# The Roughneck

Extracted from Short Stories magazine, 1926 Dec 25, pp. 119–128. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
THE ROUGHNECK
By FRANCIS LYNDE
Author of “The Currency Expert,” etc.
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. Just the same, I thought the boss was a little more hardboiled than common the day “Buck” Harrod blew in and asked for a job,
“Let me see your hands!” was the first thing I heard; and when I gave a glance over my shoulder I saw a solidly built young fellow, with square shoulders and a still squarer jaw, showing the palms of his hands to Grimsby. “Huh! Look to me more like a prize fighter's hands than a machinist's,” the boss went on gruffly. “Where are you from?”
The young fellow named a railroad in Ohio, and Grimsby snorted again.
“Put it far enough away, didn't you? Did you quit, or get fired?”
To my astonishment the job hunter said shortly: “I was fired.”
“What for?”
“For punching a man's head in the shop,” was the calm reply.
“Oho! A scrapper, are you? Well, you look it. We don't need any box-fighters here.”
A biff like that was usually enough to make the hungriest job chaser take the count, but this one didn't.
“Some day you might, at that,” he said mildly. Then: “I know my job. If I can't prove it, it won't cost you anything to give me my time.”
As I knew Grimsby, this was no way at all to get on his soft side, if he had one; but for once in a blue moon it seemed to work.
“Ha! Think you can make good, do you?” he barked. “All right; come along and we'll see what your bluff amounts to.” And he got up and took the new man into the shop.
That was all for the moment; but, later in the day, when I had occasion to go into the back shop, I saw that Harrod had been put on one of the pit gangs. He was taking down the front end of an engine to grind in the dry-pipe joints, and the way he went at the job told me that he was at least no “floater.” You can tell, if you've ever handled tools yourself, as I had before I worked my way out of the shop and into the drafting room.
That evening at quitting time I chanced to catch up with Harrod as we were crossing the tracks to the town side of things and spoke to him.
“Been in town long?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. “I came in this morning.”
“Got a good place to stay?”
He named a pretty tough joint on a side street, adding: “Flagman on the train sent me there. I can't say much for his notion of a place to eat and sleep.”
“No,” I agreed; then: “Mother Gifford—she runs a boarding house for a bunch of us—has a spare room. Like to go around with me and look at it?”
He said he would, and the result was that he became one of us, after a fashion; I say after a fashion because he didn't mix and mingle to amount to anything; got in all the overtime he could, and when there wasn't any, he spent the evenings in his room, smoking and reading detective stories. He wasn't surly, or anything of that sort; just kept himself to himself, as you might say.
After a bit we got chummy enough so that I'd drop into his room now and then of an evening to smoke a bedtime pipe with him, and at such times he gave me the notion that there was more to him than appeared on the surface; I mean that when he came to us he wasn't just the ordinary mechanic out of work falling into the first shop he came to for a job; that he had some bigger reason than that for picking Green Butte as a stopping place.
One evening when we were chinning in his room I was brash enough to ask him how he come to pick on Green Butte and our railroad dump for a hangout, and he bluffed me fair and square.
“Maybe you'll find out some day, Jimmie,” he said, with a grin that wasn't altogether good natured. “I had my reasons.”
I knew it was no good to ask him what the reasons were. If he wanted to, he'd tell me, when he got ready, but not a minute before. Drifting into talk about other things, he asked me, casually, if I knew anything about the opening of a new bank in Green Butte, and I said I knew the town talk; that some rich relation of Mr. Homer's, our division superintendent, was backing it, and that I'd heard the rich man's son was to be put in as manager. Also, that there was a rumor that the new bank would get the railroad pay-roll account, through Mr. Homer, of course.
“Do you happen to know where this rich banker is from?” he asked.
I said I didn't know. where he was from but that I'd heard that his name was Hiram Stearns, that he was a stockholder in our railroad, and that he was president of a bank somewhere in the East. I added that he'd brought a party of friends with him to Green Butte, and he was showing the party a good time at the expense of the railroad company—this on the strength of his being a stockholder. Then I asked Buck, jokingly, if he were going to help the new bank out by opening a savings account with it.
