Part 33 (1/2)
Brannahan stooped and lunged the stub of the cigar in his mouth over the lamp chimney, and with the up-draft nearly extinguished the flame; then he pulled up a chair, tilted back and stuck his feet up on the desk.
”Guess most anything would be variety in this G.o.d-forsaken hole,” he observed between puffs. ”What?”
”Oh, it's not so bad--when you get used to it,” said the Kid.
He edged his own chair around to face Brannahan squarely--the wound in the back of his head was bleeding again; perhaps it had never stopped bleeding, he did not know.
Brannahan made small talk, waiting for the fast freight, east, to cross; and the Kid smiled, while his fingers clutched desperately now and then at the arms of his chair to keep himself from pitching over, as those sickening, giddy waves, like hot and cold flashes, swept him.
Brannahan went at last, the fast freight roared by, No. 81 pulled out, and the Kid went back to the wash-basin and put his bandage on again.
The morning came and went, the afternoon, and the evening; and by evening the Kid was sick and dropping weak. That smash on his head must have been more serious than he had thought at first; for, again and again, and growing more frequent, had come those giddy flashes, and once, he wasn't sure, but it seemed as though he had fainted for a moment or two.
It was getting on to ten o'clock now, and he sat, or, rather, lay forward with his head in his arms over the desk under the lighted lamp.
The sounder was clicking busily; the Kid raised his head a little, and listened. There was a Circus Special, west, that night, and No. 2, the eastbound Limited, was an hour off schedule, and, trying to make it up, was running with clear rights while everything else on the train sheet dodged to the sidings to get out of the way. The sounder stopped for an instant, then came the dispatcher's ”complete”--the Circus Special was to cross the Limited at L'Aramie, the next station west of Angel Forks. It had nothing to do with the Kid, and it would be another two hours at least before the Circus Special was along.
The Kid's head dropped back on his arms again. What was he to do? He could stick out the night somehow--he _must_ stick it out. If he asked for a relief it was the sack for the man upstairs--it was throwing McGrew cold. It wouldn't take them long to find out what was the matter with McGrew! And surely McGrew would be straight again by morning--he wasn't any better now, worse if anything, but by morning surely the worst of the drink would be out of him. McGrew had been pretty bad all day--as bad as the Kid had ever seen a man. He wondered a little numbly about it. He had thought once that McGrew might have had some more drink hidden, and he had searched for it during the forenoon while McGrew watched him from the bunk; but he had found nothing. It was strange, too, the way McGrew was acting, strange that it took so long for the man to get it out of his system, it seemed to the Kid; but the Kid had not found those last two bottles, neither was the Kid up in therapeutics, nor was he the diagnostician that Doctor McTurk was.
”By morning,” said the Kid, with the moan, ”if he can't stand a trick I'll _have_ to wire. I'm afraid to-night 'll be my limit.”
It was still and quiet--not even a breeze to whisper through the cut, or stir the pine-clad slope into rustling murmurs. Almost heavily the silence lay over the little station buried deep in the heart of the mighty range. Only the sounder spoke and chattered--at intervals--spasmodically.
An hour pa.s.sed, an hour and a half, and the Kid scarcely moved--then he roused himself. It was pretty near time for the Circus Special to be going through to make its meeting point with the Limited at L'Aramie, and he looked at his lights. He could see them, up and down, switch and semaph.o.r.e, from the bay window of the station where he sat. It was just a glance to a.s.sure himself that all was right. He saw the lights through red and black flashes before his eyes, saw that the main line was open as it should be--and dropped his swooning, throbbing head back on his arms once more.
And then suddenly he sat erect. From overhead came the dull, ominous thud of a heavy fall. He rose from his chair--and caught at the table, as the giddiness surged over him and his head swam around. For an instant he hung there swaying, then made his way weakly for the stairs and started up.
