Part 20 (1/2)

”Make fast!” roared Siclone. Fitzpatrick shouted back, and the two men above drew taut. Hand over hand Siclone Clark crept up, like a monkey, bracing his feet against the smoking clapboards, edging away from the vomiting windows, swinging on the single strand of horse-hair, and followed by a hundred prayers unsaid.

Men who didn't know what tears were tried to cry out to keep the choking from their throats. It seemed an age before he covered the last five feet, and the men above caught frantically at his hands.

Drawing himself over the cas.e.m.e.nt, he was lost with them a moment; then, from behind a burst of smoke, they saw him rigging a maverick saddle on Fitzpatrick; saw Fitzpatrick lifted by Clark and the nurse over the sill, lowered like a wooden tie, whirling and swinging, down into twenty arms below. Before the trainmen had got the engineer loose, the nurse, following, slid like a cat down the incline; but not an instant too soon. A tongue of flame lit the gable from below and licked the horse-hair up into a curling, frizzling thread; and Siclone stood alone in the upper cas.e.m.e.nt.

It seemed for the moment he stood there the crowd would go mad. The shock and the shouting seemed to confuse him; it may have been the hot air took his breath. They yelled to him to jump; but he swayed uncertainly. Once, an instant after that, he was seen to look down; then he drew back from the cas.e.m.e.nt. I never saw him again.

The flames wrapped the building in a yellow fury; by daylight the big barracks were a smouldering pile of ruins. So little water was thrown that it was nearly nightfall before we could get into the wreck. The tragedy had blotted out the feud between the strikers and the new men.

Side by side they worked, as side by side Siclone and Fitzpatrick had stood in the morning, striving to uncover the mystery of the missing man. Next day twice as many men were in the ruins.

Fitzpatrick, while we were searching, called continually for Siclone Clark. We didn't tell him the truth; indeed, we didn't know it; nor do we yet know it. Every brace, every beam, every brick was taken from the charred pile. Every foot of cinders, every handful of ashes sifted; but of a human being the searchers found never a trace. Not a bone, not a key, not a knife, not a b.u.t.ton which could be identified as his. Like the smoke which swallowed him up, he had disappeared completely and forever.

Is he alive? I cannot tell.

But this I know.

Years afterwards Sidney Blair, head of our engineering department, was running a line, looking then, as we are looking yet, for a coast outlet.

He took only a flying camp with him, travelling in the lightest kind of order, camping often with the cattlemen he ran across.

One night, away down in the Panhandle, they fell in with an outfit driving a bunch of steers up the Yellow Gra.s.s trail. Blair noted that the foreman was a character. A man of few words, but of great muscular strength; and, moreover, frightfully scarred.

He was silent and inclined to be morose at first, but after he learned Blair was from McCloud he unbent a bit, and after a time began asking questions which indicated a surprising familiarity with the northern country and with our road. In particular, this man asked what had become of Bucks, and, when told what a big railroad man he had grown, a.s.serted, with a sudden bitterness and without in any way leading up to it, that with Bucks on the West End there never would have been a strike.

Sitting at their camp-fire while their crews mingled, Blair noticed in the flicker of the blaze how seamed the throat and breast of the cattleman were; even his sinewy forearms were drawn out of shape. He asked, too, whether Blair recollected the night the barracks burned; but Blair at that time was east of the river, and so explained, though he related to the cowboy incidents of the fire which he had heard, among others the story of Fitzpatrick and Siclone Clark.

”And Fitzpatrick is alive and Siclone is dead,” said Blair, in conclusion. But the cowboy disputed him.

”You mean Clark is alive and Fitzpatrick is dead,” said he.

”No,” contended Sidney, ”Fitzpatrick is running an engine up there now.

I saw him within three months.” But the cowboy was loath to conviction.

Next morning their trails forked. The foreman seemed disinclined to part from the surveyors, and while the bunch was starting he rode a long way with Blair, talking in a random way. Then, suddenly wheeling, he waved a good-bye with his heavy Stetson and, galloping hard, was soon lost to the north in the ruts of the Yellow Gra.s.s.

When Blair came in he told Neighbor and me about it. Blair had never seen Siclone Clark, and so was no judge as to his ident.i.ty; but Neighbor believes yet that Blair camped that night way down in the Panhandle with no other than the cowboy engineer.

Once again, that only two years ago, something came back to us.

Holmes Kay, one of our staff of surgeons, the man, in fact, who took care of Fitzpatrick, enlisted in Illinois and went with the First to Cuba. They got in front of Santiago just after the hard fighting of July 1st, and Holmes was detailed for hospital work among Roosevelt's men, who had suffered severely the day before.

One of the wounded, a sergeant, had sustained a gunshot wound in the jaw, and in the confusion had received scant attention. Kay took hold of him. He was a cowboy, like most of the rough-riders, and after his jaw was dressed Kay made some remark about the hot fire they had been through before the block-house.

”I've been through a hotter before I ever saw Cuba,” answered the rough-rider, as well as he could through his bandages. The remark directed Kay's attention to the condition of his breast and neck, which were a ma.s.s of scars.