CHAPTER XV
He found Baxter needing a man in the office, and Bucks was asked to substitute until Collins, the despatcher who was ill, could take his trick again. This brought Bucks where he was glad to be, directly under Stanley’s eye, but it brought also new responsibilities, and opened his mind to the difficulties of operating a new and already over-taxed line in the far West, where reliable men and available equipment were constantly at a premium.
The problem of getting and keeping good men was the hardest that confronted the operating department, and the demoralization of the railroad men from the life in Medicine Bend grew steadily worse as the new town attracted additional parasites. When Bucks, after his return, took his first walk after supper up Front Street, he was not surprised at this. Medicine Bend was more than ten times as noisy, and if it were possible to add any vice to its viciousness this, too, it would seem, had been done.
As was his custom, he walked to the extreme end of Front Street and turning started back for the station, when he encountered Baxter, the chief despatcher. Baxter saw Bucks first and spoke.
“I thought you were taking your sleep at this time,” returned Bucks, greeting him.
“So I should be,” he replied, “but we are in trouble. Dan Baggs is to take out the passenger train to-night, and no one can find him. He is somewhere up here in one of these dives and has forgotten all about his engine. It is enough to set a man crazy to have to run trains with such cattle. Bucks, suppose you take one side of the street while I take the other, and help me hunt him up.”
“What shall we do?”
“Look in every door all the way down-street till we find him. If we don’t get the fellow on his engine, there will be no train out till midnight. Say nothing to anybody and answer no questions; just find him.”
Baxter started down the right-hand side of the long street and Bucks took the left-hand side. It was queer business for Bucks, and the sights that met him at every turn were enough to startle one stouter than he. He controlled his disgust and ignored the questions sometimes hurled at him by drunken men and women, intent only on getting his eye on the irresponsible Baggs.
Half-way down toward the square he reached a dance hall. The doors were spread wide open and from within came a din of bad music, singing, and noise of every kind.
Bucks entered the place with some trepidation. In the rear of the large room was a raised platform extending the entire width of it. At one end of the platform stood a piano which a man pounded incessantly and fiercely. Other performers were singing and dancing to entertain a motley and disorderly audience seated in a still more disorderly array before them.
At the right of the room a long bar stretched from the street back as far as the stage, and standing in front of this, boisterous groups of men were smoking and drinking, or wrangling in tipsy fashion. The opposite side of the big room was given over to gambling devices of every sort, and this space was filled with men sitting about small tables and others sitting and standing along one side of long tables, at each of which one man was dealing cards, singly, out of a metal case held in his hand. Other men clustered about revolving wheels where, oblivious of everything going on around them, they watched with feverish anxiety a ball thrown periodically into the disc by the man operating the wheel.
Bucks walked slowly down the room the full length of the bar, scanning each group of men as he passed. He crossed the room behind the chairs where the audience of the singers and dancers sat. He noticed, when he reached this, the difference in the faces he was scrutinizing. At the gambling tables the men saw and heard nothing of what went on about them. He walked patiently on his quest from group to group, unobserved by those about him, but without catching a sight of the elusive engineman. As he reached the end of the gambling-room, he hesitated for a moment and had finished his quest when, drawn by curiosity, he stopped for an instant to watch the scene about the roulette wheels.
Almost instantly he heard a sharp voice behind him. “What are you doing here?”
Bucks, surprised, turned to find himself confronted by the black-bearded passenger conductor, David Hawk. Baxter’s admonition to say nothing of what he was doing confused Bucks for an instant, and he stammered some evasive answer.
Hawk, blunt and stern in word and manner, followed the evasion up sharply: “Don’t you know this is no place for you?” and before Bucks could answer, Hawk had fixed him with his piercing eyes.
“You want to hang around a gambling-table, do you? You want to watch how it is done and try it yourself sometime? You want to see how much smarter you can play the game than these sheep-heads you are watching?