“Not so you could notice it; not if it's a Hiram Stearns bank,” he denied, adding, half humorously, that he never had liked the name 'Stearns.'
That was all that was said, and it didn't occur to me at the time to wonder why Harrod, a newcomer himself, should be interested enough to ask questions about the new bank.
As for his own state and standing as a valuable addition to the shop force, that was already well assured. 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. In the afternoon of the day in question I had gone into the shop to explain a blue-print to a man whose lathe was next to the bench where Buck was fitting a set of crank-pin brasses.
At the moment, the yard engine was backing the “dead” 1026, laid up for a re-truing of her driving wheels, into the shop. The two repair tracks, down one of which the dead engine was being pushed to its place over a working pit, ran through the center of the main building and were spanned by an electric traveling crane carried on rails high up under the main roof trusses, its “bridge” extending across and serving both tracks.
To be ready to lift the 1026 off her drivers—the modern way to free the wheels—the crane man at his controllers in his hanging cab under the bridge was bringing his big lifting machine along its rails from the far end of the shop; and at the same time shifting the transverse hoisting head, with its tackle and two steel yokes from which dangled the massive chain-cable lifting slings, from Track One to Track Two, upon which latter the 1026 was coming in.
In the space between the two tracks stood a young man and a girl, sightseers from the Stearns party, as I took it, watching the advance of the big dead locomotive, and they had their backs turned to the upcoming crane with its swinging menace. Neither of the two was conscious of the danger surging up behind them; and it was apparent that the crane man did not see them. The catastrophe threatening was perfectly obvious. The swinging chain slings would presently knock one or both of the sightseers down, and most likely leave them stunned and helpless directly in the path, if not fairly under the wheels, of the backing 1026.
I suppose half a dozen of us in the machine bay saw what was about to happen but Buck Harrod was the only one with presence of mind enough to get action. With a shout of warning he dropped his tools and ran. And, as he ran, we saw the young man of the pair give a startled glance over his shoulder at the approaching menace, and then, seemingly with no thought at all for the girl whose danger was precisely the same as his own, leap aside and dodge.
When Buck reached the girl there was not time for anything but strong-arm work. Without missing a stride, he grabbed her up in his arms, cleared an obstructing pile of blocking in a high jump that would have done credit to a champion hurdler at a track meet, and set her down in safety at the precise instant the nearest of the surging slings whipped over the spot where she had been standing.
That was that, and what followed was all dumb show for us, the shop noises making it impossible to hear what was said but the pantomime was readable. The girl's outburst of gratitude which seemed to be mingled with a whole lot of astonishment, was not that of a stranger to a stranger. It was plainly evident that she had known Buck aforetime and elsewhere. Then we saw him hold out his work-grimed hands, and he seemed to be excusing himself for having had to put those hands on her to the messing up of her pretty dress. And I could imagine she was saying that she had other dresses, but only one life.
At that, the dudish looking young man came up, very palpably blazing with wrath, now that the danger was over; wrath directed at the crane man, but unloaded upon Buck; perhaps switched over to Buck when the black finger marks on the girl's dress were taken into account. I could easily fancy he was flaring out at Buck and saying, “What kind of a chump are you, pawing a lady all over and spoiling her dress?” or words to that effect. Anyway, his gestures fitted the guess.
Buck came back to his bench presently and went on with the brass fitting as if nothing had happened. But his eyes were hot and he was scowling like the villain in a play. I went on into the office without saying anything to him, and there I found the lately imperiled pair. The office was otherwise unoccupied, and the young man was trying to remove some of the smudges from the girl's frock with his handkerchief, and, of course, was only making them worse. Neither of them paid any attention to me as I went to my place in the drafting alcove.
“How do you suppose Buck Harrod ever happened to turn up here?” the young man was saying irritably. “I thought he'd skipped out to South America, or Mexico, or some other foreign country.”
I fancied there was a bit of an edge in the young woman's voice when she replied, “I don't know why he shouldn't be here, if he wants to.” Then she added: “It's fortunate for me that he happened to be just where he was a few minutes ago. If he hadn't been there, I shouldn't be here now. And another thing, Hal: you ought to be ashamed of the way you spoke to him, after he had just saved me from getting hurt. Anyway, I was ashamed for you.”
