a time contract – we were giving stockmen the earth then. Everybody was prodding the Mountain Division, and part of the stuff came in late on Blackburn and part of it early on Fred, who was almost coughing his head off about that time, getting up at 3.30 every morning. Fred at four o'clock took the steers and sent them train after train through the Rat River country like bullets out of a Maxim gun. It was hot work, and before he had sat in an hour there was a stumble. The engineer of a big ten-wheeler pulling twenty-five cars of steers had been pushing hard and, at the entrance of the cañon, set his air so quick he sprung one of the driver shoes and the main rod hit it. The great steel bar doubled up like a man with a cramp. It was showing daylight; they made stop, and, quick as men could do it, flagged both ways. But the last section was crowding into the cañon right behind; they were too close together, that was all there was to it. The hind section split into the standing train like a butcher knife into a sandwich. It made a mean wreck – and, worse, it made a lot of hard feeling at the Wickiup.

When the investigation came it was pretty near up to Fred Norman right from the start, and he knew it. But Blackburn, who shielded him when he could, just as all the despatchers did, because he was a boy – and a sick one among men – tried to take part of the blame himself. He could afford it, Blackburn; his shoulders were broad and he hadn't so much as a fly-speck on his book. Bucks looked pretty grave when the evidence was all in, and around the second floor they guessed that meant something for Norman. Fred himself couldn't sleep over it, and to complicate things the engineer of the stalled train, who hated Doubleday, hinted quietly that the trouble came in the first place from Doubleday's new-fangled idea of putting the driver shoes behind instead of in front of the wheels. Then the fat was in the fire. Fred got hold of it, and, boy-like – sore over his own share in the trouble and exasperated by something Doubleday was reported to have said about him over at the house – lighted into Doubleday about the engine failure.

Doubleday was right in his device, as time has proved; but it was unheard of then and moreover, the assistant master mechanic sensitive to criticism at any time, was a fearful man to run against. Sunday morning he and Norman met in the trainmaster's office. They went at each other like sparks, and when Doubleday, who had a hard mouth, began cursing Fred, the poor little despatcher, rankling with the trouble, anyway half sick, went all to pieces and flew at the big fellow like a sparrowhawk. He threw a wicked left into the master mechanic before Doubleday could lift a guard. But Walter Doubleday, angry as he was, couldn't strike Fred. He caught up both the boy's hands and pushed him, struggling madly, back against the wall to slap his face, when a froth of blood stained Fred's lips and he fell fainting; just at that minute Blackburn stepped into the room.

It wasn't the kind of a time – they weren't the kind of men – to ask or volunteer explanations. Blackburn was on Doubleday in a wink, and before Walter could right himself the night despatcher had thrown him headlong across the room. As the operators rushed in, Blackburn and the tall master mechanic sprang at each other in a silent fury. No man dare say where it might have ended had not Fred Norman staggered between them with his hands up – but the blood was gushing from his mouth.

It was pretty serious business. They caught him as he fell, and the boy lay on Blackburn's arm limp as a dead wire: nobody thought after they saw that hemorrhage that he would ever live to have another. I was scared sick, and I never saw a man so cut up as Doubleday. Blackburn was cool in a second, for he saw quicker than others and he knew there was danger of the little despatcher's dying right there in his tracks. Blackburn stood over him, as much at home facing death as he was in a fight or in a despatcher's chair. He appeared to know just how to handle the boy to check the gush, and to know just where the salt was and how to feed it, and he had Doubleday telephoning for Dr. Carhart and me running to a saloon after chopped ice in a jiffy. When anybody was knocked out, Blackburn was as regular a nurse as ever you saw; even switchmen, when they got pinched, kind of looked to Blackburn.

That day the minute he got Fred into Carhart's hands there was Fred's trick to take care of, and nobody, of course, but Blackburn to do it. He sat in and picked up the threads and held them till noon; then Maxwell relieved him. Doubleday was waiting outside when Blackburn left the chair. I saw him put out his hand to the night despatcher. They spoke a minute, and went out and up Third Street toward Fred Norman's room. It was a gloomy day around the depot. Everybody was talking about the trouble, and the way it had begun and the way it had ended. They talked in undertones, little groups in corners and in rooms with the doors shut. There wasn't much of that in our day there, and it was depressing. I went home early to bed, for I was on nights. But the wind sung so, even in the afternoon, that I couldn't quiet down to sleep.

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C. and E. No. One, Ames.

No. One, Eng. 871, will hold at O'Fallon'sfor Special 202.

C. and E. Special 202, Rosebud.

Special 202, Eng. 636, will run to Salt Rocks regardless of No. One.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You need not come down."

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

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

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