“Don’t talk to me,” he exclaimed sternly as Bucks tried to explain. “I’ve seen boys in these places before. I know where they end. If I ever catch you in a gambling-den again I’ll throw you neck and heels into the river.”
The words fell upon Bucks like a cloud-burst. Before he could return a word or catch his breath Hawk strode away.
As Bucks stood collecting his wits, Baggs, the man for whom he was looking, passed directly before his eyes. Bucks sprang forward, caught Baggs by the arm, and led him toward the door, as he gave him Baxter’s message. Baggs, listening somewhat sheepishly, made no objection to going down to take his train and walked through the front door with Bucks out into the street.
As they did this, a red-faced man who was standing on the doorstep seized Bucks’s sleeve and attempted to jerk him across the sidewalk. Bucks shook himself free and turned on his assailant. He needed no introduction to the hard cheeks, one of which was split by a deep scar. It was Perry, Rebstock’s crony, whom Stanley had driven out of Sellersville on the Spider Water.
“What are you doing around here interfering with my business?” he demanded of Bucks harshly. “I’ve watched you spying around. The next time I catch you trying to pull a customer out of my place, I’ll knock your head off.”
Bucks eyed the bully with gathering wrath. He was already upset mentally, and taken so suddenly and unawares lost his temper and his caution. “If you do, it will be the last head you knock off in Medicine Bend,” he retorted. “When I find trainmen in your joint that are needed on their runs, I’ll pull them out every time. The safest thing you can do is to keep quiet. If the railroad men ever get started after you, you red-faced bully, they’ll run you and your whole tribe into the river again.”
It was a foolish defiance and might have cost him his life, though Bucks knew he was well within the truth in what he said. Among the railroad men the feeling against the gamblers was constantly growing in bitterness. Perry instantly attempted to draw a revolver, when a man who had been watching the scene unobserved stepped close enough between him and Bucks to catch Perry’s eye. It was Dave Hawk again. What he had just heard had explained things to him and he stood now grimly laughing at the enraged gambler.
“Good for the boy,” he exclaimed. “Want to get strung up, do you, Perry? Fire that gun just once and the vigilantes will have a rope around your neck in five minutes.”
Perry, though furious, realized the truth of what Hawk said. He poured a torrent of abuse upon Bucks, but made no further effort to use his gun. The dreaded word “vigilantes” had struck terror to the heart of a man who had once been in their hands and escaped only by an accident.
“You know what he said is so, don’t you?” laughed Hawk savagely. “What? You don’t?” he demanded, as Perry tried to face him down. “You’ll be lucky, when that time comes, if you don’t get your heels tangled up with a telegraph pole before you reach the river,” concluded Hawk tauntingly.
“Let him keep away from me if he doesn’t want trouble,” snarled the discomfited gambler, eying Bucks threateningly. But he was plainly out-faced, and retreated, grumbling, toward the dance-hall steps.
Dan Baggs, at the first sign of hostilities, had fled. Bucks, afraid of losing him, now followed, leaving Hawk still abusing the gambler, but when he overtook the engineman he found he was going, as he had promised, straight to the roundhouse.
It was almost time for the night trick. Bucks hastened upstairs to the despatchers’ office and reported to Baxter, who had returned ahead of him and was elated at Bucks’s success. Before the young substitute took up his train-sheet, he told the chief despatcher of how strangely the conductor, Dave Hawk, had talked to him.
“He has a reason for it,” responded Baxter briefly.
“What reason?”
“There is as good a railroad man as ever lived,” said Baxter, referring to the black-bearded conductor. “He is the master of us all in the handling of trains. He could be anything anybody is on this line to-day that he might want to be but for one thing. If he hadn’t ruined his own life, Dave Hawk could be superintendent here. He knows whereof he speaks, Bucks.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he is a gambler. Did you hear the shooting after I left you?”
“No, what was it?”
“It must have been while you were in Perry’s. Not five minutes after we parted, a saloon-keeper shot a woman down right in front of me; I was standing less than ten feet from her when she fell,” said the despatcher, recounting the incident. “But I was too late to protect her; and I should probably have been shot myself if I had tried to.”