“Pshaw!” was the frowning rejoinder; “His skin's thick enough. He's nothing but a mechanic—if he isn't something much worse. I'll bet they don't know his record here. If they did, they'd fire him, too, quick.”
“That's ungenerous, Harry, and you know it is!” the girl flamed out. “He proved that he was at home in bed the night your father's bank was broken into. You know that as well as I do!”
“I know that his boarding-house lady testified that she saw him come in and go to his room, and that she would have known if he had gone out again. 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. He couldn't stay in Middletown after the bank burglary, and I shall try to see to it that he doesn't stay in Green Butte.”
Whew! That brought blood, if nothing else had. I didn't need to turn around and look; I could perfectly well imagine how that pretty girl's brown eyes were scorching things when she said, “If you do that, Harry Stearns, I'll never speak to you again as long as I live! I don't care if you are my cousin!”
They left the office a minute or so after this, and what I had seen, and, later, overheard, was mighty interesting. So Buck had been accused of robbing a bank, had he? And he had got off on a Scotch verdict of “not proven guilty,” which meant that the jury had thought he was guilty only the legal evidence was lacking. It was in the hope that I might make him loosen up a bit that I strolled into his room that evening for a smoke and took occasion to say something about the crane-and-girl episode of the afternoon, praising him for his swift get-away when the rest of us were too nearly paralyzed to move.
“Umph!” he grunted; “I came mighty near being that way myself. Didn't know Lois Hardwick was within a thousand miles of Green Butte until I looked up and saw her standing there in the way of the crane.”
“You knew her before?” I threw out.
“You said it! We used to go to school together; that is, until after her father got rich in real estate and sent her away to a fashionable college.”
“Then you know the man who was with her, too?”
“I'll say I do!”
For a few minutes we smoked in silence, and that seemed as if it were going to be the end of it. 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. They've forgotten that one of her grandfathers was a carpenter and the other a farm hand. Besides, I'm black-listed.”
“How is that?” I asked, wishing to hear his side of it.
“It's a short horse, soon curried. 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. With the news of the cashier's stroke in the morning paper, some fool had started a rumor that the bank was in trouble; that there'd been a defalcation. The town was wild.”
“I see,” I said. “That meant a run on the bank.”
“Sure; especially if there was any delay about opening the doors. When Stearns sneaked me in at the side door he couldn't talk straight, he was so crazy scared. I expected to have to drill into the lock and force it, and had brought tools for it. But when I saw that the lock was an old-fashioned make, I told Stearns I thought I could open it by listening to the click of the tumblers.”
“And you did it?”
“Yes; I was just fool enough to do it. And for my pay, Stearns went to my boss afterward and told him I was a dangerous man to have around; that he'd better just quietly get rid of me. I got that straight, from the boss's stenographer. The Old Man was decent enough to refuse to fire me; but three weeks later the Stearns bank was burglarized by somebody who either knew the combination, or had opened the vault in the same way that I had. Stearns had me arrested on suspicion and I had to stand trial. Stearns and his cousin, Lois's father, cut a big figure in the town—they own a good deal of it—and I was nothing but a roughneck workingman who knew too much about opening safes. I had a packed jury, but it had to acquit me for lack of evidence.”
“I see,” I said. “And then you lit out and came west?”
“Not right away. My boss, the master mechanic—he was about the only friend I had left—took me back into the shop after the trial; but it wasn't long before the fellow at the bench next to mine got funny one day and called me 'Buck the Burglar.' I beat him up for it, and then, of course, I had to clear out.”
“How did Miss Lois figure in all this?” I asked.
“She didn't figure at all. She was away during the trial. But I guess they filled her up properly after she came back and made her believe that I was a crook. Anyway, just before I left I heard she was going to marry Hal Stearns.”
“Don't you believe it,” I laughed; “either that, or the other thing—that she thinks you're a crook.”
“Humph! What do you know about it?” he shoved in suspiciously.
I wasn't going to tell him what I had overheard in the office a few minutes after the near tragedy, so I said, “Call it a guess but I'd bet on it, just the same. 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?”
“He had the nerve to rip out at me for putting my dirty hands on Lois and spoiling her dress; wanted to know why I hadn't grabbed the crane chains instead of pawing her all over.”
