Frank H. Spearman

“ He stood like a broken man. "God help me, have I laid on your dear head the curse of my own life? Must you, too, suffer because our perils force us lightly to pawn our lives one for another? One night in that yard"—he pointed to the window—"I stood between the rails with a switch engine running me down. I knew nothing of it. There was no time to speak, no time to think—it was on me. Had Blood left me there one second I never should have looked into your dear face. Up on the hill with Hailey and Brodie, under the gravel and shale, I should never have cost your heart an ache like this. ”

“ Some men get used to it; I never do. As much as I have seen of railroad life, the word that a man's hurt always hits me in the same place. Slipping into an ulster, I pulled a storm-cap over my ears and hurried down stairs buttoning my coat. The arc-lights, blinded in the storm, swung wild across the long yard, and the wind sung with a scream through the telegraph wires. Stumbling ahead, the big car-tink, facing the storm, led me to where between the red and the green lamps a dozen men hovered close to the gangway of a switch engine. The man hurt lay under the forward truck of the tender. ”

“ Within two hours of division headquarters a train ran lost—lost as completely as if she were crossing the Sweetgrass plains on pony trails instead of steel rails. Not once but a dozen times McGraw and Glover, pawning their lives, left the cab with their lanterns in a vain endeavor to locate a station, a siding, a rock. Numbed and bitten at last with useless exposure they cast effort to the wind, gave the engine like a lost horse her head, and ran through everything for headquarters and life. ”

“ Switch engines puffed impatiently up and down the ladder track shifting stuff to the distant spurs. At the river front an army of men moved like loaded ants over the dikes. Beyond them the eye could mark the boiling yellow of the Spider, its winding channel marked through the waste of waters by whirling driftwood, bobbing wreckage and plunging trees—sweepings of a thousand angry miles. "There's the Spider," repeated the West End conductor, pointing, "out there in the middle where you see things moving right along. ”

“ Where the dike gave under the terrific pounding, or where swiftly boiling pools sucked under the heavy piling, Glover's men were sinking fresh relays of mattresses and loading them with stone.
At moments laden flat cars were pushed to the brink of the flood, and men with picks and bars rose spirit-like out of black shadows to scramble up their sides and dump rubble on the sunken brush. Other men toiling in unending procession wheeled and slung sandbags upon the revetment ”

“ On the platform in the gray light three men were climbing into the gangway of a switch-engine, the last man so long and so loosely put together that he was taking, as he always took when he tried to get into small quarters, the chaffing of his companions on his size. He smiled languidly at Callahan's excited greeting, and as they ran down the yard listened without comment to the story of the washout. No words were needed to convey to Glover or to Blood the embarrassment of the situation. ”

“ With shovels, picks, bars, hammers, and drills, hearty in miners' boots and pied in woollen shirts the first of Ed Smith's men were clambering into place. The field telegraph had been set up on the bench above the point: every few moments a new batch of irrigation men appeared stringing up the ledge, and with the roadmasters as lieutenants, Glover, on the apex of the low spur of the mountain, taking reports and giving orders, surveyed his improvised army. ”

“ In the seclusion of the car a storm hardly made itself felt; in the cab she seemed under the open sky. The wind buffeted the glass at her side, rattled in its teeth the door in front of her, drank the steaming flame from the stack monstrously, and dashed the cinders upon the thin roof above her head with terrifying force. With the gathering speed of the engine the cracking exhaust ran into a confusing din that deafened her, and she was shaken and jolted. The plunging of the cab grew violent, and with every lurch her cushion shifted alarmingly. ”

“ Bucks paused. Glover stared a moment. "If you put it in that way let us drop it," said he at last. "I will go."
"The blunder was not a life and death matter. In the mountains where we don't see one woman a year it might happen that any man expecting one young lady should mistake another for her. Miss Brock is full of mischief, and the temptation to her to let you deceive yourself was too great, that's all. If I could go without sacrificing the interests of all of us in the reorganization I shouldn't ask you to go." ”

“ Just as he regained the main aisle of the Lalla Rookh, a lurch of the car plumped him against a section-head. He grasped it an instant to steady himself, and as he stopped he looked. Whether it was that his eyes fell on the curtained section swaying under the Pintsch light ahead—Section Eleven made up—or whether his eyes were drawn to it, who can tell? A woman's head was visible between the curtains. Glover stood perfectly still and stared. Without right or reason, there certainly stood a woman. ”

“ The train, a private car special, carrying Mr. Brock, chairman of the board, and his family, the new president and the second vice-president elect, was pulling slowly across the long, high spans of the Spider bridge. Glover and Gertrude had gone back to the observation platform. Leaning on his arm, she was looking across the big valley and into the west. The sun, setting clear, tinged with gold the far snows of the mountains. ”

“ But some fascination drew her eyes always back to that bright circle in the front—to the sinister snow retreating always and always advancing; flowing always into the headlight and out, and above it darkening into the fire that streamed from the dripping stack. A sudden lurch nearly threw her from her seat, and she gave a little scream as the engine righted. Glover beside her like thought caught her outstretched hand. "A curve," he said, bending apologetically toward her ear as she reseated herself. "Is it very trying?" ”

“ During each hour Glover was over every foot of the work, and inspecting the track building. If a track boss couldn't understand what he wanted the engineer could take a pick or a bar and give the man an object lesson. He patrolled the cañon walls, the roadmasters behind him, with so good an eye for loose bowlders, and fragments such as could be moved readily with a gad, that his assistants before a second round had spotted every handy chunk of rock within fifty feet of the water. He put his spirit into the men and they gave their work the enthusiasm of soldiers. ”