“Was the brute arrested?”
“Arrested! Who arrests anybody in this town?”
“How long is this sort of thing going on?” asked Bucks, sitting down and signing a transfer.
“How long!” echoed the despatcher, taking up his hat to go to his room. “I don’t know how long. But when their time comes–God help that crowd up Front Street!”
CHAPTER XVI
Following Collins’s return to duty, Bucks was assigned to a new western station, Point of Rocks. It was in the mountains and where Casement, now laying five and even six miles of track a day, had just turned over a hundred and eighty miles to the operating department. Bucks, the first operator ever sent to the lonely place afterward famous in railroad story, put his trunk aboard a freight train the next morning and started for his destination.
The ride through the mountains was an inspiration. A party of army officers and their wives, preferring to take the day run for the scenery, were bound for one of the mountain posts, Fort Bridger, and they helped to make the long day journey in the cabin car, with its frequent stops and its laborious engine-puffing over the mountain grades, a pleasant one. The women made coffee on a cabin stove and Bucks, the only other passenger, was invited to lunch with them.
When the train stopped at Point of Rocks and Bucks got off, the sun was setting, and though the thin, clear air brought the distant mountains very close, the prospect was not a cheerful one. In every direction mountain ranges, some brown and others snow-capped, rose upon the horizon. Where the railroad line made a tortuous way among the barren buttes that dotted the uneven plain all about, there was not a spear of grass nor a living thing except the stunted sage-brush of the alkali plain. In the midst of this desert a great upheaval of granite rock thrown squarely across the direct path of the railroad opposed its straight course and made a long reverse curve necessary. This was Point of Rocks.
“You,” said Stanley once to Bucks, “may live to see this railroad built across these mountains as it should be built. There will be no sharp curves then, no heavy grades such as these our little engines have to climb now. Great compound locomotives will pull trains of a hundred cars up grades of less than one per cent and around two and three degree curves. These high wooden bridges will all be replaced by big rock and earth fills. Tunnels will pierce the heights that cannot be scaled by easy grades, and electric power supplied by these mountain streams themselves will take the place of steam made by coal and hauled hundreds of miles to give us costly motive power. You may live, Bucks, to see all of this; I shall not. When it comes, think of me.”
But there was no thought now in Bucks’s mind of what the future might bring to that forbidding desert. He saw only a rude station building, just put up, and as the train disappeared, he dragged into this his trunk and hand-bag, and in that act a new outpost of civilization was established in the great West.
He called up Medicine Bend, reported, lighted a fire in the little stove, and the spot in the desert known now to men as Point of Rocks for the first time in the story of the world became a part of it–was linked to the world itself.
But the place was lonely beyond words, and Bucks had a hard time to keep it from being too much so for him. He walked at different times over the country in every direction, and one night after a crudely prepared supper he strolled out on the platform, desperate for something to do. Desolation marked the landscape everywhere. He wandered aimlessly across the track and seeing nothing better to interest him began climbing Point of Rocks.
The higher he climbed the more absorbed he became. Youth and strength lent ardor to the ascent, and Bucks, soon forgetting everything below, was scaling the granite pile that towered above him. For thirty minutes, without a halt, he continued to climb, and reaching after a while what seemed the highest ledge of the rocky spur, he walked out upon it to the very edge and was rewarded for his labor with a magnificent panorama of the mountain divide.
In the west the sky was still golden and, though clouds appeared to be banking heavily in the north, the view of the distant peaks was unobstructed. From where he sat he could almost have thrown a stone into one tiny mountain stream that cut a silver path toward the setting sun, and another, a hundred yards away, that flowed gently toward the rising sun. And he knew–for Bill Dancing had told him–that the one rill emptied at last into the Pacific Ocean, and the other into the Atlantic Ocean. Alongside these tiny streams he could plainly trace the overland trail of the emigrant wagons, and, cutting in straighter lines, but following the same general direction, lay the right-of-way of the new transcontinental railroad.