I laughed. “I don't wonder that you wanted to push his face in,” I said; and with that I left him.
During the week that followed this little heart-to-heart talk with Buck a number of things happened. The first of them was a call upon Mr. 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.”
“Thanks,” said the boss, and that's all he did say. But for some time after Buck's accuser had gone, he sat back in his chair, chewing his dead cigar and scowling, and I knew he was trying to make up his mind whether to fire Buck, or to let things rock along. And I was a lot relieved when quitting time came and he had not sent me to call Buck on the carpet. With the relief came the thought that I'd like to have some excuse to punch young Stearns's head. He had done the tale-bearer act, just as he had threatened to.
Naturally, I didn't tell Buck anything about this dirty little episode. So long as the boss didn't fire him, there was no need of my butting in.
It was on the second day after this that we put on a small night shift to catch up on some extra repairs, giving such of the men as cared for it a chance to get in some overtime. Buck was one of a dozen or more who took to coming back after supper, and one night I accompanied him from Mrs. Gifford's, meaning to get in a quiet evening hour or so figuring some data for the boss.
From the night when Buck had unloaded his particular grief on me, neither of us had broached the subject again; but new he opened the door of his own accord.
“Jimmie, it's hell for me to have Lois here in the same town with me, and yet be obliged to dodge and keep out of her way,” he began abruptly. “I thought I'd got a grip on myself when I heard that she and Hal Stearns were engaged; but I guess I'm just as big a fool as ever I was.”
“Huh!” said I. “If I were in your place, and felt that way about it, I'd butt in, or break a leg trying to.”
“No you wouldn't,” he snapped. “Suppose I had a chance—and I don't know that I ever had—look what it would be asking of her. You've seen her. Can you imagine her marrying a common mechanic, cooking for two in a five-room shack and living on a machinist's wages?”
“I can very well imagine her marrying the man she loves, no matter what his job might be. She wouldn't marry the job: she'd marry the man.”
“But that isn't all,” he went on. “Her people, the whole new-rich tribe of them, including the Stearns cousins, hate me. Despise me, I guess is the better word. I think they've been sort of scared of me ever since Lois and I were children together; afraid it might eventually come to something more than chumminess. I shouldn't wonder if that was the main reason why Cousin Hiram tried to run me off the map in that bank-burglary business.”
I could have told him that Cousin Hiram was again trying to run him off the map, but I didn't. Instead, I spoke of the junketing party the elder Stearns had brought with him from the East, and what it was costing the railroad company to chase it all over the landscape in a special train.
“Where is the party now?” he asked.
“It went up to the Copper Consolidated mines on the Lame Horse branch this morning,” I replied, adding: “again in Mr. 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. 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.
When I re-entered the office the telephone was ringing fiercely and I answered it. Betterton, the superintendent's chief clerk, was on the wire, and he was evidently excited, not to say badly rattled.
“That you Jimmie?” he barked. “Has Burkman got back yet?”
“No,” I told him.
“And Grimsby's still at the time meeting?
“Sure thing.”
“So is Mr. Homer, and there's the devil to pay! 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. He's here now, working in the night shift.”
“Harrod? I don't know him, but I'll take your word for it. Tell him he has the authority and to hop to it. The despatcher is clearing for the wreck train and there won't be anything in the way. Jump to it, Jimmie! Tell Harrod to grab every man he can get hold of. It's up to us—with the bosses all out of reach!”
I jumped, first upon Buck. He took hold, quite as if it were all in the day's work, turned the night shift out to a man, and sent me to the roundhouse to get what help was to be had there. In less time than it takes to tell it, the train was made up and we were on our way to the scene of the disaster forty miles west, with a picked-up crew of shopmen, yardmen, roundhouse helpers—a little of everything. I sat with Buck on a coil of rope in one of the box-cars.
“Ever had any experience in snakin' em out, Buck?” I asked,
“A little; but not enough to hurt. Who let me in for this job?”
“I did,” I confessed.
“What for?”
I didn't tell him the real reason; that for a second time Banker Stearns was reaching for his scalp, and that if he made a good job of picking up this wreck it might turn the scale in his favor. Instead I said, laughing, “Oh, just to see what you're made of, I guess.”
