Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life

"Or will it get us altogether?" asked Hailey.

"Either way," said Callahan, "it will be mostly at once."

May opened bleaker than April; even the trackmen walked with set faces; the dirtiest half-breed on the line knew now what the mountains held. At last, while we looked and wondered, came a very late Chinook; July in May; then the water.

II

Section gangs were doubled and track-walkers put on. By-passes were opened, bridge crews strengthened, everything buckled for grief. Gullies began to race, culverts to choke, creeks to tumble, rivers to madden. From the Muddy to the Summit the water courses swelled and boiled – all but the Spider; the big river slept. Through May and into June the Spider slept; but Hailey was there at the Wickiup, always, and with one eye running over all the line, one eye turned always to the Spider where two men and two, night and day, watched the lazy surface water trickle over and through the vagabond bed between Hailey's monumental piers. Never an hour did the operating department lose to the track. East and west of us railroads everywhere clamored in despair. The flood reached from the Rockies to the Alleghenies. Our trains never missed a trip; our schedules were unbroken; our people laughed; we got the business, dead loads of it; our treasury flowed over; and Hailey watched; and the Spider slept.

Big Ed Peeto, still foreman of the bridges, hung on Hailey's steps and tried with his staring, swearing eye to make it all out; to guess what Hailey expected to happen, for it was plain he was thinking. Whether smoking or speaking, whether waking or sleeping, he was thinking. And as May turned soft and hot into June with every ditch bellying and the mountains still buried, it put us all thinking.

On the 30th there was trouble beyond Wild Hat and all our extra men, put out there under Hailey, were fighting to hold the Rat valley levels where they hug the river on the west slope. It wasn't really Hailey's track. Bucks sent him over there because he sent Hailey wherever the Emperor sent Ney. Sunday while Hailey was at Wild Hat it began raining. Sunday it rained. Monday it rained all through the mountains; Tuesday it was raining from Omaha to Eagle pass, with the thermometer climbing for breath and the barometer flat as an adder – and the Spider woke.

Woke with the April water and the June water and the rain water all at once. Trackmen at the bridge Tuesday night flagged Number One and reported the river wild, and sheet ice running. A wire from Bucks brought Hailey out of the west and into the east; and brought him to reckon for the last time with his ancient enemy.

He was against it Wednesday morning with dynamite. All the day, the night and the next day the sullen roar of the giant powder shook the ice-jams. Two days more he spent there watching, with only an occasional thunderbolt to heave and scatter the Spider water into sudden, shivery columns of spray; then he wired, "ice out," and set back dragged and silent for home and for sleep – ten hours out of two hundred, maybe, was all he reckoned to the good when he struck a pillow again. Saturday night he slept and Sunday all day and Sunday night. Monday about noon Bucks sent up to ask, but Hailey was asleep; they asked back by the lad whether they should wake him; Bucks sent word, "No."

Tuesday morning the tall roadmaster came down fresh as sunshine and all day he worked with Bucks and the despatchers watching the line. The Spider raced like the Missouri, and the men at the bridge sent in panic messages every night and morning, but Hailey lit his pipe with their alarms. "That bridge will go when the mountains go," was all he said.

Tuesday was his wedding date, old Denis told Peeto; it was Hailey's wooden wedding, and when he found everybody knew they were going to have a little spread over at the cottage, Hailey invited the boys up for the evening. Just a little celebration, Hailey said, and everybody he spoke wrung his hand and slapped his iron shoulders till Hailey echoed good cheer through and through. Callahan was going over; Bucks had promised to look in, and Ed Peeto and the boys had a little surprise for Hailey, had it in the dark of the baggage-room in the Wickiup, a big Morris chair. No one would ever guess how it landed at Medicine Bend, but it was easy. Ed Peeto had pulled it badly demoralized out of a freight wreck at the Sugar Buttes and done it over in company screws and varnish to surprise Hailey. The anniversary made it just right, very hot stuff, Ed Peeto said, and the company had undoubtedly paid a claim voucher, for it – or would.

It was nine o'clock, night, and every star blinking when Hailey looked in again at the office for the track-walkers' reports and the Railway weather bulletins. Bucks, Callahan, and Peeto sat about Duffy, who in his shirt-sleeves threw the stuff out off the sounder as it trickled in dot and dash, dot and dash over the wires. The west wire was good but east everything below Peace River was down. We had to get the eastern reports around by Omaha and the south – a good thousand miles of a loop – but bad news travels even round a Robin Hood loop.