Beyond, in every direction, stretched great plateaus, and above these rugged mountain chains, lying in what seemed the eternal solitude of the vast desert. He was alone with the sunset, and stood for some moments silenced by the scene before him. When a sound did at length reach his ear as he sat spellbound, it brought him back to himself with the suddenness of a shock.
At first he heard only distant echoes of a short, muffled blow, irregularly repeated and seeming familiar to the ear. As he speculated upon what the sound might be, it grew gradually plainer and came seemingly nearer. He bent his eyes down the valley to the west and scanned the wagon-trail and the railroad track as far as he could in the dusk, but could see nothing. Then the muffle of the sound was at once lifted. It came from the other direction, and, turning his eyes, he saw emerging from a small canyon that hid the trail to the east, a covered emigrant wagon, drawn by a large team of horses and driven by a man sitting in front of the hood, making its way slowly up the road toward the station.
The heavy play of the wheel-hubs on the axles echoed now very plainly upon his ears, and he sat watching the outfit and wondering whether the travellers would camp for the night near him and give him what he craved most of all, a little human society. The horses passed the station, and as they did so, the driver peered intently at the new building, looking back around the side of the canvas cover, and straining his neck to see all he could see, while the horses moved along.
This would have seemed to Bucks mere idle curiosity had he not noticed that some one within the wagon parted the canvas flaps at the rear as it went by and likewise inspected the building with close attention. Even this was no especial incident for wonderment, nor was Bucks surprised when the emigrants, after pursuing their way until they were well out of sight of the station itself, guided their wagon from the trail into a little depression along the creek as if to make camp for the night. The driver, a tall, thin man, wearing a slouch hat, got down from the front of the wagon and walked with a shambling gait to the head of his horses and loosened their bridles. While the horses were drinking, a second man, carrying a rifle, climbed down from the rear of the wagon. He was of a shorter and stockier build, and on one side the brim of his soft hat had been torn away so that it hung loosely over one ear, the other ear being covered only by a shock of dusty hair.
A third man emerged from under the canvas cover, dropping down almost behind the second–a fat man who looked about him with suspicion as he slowly drew a rifle out of the wagon. The driver joined his companions for a brief conference, and when it was finished the three men, examining their rifles, walked back up the road toward the station. As they neared it, two of them loitered back and presently took their places behind convenient rocks where, without being seen, they could see everything. The third man, the driver, carrying his rifle on his arm, walked ahead, crossed the road, and, proceeding with some care, stepped up on the platform and pushed open the door of the station building.
Bucks, perched high on the rocky spur above the scene, looked on, not knowing just what to make of it all. As he saw the two men conceal themselves, he wondered what sort of a call the third man intended making on the new agent, and why he should leave two armed men close at hand in ambush when calling on one lone telegraph operator. Bucks began to feel a bit creepy and watched the scene unfolding below with keen attention. The driver of the wagon getting no response as he opened the door, walked inside, and for a moment was not seen. He soon reappeared, and, stepping to the side of the building signalled his companions to come up. Bucks saw them emerge from their hiding-places and join the driver at the station door.
A second conference followed. It was briefer than the first, but there seemed some difference of opinion among the three men, and the talk terminated abruptly by the driver’s clubbing his rifle and deliberately smashing in the sash of the window before which he was standing.
Whatever had held Bucks spellbound thus far released him suddenly for action when he saw the rifle-stock raised and heard the crash of the glass. He jumped up, and running to the edge of the ledge nearest the station yelled at the marauder and shook his finger at him vigorously. The attack on his habitation was too much for Bucks’s composure, and, although he knew his words could not be heard from where he stood, he felt he could frighten the intruders.
This was his second mistake. No sooner had his visitors sighted him than two guns were turned on him and instantly fired. He jumped back before the fat man, who, slower than his companions, had some difficulty in shooting so high above his head, could get his gun up. Afterward, Bucks learned how providential this was, inasmuch as the big fellow was the deadliest shot of the three.