“All right,” he grinned; “if that's it, I'll show you.”
He did it, and to the queen's taste, at that. When we reached the Junction, we found that Betterton hadn't stretched things a particle. Something had gone wrong with the split switch at the junction and about two-thirds of a long freight train was piled up all over the main line and the first hundred yards of the branch. We had only the secondary equipment; Burkman had the big crane picking up the derailed engine at the other end of the division. 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.
“Did you tell me the junketer's special had gone somewhere up the branch?” he asked. And when I nodded; “It's on its way back now,” and he pointed to the headlight of a train that was appearing and disappearing on the sharp grades of Lame Horse Mountain.
“Huh,” said I, “they'll have a good long wait before they can get out on the main line.”
“They are probably all abed and asleep long before this time,” he offered.
But, as it turned out, he was wrong. When the one-car special had pulled down as near to the obstructions as it could get, half a dozen or more of the junketers piled out of it to come and look on; among them, Banker Stearns and his son and Miss Lois. The work of snatching and snaking the wrecked cars out of the way was again going on full tilt, and I could see that Buck was fiercely resenting the invasion of the sightseers. Spectators at such a job have a way of getting underfoot, to the hindering of the rush and not seldom to their own peril. Any moment a hitch may break and let a strained tackle or cable snap back like a murderous whip, and it is all a foreman can do to look out for his own men and keep them out of danger.
Buck stood it in silence as long as he could, but finally he had to go to the intruders and tell them to keep back out of the way. They didn't take his warning kindly; at least Mr. Banker Stearns didn't, I wasn't near enough to hear what was said; but when Buck came down into the raffle to show his men how to make the next hitch, his face was red and his eyes were blazing, and I knew then that Stearns had said something to humiliate him; something to belittle him before the others.
And that wasn't all. 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. A box-car was bedded in the mass of wreckage in such a manner that it served as a key to lock in three others. Bucks called Harvey, the crane engineer, down to look at it, and Harvey said the crane would pull it if the tackle would hold. Accordingly, a hitch was made on the box-car, and when the crane began to wind, Buck shouted a warning to all and sundry to stand clear, and everybody got out of the way—all but three members of the private-car party.
Buck bellowed again, and two of the three came back and joined the others at the bonfire. But the third man, young Stearns, paid no attention to the repeated warning. I suppose he thought he was safe enough where he was. He was standing between the rails of the main track, and what he didn't know was that the pulling cable, if it should break, would recoil like a giant whiplash. Anyway, he merely gave Buck a scowling look, calmly tock a cigarette from his pocket case, tapped it on his thumbnail and struck a match to light it.
It was at this moment that the box-car began to move, and we could all see that the strain on the tackle was terrific. The wrecking crew, with Buck holding the men back out of possible danger, had eyes for nothing but the straining crane tackle and its extension, a big, three-inch hemp hawser, a new rope that began to sweat the castor oil in drippings and grow rigid as an iron bar under the tremendous pull. We all knew that the hawser would break, if anything did; that the wire-rope fall of the crane would stand any strain the winding-drum could put upon it.
Fortunately for Stearns, a hemp hawser always gives a momentary warning when it is about to pull in two; a few fibres part first and stand out as if they were electrified. Stearns didn't see the warning; perhaps he wouldn't have known what it meant if he had seen it. He was holding the lighted match to his cigarette when Buck gave a roar like that of a mad bull and leaped for him; leaped, caught him around the waist and flung him, as if he had been a bag of feathers, to the safe side of the main track embankment. At the flinging instant the big rope parted, the free end came back in a hurtling, scythelike sweep, and Buck went down as if he had been hit with an ax.
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. Just as she broke away, Buck sat up and pushed the doctor aside.
“I'm all right,” he said in a sort of thin voice. “Just knocked the breath out of me for a minute.”
“You are very far from all right,” the doctor snapped back. “You have two ribs broken that I know of. Lie down and let me see what else you've got.”
“Can't do it now—not till my job's done. Thanks, just the same. Here, Jimmie—give me a hand up, will you?” And after we'd pulled him to his feet, he staggered off down the slope and began to tell his men how to make another hitch on that key box-car. But I could see that he was doing it pretty much on sheer nerve. Every now and then I'd see him take a handful of waste from his overalls pocket and wipe the sweat from his face, though it wasn't a hot night, by any means.