There was a light above--he had kept a lamp burning there--but for a moment after he reached the top nothing but those ghastly red and black flashes met his eyes--and then, with a strange, inarticulate cry, he moved toward the side of the room.
Sprawled in a huddled heap upon the floor beneath the eaves, collapsed, out like the snuffing of a candle wick, as Doctor McTurk had said some day he would go out, dead, lay Dan McGrew--the loose plank up, two empty bottles beside him, as though the man had s.n.a.t.c.hed first one and then the other from their hiding place in the wild hope that there might be something left of the supply drained to the last drop hours before.
The Kid stooped over McGrew, straightened up, stared at the lifeless form before him, and his hands went queerly to his temples and the sides of his head--the room spun dizzily around and around, the lamp, the dead man on the floor, the bunks, a red-and-black flashed whirl--the Kid's hands reached grasping into nothingness for support, and he slipped inertly to the floor.
From below came the sharp tattoo of the sounder making the Angel Forks call, quick, imperative at first--then like a knell of doom, in frantic appeal, the despatchers' life and death, the _seventeen_--and, ”Hold Circus Special.” Over and over again the sounder spoke and cried and babbled and sobbed like a human soul in agony; over and over again while the minutes pa.s.sed, and with heavy, resonant roar the long Circus Special rumbled by--but the man on the night wire at Angel Forks was dead; and the Kid was past the hearing--there were to come weeks, while he raved in the furious delirium and lay in the heavy stupor of brain fever, before a key meant anything to him again.
It's queer the way things happen! Call it luck, if you like--maybe it is--maybe it's something more than luck. It wouldn't be sacrilege, would it, to say that the hand of G.o.d had something to do with keeping the Circus Special and the Limited from cras.h.i.+ng head-on in the rock-walled, twisting canon, four miles west of Angel Forks, whatever might be the direct means, ridiculous, before-unheard-of, funny, or absurd, that saved a holocaust that night? That wouldn't be sacrilege, would it? Well, call it luck, if you like--call it anything you like.
Queer things happen in railroading--but this stands alone, queerest of all in the annals of fifty roads in a history of fifty years.
The Limited, thanks to a clean-swept track, had been making up time, making up enough of it to throw meeting point with the Circus Special at L'Aramie out--and the despatcher had tried to Hold the Circus Special at Angel Forks and let the Limited pa.s.s her there. There was time enough to do it, plenty of it--and under ordinary circ.u.mstances it would have been all in the night's work. But there was blame, too, and Saxton, who was on the key at Big Cloud that night, relieving Donkin, who was sick, went on the carpet for it--he let the Limited tear through L'Aramie _before_ he sent his order to Angel Forks, with the Circus Special in the open cutting along for her meeting point with nothing but Angel Forks between her and L'Aramie.
That was the despatcher's end of it--the other end is a little different. Whether some disgruntled employee, seeking to revenge himself on the circus management, loosened the door of one of the cars while the Special lay on the siding waiting for a crossing at Mitre Peak, her last stop, or whether it was purely an accident, no one ever knew--though the betting was pretty heavy on the disgruntled employee theory--there had been trouble the day before. However, be that as it may, one way or the other, one thing was certain, they found the door open after it was all over, and--but, we're over-running our holding orders--we'll get to that in a minute.
Bull Coussirat and Fatty Hogan, in the 428, were pulling the Special that night, and as they shot by the Angel Forks station the fireman was leaning out of the gangway for a breath of air.
”Wonder how the Kid's making out?” he shouted in Hogan's ear, retreating into the cab as they b.u.mped over the west-end siding switch with a shattering racket. ”Good kid, that--ain't seen him since the day he came up with us.”
Hogan nodded, checking a bit for the curve ahead, mindful of his high-priced, heavily insured live freight.
”Did ever you hear such a forsaken row!” he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed irrelevantly.
”Listen to it, Bull. About three runs a year like this and I'd be clawing at iron bars and trying to mimic a menagerie. Listen to it!”