But at the moment, danger was the last thing the operator thought of. The unprovoked and murderous attack infuriated him, and again forgetting his caution he drew his own revolver without hesitation, and, running to a more protected spot, leaned over the ledge and fired point-blank into the group, as they looked up to see what had become of him.
If it had been his intention to hit any one of them with his bullets, his shooting was a failure and some experience in after years among men practised in gunnery convinced him that to aim at three men is not the right way to hit one.
But if he had meant only to create a sensation his move was successful beyond his greatest expectation. Had a bomb been exploded on the platform the marauders could not have scattered more quickly. Bucks never in his life had seen three men move so fast. The fat man, indeed, had given Bucks the impression of being heavy and slow in his movements. He now made a surprising exhibition of agility, and Bucks to his astonishment, saw him distancing his leaner companions and sprinting for the shelter at a pace that would have made a jack-rabbit take notice.
Bucks, somewhat keyed up, fired twice again at the fleeing men, but with no more effect than to kick up the dust once behind and once ahead of them as they ran. The instant they reached the rocks where they found shelter Bucks drew back out of sight, and none too soon, for as he pulled himself away from the ledge, a rifle cracked viciously from below and the slug threw a chunk of granite almost up into his face; the fat man was evidently having his innings.
Bucks, out of immediate danger, lay perfectly still for a few moments casting up the strange situation he found himself in. Why the men should have acted as they had, was all a mystery, but thieves or outlaws they evidently were, and outlaws in this country he already well knew were men who would stop at nothing.
He realized, likewise, that he was in grave danger. The night was before him. No train would be through before morning. He could not reach his key by which he might have summoned aid instantly. For a moment he lay thinking. Then taking off his hat he stuck his head carefully forward; it was greeted at once by a bullet. The lesson was obvious and next time he wanted to reconnoitre he stuck his hat forward first on the muzzle of his gun, as he had often read of frontiersmen doing, and, having drawn a shot, stuck his head out afterward for a quick look. All that remained in the open was the team and wagon, but this left the outlaws at a disadvantage, for if they wanted to get their outfit and go on their way they must expose themselves to Bucks’s fire. While they might feel that one operator, armed with a revolver he hardly knew how to use, was not a dangerous foe, a Colt’s, even in the hands of a boy who had thus far fired first and aimed afterward, was not wholly to be despised. An accident might happen even under such conditions, and the three men, knowing that darkness would soon leave them free, waited in absolute silence.
Night fell very soon and the light of the stars, though leaving objects visible upon the high ledge, left the earth in impenetrable darkness. Strain his eyes as he would, Bucks could perceive nothing below. He could hear, however, and one of the first sounds audible was that of the wagon moving quietly away. It was a welcome sound, even though he dared not hope his troublesome visitors would withdraw without further mischief. His chief concern at this juncture was to get safely, if he could, down the rocks and into the station to give the alarm to the despatcher; for he made no doubt that the outlaws, on their wagon trip west, would damage in any way they might be able railroad supplies and property along their way.
Before Bucks had climbed down very far and after he had made one or two startling missteps, he began to consider that it was one thing to get up a rough arête in daylight and quite another to get down one in the darkness. The heavy clouds moving down from the north had massed above Point of Rocks, and he heard once in a while an ominous roll of thunder, as he slipped and slid along and bruised his hands and feet upon the rocks.
He had with great care got about half-way down, when the pitch darkness below him was pierced by a small flame which he took at first for the blaze of a camp fire. In another moment he was undeceived. The station was on fire. It was evidently the last effort of the outlaws to wreak vengeance as they left. Bucks clambered over the rocks in great alarm. He thought he might reach the building in time to save it, and, forgetting the danger of being shot should his enemies remain lying in wait, he made his way rapidly down the Point. The flames now burst from the east window of the station, and he despaired of saving it, but he hurried on until he heard the crack of a rifle, felt his cap snatched from his head and fell backward against the face of the rock. As he lost consciousness he slipped and rolled headlong down the steep ledge.