And Wild Hat came first from the west with a stationary river and the Loup creek falling – clear – good night. And Ed Peeto struck the table heavily and swore it was well in the west. Then from the east came Prairie Portage, all the way round, with a northwest rain, a rising river, and anchor ice pounding the piers badly, track in fair shape and – and —

The wire went wrong. As Duffy knit his eyes and tugged and cussed a little the wind outside took up the message and whirled a bucket of rain against the windows. But the wires wouldn't right and stuff that no man could get tumbled in like a dictionary upside down. And Bucks and Callahan and Hailey and Peeto smoked, silent, and listened to the deepening drum of the rain on the roof.

Then Duffy wrestled mightily yet once more, and the long way came word of trouble in the Omaha yards with the river at twenty-two feet and cutting; rising at Bismarck one foot an hour.

"Hell to pay on the Missouri, of course," growled the foreman, staring single-eyed at the inoffensive bulletin. "Well, she don't run our way; let her boil, damn her."

"Keep still," exclaimed Duffy, leaning heavily on the key. "Here's something – from – the Spider."

Only the hum of the rain and the nervous break of the sounder cut the smoke that curled from the pipes. Duffy snatched a pen and ran it across a clip, and Bucks leaning over read aloud from his shoulder:

"Omaha.

"J.F.Bucks. – Trainmen from Number Seventy-Five stalled west of Rapid City – track afloat in Simpson's cut – report Spider bridge out send – "

And the current broke.

Callahan's hand closed rigidly over his pipe; Peeto sat speechless; Bucks read again at the broken message, but Hailey sprang like a man wounded and snatched the clip from his superintendent's hand.

He stared at the running words till they burnt his eyes and then, with an oath, frightful as the thunder that broke down the mountains, he dashed the clip to the floor. His eyes snapped greenish with fury and he cursed Omaha, cursed its messages and everything that came out of it. Slow at first, but bitter, then fast and faster until all the sting that poisoned his heart in his unjust discharge poured from his lips. It flooded the room like a spilling stream and no man put a word against it for they knew he stood a wronged man. Out it came – all the rage – all the heart-burning – all the bitterness – and he dropped, bent, into a chair and covered his face with his hands: only the sounder clicking iron jargon and the thunder shaking the Wickiup like a reed filled the ears about him. They watched him slowly knot his fingers and loosen them, and saw his face rise dry and hard and old out of his hands.

"Get up an engine!"

"Not – you're not going down there to-night?" stammered Bucks.

"Yes. Now. Right off. Peeto! Get out your crew!"

The foreman jumped for the door; Bucks hesitated barely an instant, then turning where he sat cut a telephone plug into the roundhouse; Callahan saw him act and leaning forward spoke low to Duffy. The despatcher snatching the train sheet began instantly clearing track for a bridge special.

In twenty minutes twenty men were running twenty ways through the storm and a live engine boomed under the Wickiup windows.

"Phil, I want you to be careful!" It was Bucks standing by the roadmaster's side at the window as they looked out into the storm. "It's a bad night." Hailey made no answer. "A wicked night," muttered Bucks as the lightning shot the yards in a blaze and a crash rolled down the gorge. But wicked as it was he could not bring himself to countermand; something forbade it. Evans the conductor of the special ran in.

"Here's your orders!" exclaimed Duffy. Evans pulling down his storm cap nodded as he took the tissue. Hailey buttoned his leather jacket and turned to Bucks.

"Good-by."

"Mind your track," said Bucks, warningly to Evans as he took Hailey's hand. "What's your permit?"

"Forty miles an hour."

"Don't stretch it. Good-bye, Phil," he added, speaking to Hailey. "I'll see you in the morning."

"In the morning," repeated Hailey. "Good-by. Nothing more in, Duffy?"

"Nothing more."

"Come on!" With the words he pushed the conductor through the door and was gone. The switch engine puffed up with the caboose. Ahead of it Ed Peeto had coupled in the pile driver. At the last minute Callahan asked to go, and as the bridge gang tumbled into the caboose, the assistant superintendent, Ed Peeto, and Hailey climbed into the engine. Denis Mullenix sat on the right and with William Durden, fireman, they pulled out, five in the cab, for the Spider Water.

