Francis Lynde

“ I guess we all thought we were picking up a dead man when we gathered Buck out of the ditch into which the flying cable-end had knocked him, and there was plenty of excitement after we had carried him up the slope to put him down beside the fire. It so happened that there was a doctor in the private-car party, and while he was trying to find out whether Buck was dead or alive, one of the sightseers, a tall, thin faced man that I took to be her father, was holding Miss Lois, apparently to keep her from rushing in to kneel beside the doctor. ”

“ I was a machinist in the railroad shop in the home town, and one morning a queer thing happened. The cashier of Hiram Stearns's bank, an old man, had had a stroke of paralysis in the night and was dying. For years it had been his job to open the bank vault for the day's business, and nobody else knew the combination. Stearns had it written on a slip of paper, but he'd lost the slip. Just before nine o'clock that morning he came tearing down to the shop to have a machinist rushed up to the bank to cut the vault open. ”

“ BUCK HARROD DIDN'T COME TO THE GREEN BUTTE RAILROAD SHOPS JUST TO GET A JOB. BUT HE GOT ONE, MADE GOOD AT IT IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE, AND THEN MADE IT CLEAR JUST WHY HE DID COME TO GREEN BUTTE
SINCE the drafting room in the Green Butte railroad shops was merely an extension of the shop office, I could hardly help overhearing what went on when men came in applying for work. Grimsby, our division master mechanic, was rather hardboiled with job seekers, probably because the Western shops catch a good many “floaters”: tramps calling themselves mechanics and afterward turning out to be anything but. ”

“ It had developed immediately that he was that rare find, nowadays; a man who knew his trade in every part of it. Burkman, our foreman, soon discovered this, and he shifted Harrod all over the lot, shoving him in anywhere, on lathe, planer or the floor, wherever there was a rush job to be done, and never finding himself disappointed with the result.
This is about the way things had shaped up on the day when we had our near tragedy. The Green Butte back-shop, as everybody knows who has seen it, is a modern, steel framed building, high in the center, and with machine-tool bays on either side. ”

“ Homer's private car, stocked with everything the market affords. Nothing like being a stockholder in a railroad company when it comes to working the rabbit's foot for the luxuries.”
We had reached the shops, and when I entered the office, Buck went on to check in for the night shift. For an hour or so I worked over the data, figuring in the quiet office, with only the subdued noises of the machinery in the adjoining shop, and the jangle and crash of cars in the yard as the night crew made up the midnight freights, to break the silence. ”

“ Number Eleven is scattered all over the scenery at Lame Horse Junction, worst wreck we've had in years. They're making up a wreck train of sorts in the yards, and I've got the callers out hustling for a crew. It's got to have a boss. Are you big enough to handle it?”
“Not on your life!” I denied hastily.
“So who is? We've got to have somebody.”
In a flash I remembered that Buck was for a second time in trouble and was needing a bit of spotlight stuff that would kill the poison of Banker Stearns's story. On the impulse of the moment I said, “Buck Harrod's your man. ”

“ It was town talk that Hiram Stearns was going to open a bank out here and put his son in as manager; and it was also town talk that Hal was going to marry Lois. I made up my mind right there and then that I'd come out here and shadow Hal until I caught him redhanded in some crookedness that I knew his gambling craze would get him into, and show him up. I couldn't bear the thought of Lois throwing herself away on a damned crook. That's why I came to Green Butte. Do you blame me, Jimmie?”
“Not an atom. But how about it now? Are you going to let the crook go because you've got the girl?” ”

“ But presently Buck began again.
“You can call me a damned nut if you want to, Jimmie, but I've been in love with Lois ever since I can remember. Of course, I know I'm out of it—have never been in it by the width of a gnat's eyelash. If she were willing to marry a workingman, her people wouldn't let her. ”

“ Buck's warning seemed to have little or no effect. The private-car people kept shifting about and getting in the way and making themselves a nuisance generally; and I could imagine what Marston, our regular wrecking boss, would have said and done if he had been in Buck's place. I'll bet the air would have been blue around that bit of chaos for a few minutes, anyway. But Buck was only a shop man, and he couldn't very well cuss them out.
It so happened that some of them were edging in again when the crew was making the most dangerous hitch of the lot. ”

“ She doesn't look like a girl who could be fooled, either way around.”
He shook his head gloomily. “I shouldn't wonder if that's what she's out here for now—to marry young Stearns, now that he's the manager of the new bank. He isn't good enough for her, Jimmie. He's a money, spoiled pup; gambles, got into all sorts of trouble in college, and all that. If Lois hadn't been with him this afternoon when he jumped on me— But no matter about that.”
I grinned as I got up to go to my room. “What did he say to you, Buck?” ”

“ Grimsby by young Stearns's father, a pursy, big waisted man who would have made an excellent model for the cartoonists picturing the bloated capitalist. I couldn't hear all that was said, but I got enough of it to make me warm under the collar. The caller was telling the boss the story of Buck's arrest and trial, and when he got up to go, I heard the wind-up of it.
“I just thought you'd like to know, Mr. Grimsby. A man who can open safes by ear is a rather dangerous fellow to have around, you know.” ”

“ That is all that cleared him. Everybody in Middletown knows that he unlocked the bank vault once without having to cut through the door, and though it couldn't be proved on him, everybody in Middletown accepts the plain inference that he did it again. You've always been too soft hearted about that roughneck, Lois—just because you happened to go to school with him when you were a kiddie. He isn't in your class at all.”
“You mean because he works with his hands?”
“I mean because he is a roughneck mechanic, and one with a cloud hanging over him, at that. ”

“ But Buck certainly showed that he knew how to make the best of poor tools.
The light crane was pushed up into position, and the picked-up crew was soon working under Buck's snapped-out orders like a bunch of well drilled army engineers. In a couple of hours he had the main line clear and was ready to begin on the buried branch track. It was while the trainmen were backing and filling to get the crane into a better position and anchoring it that Buck came to a squat on his heels beside me at the fire we had built on the upper side of the main track. ”

“ It was only when I went into the shop to get some figures from the foreman's office that I remembered we were short of bosses. Mr. Grimsby had gone to the west end to attend a new-time-card meeting, and Burkman, the shop foreman, was captaining the regular wrecking crew in the picking up of a derailed engine at the eastern end of the division, substituting for Marston, the wrecking boss, who was sick. ”

“ I said it, with variations, and when I left him to go back to my job at the shops I was thinking that he was even luckier than he knew. For the girls who know enough to choose between a man and a white collar in these days are scarcer than hen's teeth, and he'd got one of them. ”

“ I'm not going to marry Hal Stearns, David.”
“They told me—before I left Middletown—you were.”
“The Middletown 'they' tell a good many things that are not so. When I marry, David, I shall marry a man. Don't you know me well enough to be sure of that?”
I didn't catch Buck's reply ”

“ Isn't there some way he can be made to stop working and take care of himself?”
I was about to say that I didn't know of any way to make a bulldog let go of the bull's nose until either he or the bull was knocked for a goal ”