Part 41 (2/2)

Bradley handed back the order without comment, picked up his lantern, and started for the door.

”No need of going forward to-night,” said Heney, laying his arm on Bradley's arm. ”We've only a short train, a dozen cars, and we can watch it well enough from the cupola. It's d.a.m.n cold out there.”

”Oh, I guess it's all right, Heney,” Bradley answered--and went out through the door.

There weren't any platforms to the box cars, just small end doors.

Once in camp, and stationary on a siding, the cars would be connected up with little wooden gangways, you understand? Bradley, from the platform of the caboose, stepped across the buffer, and made his way through several cars. One was pretty much like another; a stove going, and stuffy hot; the foreigners stretched out in their bunks, some of them; some of them playing cards on the floor; some asleep; some quarrelling, chattering, jabbering; a hard looking lot for the most part, black-visaged, scowling, unshaven, gold circlets dangling in their ears--bar the Swedes.

Bradley worked along with scarcely more than a glance at the occupants, until, in the fourth car, he halted suddenly and shoved his lamp into the face of a giant of a man, who squatted in the corner, sullen and apart, with muttering lips.

”What's wrong with you?” he demanded brusquely.

The man drew back with a growl that was like a beast's, lips curling back over the teeth. Bradley stared at him coolly, then turned inquiringly to the crowd in the car. He was greeted with a burst of unintelligible, polyglot words, and spontaneous, excitable gesticulations. Bradley shrugged his shoulders, and slammed the door behind him.

Outside on the buffer, he reached for the ladder, swung himself up the iron rungs to the top of the car, and, with his lantern hooked in his arm, sat down on the footboard, bracing himself against the brake wheel, and b.u.t.toned his reefer--there was another night--to think--ahead of him.

To think--if he could only forget! It was that fearful sense of impotency--impotency--impotency. It seemed to laugh and jeer and mock at him. It seemed to make a plaything of this father love of his.

There was nothing--nothing he could do to bring her back--that was it--nothing! Soul, life, mind and body, he would have given them all to have saved her--would give them now to bring her back--and there was only this ghastly impotency. It seemed at times that it would drive him mad--and he could not forget. And then the bitter, crus.h.i.+ng grief; the rebellion, fierce, ungovernable, that his _all_ should have been taken from him, that the years he had planned should be turned to nothing but grinning mockery; and then that raging sense of impotency again, that rocked his turbulent soul as in an angry, storm-tossed sea.

Time pa.s.sed, and he sat there motionless, save for the jolting of the train that b.u.mped him this way and that against the brake wheel. They were into the mountains now; and the snowy summits, moon-touched, reared themselves in white, grotesque, fanciful shapes, and seemed, cold in their beauty, to bring an added chill to the frosty night.

Ahead, far ahead, the headlight's ray swept now the track, now the gray rock side, now, softly green, a clump of pines, as the right of way curved and twisted and turned; now, slowing up a grade, the heavy, growling bark of the exhaust came with long intervals between, and now, on the level, it was quick as the tattoo of a snare drum, with the short stack belching a myriad fiery sparks insolently skyward in a steady stream; around him was the sweep of the wind, the roar of the train, the pound of the trucks beating the fish-plates, the sway, the jerk, the recovery of the slewing cars, and, curiously, the deep, brooding silence of the mountains, frowning, it seemed, at this sacrilege of noise; behind, showed the yellow glimmer from the caboose, the dark, indistinct outline of a watching figure in the cupola.

Suddenly, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the brake wheel to help him up, Bradley sprang erect. From directly underneath his feet came a strange, confused, m.u.f.fled sound, like a rush of men from one end of the car to the other.

Then there broke a perfect bedlam of cries, yells, shouts and screams--and then a revolver shot.

In an instant Bradley was scrambling down the ladder to investigate--they could not hear the row, whatever it was, in the caboose--and in another he had kicked the car door open and plunged inside. A faint, bluish haze of smoke undulated in the air, creeping to the roof of the car; and there was the acrid smell of powder--but there was no sign of a fight, no man, killed or wounded, sprawling on the floor. But the twenty men who filled the car were crouched in groups and singly against the car sides; or sat upright in their bunks, their faces white, frightened--only their volubility unchecked, for all screamed and talked and waved their arms at once.

They made a rush for Bradley, explaining in half a dozen languages what had happened. Bradley pushed them roughly away from him.

”Speak Englis.h.!.+” he snapped. ”What's wrong here? Can't any of you speak English?”

An Italian grabbed his arm and pointed through the door Bradley had left open behind him to the next car forward. ”Pietro!” he shouted out wildly. ”Gotta da craze--mad--gotta da gun!”

”Well, go on!” prodded Bradley. ”He's run into the next car. I understand that--but what happened here? Who's Pietro?”

But the man's knowledge, like his English, was limited. He did not know much--Pietro was not one of them--Pietro had come only that morning to Big Cloud from the East--Pietro had gone suddenly mad--no man had done anything to make Pietro mad.

And then suddenly into Bradley's mind leaped the story that he had read in the papers a few days before of an Italian, a homicidal maniac, who had escaped from an asylum somewhere East, and had disappeared. The description of the man, as he remembered it, particularly the great size of the man, tallied, now that he thought of it, with the fellow who had been in the car when he had first pa.s.sed through. He glanced quickly around--the man was gone. So that was Pietro!

Bradley started on the run for the next car ahead; and, subconsciously, as he ran, he felt the speed of the train quicken. But that was natural enough--they had been crawling to the summit of Mitre Peak, and, over that now, before them lay a four-percent grade to the level below, one of the nastiest bits of track on the division, curves all the way--only Bull Coussirat was. .h.i.tting it up pretty hard for a starter.

In the next car the same scene was repeated--the smell of powder smoke, the blue haze hanging listless near the roof out of the air currents; the crouched, terrified foreigners, one with a broken wrist, dangling, where a bullet had shattered it. Pietro, Berserker fas.h.i.+on, was shooting his way through the train.

Bradley went forward more cautiously now, more warily. Strange the way the speed was quickening! The cars were rocking now with short, vicious slews. He thought he heard a shout from the track-side without, but he could not be sure of that.

Through the next car and the next he went, trailing the maniac; and then he started to run again. Stumbling feet, trying to hold their footing, came to him from the top of the car. With every instant now the speed of the train was increasing--past the limit of safety--past the point where he would have hesitated to use the emergency brakes, if there had been any to use--a luxury as yet extended only to the pa.s.senger equipment in those days. The Polacks, the Armenians, and the Swedes were beginning to yell with another terror, at the frantic pitching of the cars, making a wild, unearthly chorus that echoed up and down the length of the train.

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