From Medicine Bend to the Spider Water is a ninety mile run; down the gorge, through the foothills and into the Painted Desert that fills the jaw of the spur we intersect again west of Peace River. From the Peace to the Spider the crow flies twenty miles, but we take thirty for it; there is hardly a tangent between. Their orders set a speed limit, but from the beginning they crowded it. Hailey, moody at first, began joking and laughing the minute they got away. He sat behind Denis Mullenix on the right and poked at his ribs and taunted him with his heavy heels. After a bit he got down and threw coal for Durden, mile after mile, and crowded the boiler till the safety screamed. When Durden took the shovel Hailey put his hand on the shoulder of Callahan, who was trying to hang to big Ed Peeto on the fireman's seat.

"Callahan," he yelled in his ear, "a man's better off – " And Callahan, though he couldn't, in the pound and the roar, catch the words, nodded and laughed because Hailey fiercely laughed. Then going around to the right the roadmaster covered Denis Mullenix's fingers on the throttle latch and the air with his big hands and good-naturedly coaxed them loose, pushed the engineer back and got the whip and the reins into his own keeping. It was what he wanted, for he smiled as he drew out the bar a notch and settled himself for the run across the flat country. They were leaving the foothills, and when the lightning opened the night they could see behind through the blasting rain the great hulking pile driver nod and reel out into the Painted Desert like a drunken man; for Hailey's schedule was the wind and his limit the wide throttle.

The storm shook them with freshening fury and drove the flanges into the south rail with a grinding shriek, as they sped from the shelter of the hills. The rain fell in a sheet, and the right of way ran a river. The wind, whipping the water off the ballast, dashed it like hail against the cab glass; the segment of desert caught in the yellow of the headlight rippled and danced and swam in the storm water, and Hailey pulled again at the straining throttle and latched it wider. Callahan hung with a hand to a brace and a hand to Peeto, and every little while looked back at the caboose dancing a horn-pipe over the joints; Mullenix, working the injector, stared astonished at Hailey; but Durden grimly sprinkled new blood into the white furnace and eyed his stack.

Notch after notch Hailey drew, heedless of lurch and jump; heedless of bed or curve; heedless of track or storm; and with every spur at her cylinders the engine shook like a frantic horse. Men and monster alike lost thought of care and drunk a frenzy in the deafening whirl that Hailey opened across the swimming plain.

The Peace River hills loomed into the headlight like moving pictures; before they could think it, the desert was behind. Callahan, white-faced, climbed down, and passed from hand to hand by Durden and Mullenix got his hands on Hailey's shoulders and his lips to his ear.

"For God's sake, Phil, let up!"

Hailey nodded and choked the steam a little. Threw a hatful of air on the shoes, but more as a test than a check: the fire was in his blood and he slewed into the hills with a speed unslackened. From the rocks it is a down grade all the way to the cañon, and the wind blew them and the track pulled them and a frenzied man sat at the throttle. Just where the line crosses Peace River the track bends sharply in through the Needles to take the bridge.

The curve is a ten degree. As they struck it, the headlight shot far out upon the river – and they in the cab knew they were dead men. Instead of lighting the box of the truss the lamp lit a black and snaky flood sweeping over the abutment with yellow foam. The Peace had licked up Agnew's thirty-foot piles and his bridge was not.

Whatever could be done – and Hailey knew all – meant death to the cab. Denis Mullenix never moved; no man that knew Hailey would think of trying to supplant him even with death under the ponies. He did what a man could do. There was no chance anyway for the cab: but the caboose held twenty of his faithful men.

He checked – and with a scream from the flanges the special, shaking in the clutches of the air-brake, swung the curve.

Again, the roadmaster checked heavily. The leads of the pile driver swaying high above gravity center careened for an instant wildly to the tangent, then the monster machine, parting from the tender, took the elevation like a hurdle and shot into the trees, dragging the caboose after it. But engine and tender and five in the cab plunged head on into the Peace.

Not a man in the caboose was killed; it was as if Hailey had tempered the blow to its crew. They scrambled out of the splinters and on their feet, men and ready to do. One voice from below came to them through the storm, and they answered its calling. It was Callahan; but Durden, Mullenix, Peeto, Hailey, never called again.

At daybreak wreckers of the West End, swarming from mountain and plain, were heading for the Peace, and the McCloud gang – up – crossed the Spider on Hailey's bridge – on the bridge the coward trainmen had reported out, quaking as they did in the storm at the Spider foaming over its approaches. But Hailey's bridge stood – stands to-day.