“ If you happen to kill a few people they can't make anything more than manslaughter out of it—I know that because I've seen them try to hang a despatcher for a passenger wreck—they can't do it, Bud, don't ever believe it. In this state ten years is the extreme limit for manslaughter, and the only complication is that if your train should happen to burn up they might soak you an extra ten years for arson; but a despatcher is usually handy around a penitentiary and can get light work in the office, so that he's thrown more with wife poisoners and embezzlers than with cutthroats and hold-up men. ”

“ It was a nasty night for any sort of a sleeper; for a dead one it was very bad.
Glover walked into the Lalla Rookh vestibule, around the smoking-room passage, and into the main aisle of the car, dimly lighted at the hind end. He made his way to the stateroom. The open door gave him light, and he took off his storm-coat, pulled it over him for a blanket, and had closed his eyes when he reflected he had forgotten to warn O'Brien he must get off at Medicine Bend. ”

“ The wheels were turning under her, the engine was backing for the dash. "We know now the ploughs are not ahead of us, for the cut is full of sheep and snow. If they are behind us we are in grave danger. They may strike us at any moment—that means, do you understand? death. We can't go back now; there's too much snow even if the track were clear. To stay here means to freeze to death." She turned restively from him. "Could you have thought it a joke," he asked, slowly, "to run a hundred and seventy miles through a blizzard?" ”

“ Oftener, with blanched faces they would hear of her dashing like an apparition past a frightened operator, huddled over his lonely stove, a spectral flame shot across the fury of the sky—as if the dread night breathing on the scrap-pile and the grave had called from other nights and other storms a wraith of riven engines and slaughtered men to one last phantom race with death and the wind. ”

“ Gertrude, I may as well admit it—I'm a coward since I've begun to love you. I've never told you how I saw your face once between the curtains of an empty sleeper. But it came back to me just as Dancing's shoulder slipped—that's why I went. I'm done forever with long chances." And she, silent, tried only to quiet him while the car moved down the gap bearing them from Pilot together.
"Do you know what day to-morrow is?" Gertrude was opening a box of flowers that Solomon had brought from the express-office; Glover, plastered with bandages, was standing before the grate fire in the hotel parlor. ”

“ In October, the horse, starting, shrinks under his rider, for the lion, always moving, never seen, is following the game into the valleys, leaving the grizzly to beat his stubborn retreat from the snow line alone.
Starting from the big hotel in a new direction every day the Pittsburgers explored the valleys and the cañons, for the lake and the springs nestle in the Pilot Mountains and the scenery is everywhere new. Mount Pilot itself rises loftily to the north, and from its sides may be seen every peak in the range. ”

“ I know every grade, curve, tunnel, and culvert from here to Bear Dance—yes, to the coast. The day of heavy gradients and curves for transcontinental tonnage is gone by. If I ever get a chance, I will rip this right of way open from end to end and make it possible to send freight through these ranges at a cost undreamed of in the estimates of to-day. But that was not my only object in coming to the mountains."
"Go ahead."
"Mr. Bucks and the men he has gathered around him—Callahan, Blood and the rest of us—are railroad men. Railroading is our business; we know nothing else. ”

“ Cruelly broken and bruised, Young, Bill Dancing, and Glover late that night were brought up in rope cradles by the wrecking derrick and taken into the Brock car, turned by its owner into a hospital. An hour after the fall on the south arête the hill blockade had been broken. With word of the disaster to nerve men already strained to the utmost, effort became superhuman, the impossible was achieved, and the relief train run in on the mine track. ”

“ Mauls were ringing at the last spikes when the head flat car moved cautiously out on the new track. Car after car approached, every second one bearing a flagman re-signalling to the cab as the train took the short curves of the cañon and entering the gorge rolled slowly beneath the Cat's Paw over the prostrate granite.
The trackmen parted only long enough to give way to the advancing cars. The locomotive steamed gingerly along. In the gangway stood a small, broad-hatted man, Morris Blood. He waved his lantern at Glover, and Glover caught up a hand-torch to swing an answering greeting. ”

“ Many men poured out of the battered ice-bound cars at the end of the string. While Gertrude's eyes strained with expectation a collie dog shot headlong to the platform from the steps of the hind caboose, and wheeling about, barked madly until, last of three men together, Glover, carrying his little bag, swung down, and listening to his companions, walked leisurely forward. ”

“ It had been no part of Glover's plan to receive his guests at that point, and his first efforts after the greetings were to coax them away from the interest they expressed in the equipment of an emergency headquarters, and get them back to where the track crossed the river. But when the young people learned that the blue-eyed boy at the little table on the rock could send a telegram or a cablegram for them to any part of the world, each insisted on putting a message through for the fun of the thing, and even Mrs. Whitney could hardly be coaxed from the illimitable possibilities just under her. ”

“ One night after a particularly happy evening near the piano for Gertrude and Glover, Mr. Brock, re-entering the parlor, found the somewhat tedious gentleman bending very low, as his daughter said good-night, over her hand; in fact, the gentleman that had been so kind to everybody was kissing it.
When Glover recovered his perpendicular the cold magnate of the West End stood between the folding doors looking directly at him. If the owner of several trunk lines expected his look to inspire consternation he was disappointed. Each of the lovers feared but one person in the world ”

“ And it was always the wild horse and the buffalo and the Sioux and the mountains—I dreamed of nothing else. Now, so many times, I meet strangers that come into the mountains—foreigners often—and I can never listen to their rhapsodies, or even read their books about the Rockies, without a jealousy that they are talking without leave of something that's mine. What can the Rockies mean to them? Surely, if an American boy has a heritage it is the Rockies. ”