Between times, I had an eye on the bunch of private-car people. Young Stearns, looking a bit the worse for wear for the fling into the ditch that had saved his life, was talking to Miss Lois, or rather, she was talking to him, and I was just curious enough, or unprincipled enough, to listen in.
“After what you've done and what he's done, you ought to go down on your knees to Dave Harrod!” the girl was saying, and though she spoke quietly, anybody could see that she was fighting hard for self control.
The man she was talking to hung his head. “I don't know what you mean,” he said.
“Oh, yes, you do!” came back like a shot from a gun. “You told your father that Dave was working for the railroad company in Green Butte, and he went to Mr. Grimsby and tried to get Dave discharged!”
“How do you know all this?”
“Don't be an ostrich! You told me yourself you were going to do it; and when your father told mine what he had done, I knew you'd carried out your cowardly threat. You've been talking against Dave and sneering at him ever since I can remember, and you call yourself a gentleman! You are not even a good sport, Harry. You're sneering at him now, when he has just saved your life and got himself all smashed up doing it. I'd like to know what you've got against him to make you act so much like a cad.”
At this the cad struck back. “You're in love with that brute, Lois, and that's enough. I'm not going to let him stay in the same town with me—not if I can help it!”
I saw her pretty lip curl and her eyes flash. “Oh,” she said, very softly, “you are making another threat, are you?” And then, as sweetly as if she were not angry enough to bite a nail in two: “I think you will change your mind about that, cousin mine: I shall make you change it.” Then she turned her back upon him and came over to where I was standing by the fire.
Before I knew she was going to speak to me, she said, “You are a friend of Dave's, aren't you?”
I said I was, and she went on quickly: “Doctor Lambert tells me he is badly hurt. 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; but just then a better answer came along in the approach of a train from the west. Excusing myself abruptly, I ran down to where the train was coming to a stand on the cleared main line. It was a company special, made up of a single Pullman and a diner, and it was carrying a bunch of the east-end officials who had been attending the time meeting. When it stopped opposite the wreck I was glad to see Mr. Homer and Mr. Grimsby drop from the step of the Pullman.
Of course, they'd had a wire report of the wreck, and I told them what they hadn't heard; about the broken tackle that had come near killing Buck, who was pinch-hitting as wrecking boss. Mr. Grimsby looked at the huge pile of débris that had been snaked off the main-line track and said to Mr. Homer: “Damned good work, I'll say—for the little time he's had; wouldn't you?” Then he went with me down to the branch track, where Buck was leaning against a tipped-up gondola bossing the gang, and took over the job himself, telling Buck he was to go to Green Butte on the official train and get himself looked after in the railroad hospital.
I helped Buck up the embankment, but he balked like a mule when I to put him on the train. “No,” he objected stubbornly, “I don't want to mess up a Pullman in these clothes. I'll hang on and go back with the wreck-wagons.” I didn't insist too much. He wasn't either dead or dying; and I had a hunch that there was something waiting for him up by the bonfire that might do him a heap more good than a hospital would, just then.
I boosted him up the hill and eased him down by the fire where he could sit with his back to a tree and look on while Mr. Grimsby finished the snaking job. Right off the bat, Miss Lois came over and sat down on the ground beside him. At that, I suppose I should have pulled my freight and faded out of hearing; I did sheer off a bit and turn my back. But again I was just curious enough, and unprincipled enough, to listen in.
The first thing she said was, “David, dear, haven't you any sense at all? Won't you let Doctor Lambert find out how badly you are hurt?”
I heard Buck mutter: “You mustn't worry about me; I'm all right.”
“But I am worried,” she insisted. Then: “You shouldn't have risked your life the way you did, David.”
“I guess I had to, didn't I?” he gritted. “I couldn't stand by and see you made a widow before you were married, could I?”
“A widow? 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; in fact, in the next few minutes there was a good bit that I didn't catch because their voices had suddenly dropped to a murmur. When they became audible again, Buck was saying, in a voice that was like that of a man just coming to the surface of the pond after a deep dive, “Do you really mean it, Lois—that I am the man? I—you've got me going, little girl! I thought it was all on my side, I've always. thought so.” Then: “I wonder if you realize what you're going up against—what your people will say—what it will mean to marry a man who works with his hands for wages?”
“You're not always going to work only with your hands, David, dear; though I shouldn't care if you did. I can work, too; I belong to my own generation, and I don't want to be a useless ornament. Each of my two grandmothers kept house for the man she loved, and I can do the same. And as for my people——”
There was an abrupt pause, and I skewed my head around to see what made it. The person responsible was the tall, thin faced man whom I had spotted as Miss Lois's father. He was standing over the two sitting by the tree and saying in a voice that sounded exactly like a circular saw going through a dry board, “If you are quite through entertaining your workman friend, Lois, I think we'd better go back to the car. It's getting very late.”
It was then that Miss Lois, who certainly did belong to her own generation, rose to the occasion.
“But I am not through, Dad,” she said quite coolly, as she got upon her feet to face the music. “I have just now asked Mr. Harrod—” she put the emphasis an inch thick on the “Mister”—“to marry me, and he says he will. That being the case, I have some new responsibilities, the first of which is to see that my husband-to-be gets proper care for the hurts he got a little while ago keeping Cousin Hal from being killed.” Then to me: “Jimmie—” I haven't the remotest idea how she had learned my name— “Jimmie, please run and see if Mr. Homer can find room for David and me in his car, so we can reach Green Butte and the hospital without any more delay.”
Of course, I ran for it, and so didn't hear what Father Hardwick had to say to his up-to-date daughter; but it was no doubt good and plenty. I caught Mr. Homer just as he was getting orders over the Junction wire for his special to go on east, and he held things up until Miss Lois and the private-car party doctor came along with Buck and put him aboard. I went in with them and helped get Buck into a made-down berth, and then, as the engine bell was ringing for the start, I made a break to get off. But Miss Lois held me for just a second.
“You're a dear, Jimmie,” she said, putting her arms around my neck and kissing me as if I'd been her long lost brother. Then: “It won't be much of a wedding party, but you'll be in it. Run along now, and don't get hurt jumping off.”
It was a new kind of a Buck that looked up at me from the hospital bed the next day when I made my duty call. He was all swathed and strapped up with bandages to hold the broken ribs in place, but his good right hand had a grip like a vise when it closed around mine.
For a while I couldn't get him to talk about anything but the wonderful girl who had picked him out of a worldful of men. I found she had just been to see him, so that accounted fer the way he looked and talked. But after he'd used all the words in the dictionary raving over his heavenly luck, I got in a question or so that I wanted to ask.
“Did you know she was coming to Green Butte when you lit down out here, Buck?” I asked.
“No; but I knew Hal Stearns was. That was why I came.”
“That's only half of it,” I suggested.
“You're right; it is. From two or three things that I learned before I left Middletown, I was pretty sure he was the one who had robbed his father's bank. In the first place, there was only a couple of thousand dollars taken, when there was a chance to take a good deal more. Then a fellow who knew Hal pretty well from having gambled a good bit with him told me that Hal owed gambling debts to just about that figure and was likely to have a lot of trouble made for him if he didn't pay up. Get the idea?”
“Perfectly,” I said.
“Well, that wasn't all. This same fellow that I'm talking about showed me a bit of paper with some numbers on it; said it was stuck between two five-dollar bills he'd won off of Stearns the night before. The numbers looked familiar, and pretty soon I remembered; they were the combination figures of the lock on the bank vault. You may remember I told you that Hiram Stearns had these numbers written on a slip, and that he couldn't find it—for the good reason that Hal had found it and stolen it.
“When I got hold of that slip I knew then what I was going to do. 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?”
He grinned and rocked his head on the pillow.
“Its all jake, now, Jimmie,” he said. “I've told Lois the facts, and have given her the fatal slip of paper with the figures on it; also the name of the fellow who gave it to me. She'll do the rest, never you fear. There won't be any scandal, because it's all in the family; but there'll be a new manager for the new bank, just the same. Now then, if you haven't anything better to do, you may congratulate me. If you don't say I'm the luckiest dog that ever barked——”
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.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1930, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 93 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse