# The Darragh Clurichawn

Extracted from Popular magazine, 01 Dec 1911, pp. 83-95. Accompanying illustrations omitted. Astory of the early American railroad.
The Darragh Clurichawn
By Francis Lynde Author of “The Taming of Red Butte Western,” “The Pan-Americans,” Etc.
Darragh, the man at the throttle of the 809, was all right till an enemy put the “black curse" on him. Perhaps he should have laughed when the Clurichawn—the little old dwarf with the long white beard—confronted him. But Darragh hailed from Enniskiilen and the fear of death gripped him. The mysticism in the blood of the Celtic race dies hard.
JACK DARRAGH'S luck had come to be a proverb on the Timanyoni Division long before the P. S. W. captured the contract for carrying the China mails—which was also before the rush order was placed for the ten new locomotives to be assigned to the Red Butte Western district for the handling of the mail-train flyer.
The luck was not merely ordinary good fortune. It figured rather as a striking example of the good will of the gods. While he was still a fireman, three wrecks, in each of which his engineer had been killed, left him unscathed. When he got his first freight run, the miracles continued. A broken rail in the Red Desert obligingly stayed in place until his entire train had passed over it in safety, flicking over into the ditch only when the last pair of wheels under the caboose had given it a final kick.
Next, a softened embankment in the Tumbling Water flats dropped a foot or more one flood-tide morning just as his engine struck it, but the big mogul—and again the entire train—teetered a round the brink of disaster and came out whole, with Darragh looking back out of his cab window and laughing at the other members of the crew turning handsprings in the ditch in a mad sauve gui peut.
Farther along, when he had been promoted to a passenger run, there were more of the striking dissertations upon the maxim that it is better to be born luck}' than rich. Once, when he was racing the day express down the western grades in the Crosswater Hills, the off-shift dispatcher went to sleep on the job and let the Denver Limited pass the last station at which he could have given it a “meet” order with Darragh's belated train.
With anybody but Lucky Darragh at the throttle of the 809, there would have been a head-on collision and much carnage—at least, that was what everybody said. But, when the trains were within an easy mile of each other, Darragh saw the smoke of the Limited rising above one of the lower hill shoulders, and made his stop, timing it deftly on a bit of straight track so that his fireman had all the topographies in his favor when he made his frantic sprint with the red flag.
Still farther along, there was the incident of the falling bowlder in Timanyoni Cañon. It happened just at sundown, and again Darragh was pulling the day express.
At the curve in the crooked cañon, just above the sheer cliff that rises perpendicularly from the torrent's bed to the first bench of Mount Fernando, Darragh saw a huge mass of rock spring clear from the overhanging edge of the six-hundred-foot precipice.
One glimpse he had of it in the level rays of the setting sun; and the glimpse assured him that the falling bowlder was due to drop upon the track, either just ahead of his train or upon it.
Another man might have disregarded the steep down grade and the laws of momentum and tried to stop. But Darragh was daring as well as lucky, and he knew that his only chance lay in trying to underrun the falling rock.
With the brakes off and the throttle jerked wide, he stormed around the indented curve of hazard in a hailstone shower of pebbles dislodged by the main mass at its first slipping; and a bunch of tourists, crowding the back platform of the rear sleeper for the matchless, cañon view, saw the meteoric death miss them by a scant train length; saw the huge projectile bury itself in the embankment, crushing the heavy steel over which they had just passed as if the rails had been a double line of wheat straws.
This time Darragh had to run the gamut of gratitude. The tourists, and some others, made up a purse for him on the spot, but he would not take it.
“What for should I be swipin' your good money when I've got a roll o' me own in the Brewster Savings Bank?” he protested, with the good-natured laugh that had made him friends from one end of the division to the other. “'Tis well thought of, and I'm obliged to yez. But ye shouldn't be taking it so har-rd. Sure, 'tis all in the day's work, annyhow.”
And then, the flagmen having been posted above and below the avalanched curve, he told the grateful ones that they would better be getting aboard, since he was about to pull out for Brewster and the end of his run.
It was perhaps a month later that Superintendent Maxwell and MacFarland, the trainmaster, met in the dispatcher's office to go for the final time over the “stringing” of the new schedule, which was to include the daily shuttle flight of the fast mail.
“If they'll only get those new engines here in time,” Maxwell was saying. “We're going to be frightfully short of the right kind of motive power if they don't, Mac.”
“That's so,” agreed the trainmaster. “We're going to be short on power, and a good bit shorter on men—the kind of men it's going to take to run that train and make its time.”
“What's that?” demanded the boss. “I thought you had your list filled out.”
“It was filled out—until Darragh went back on me.”
“Lucky Darragh?” queried Maxwell. “What's the matter with him?”
MacFarland, American transplanted while he was yet young, was still enough of a Scotchman to wear a pair of tufty little side whiskers, which he was given to absently stroking the wrong way of the grain in moments of perplexity.
“He's clean daft, I'm thinking,” he said. “You know his record, and how good it is. The men call him 'Lucky'; but the full half of it is a cool head and that blessed gift of judgment that tells a man when to take a chance and when to dodge, and doesn't use up more than the inside fraction of a second in the telling.”
“Well?” said Maxwell questioningly.
“When I told him he was slated for one of the new engines and a mail run, he went white to the ears, and began to stammer out something about having come up to the office to ask if I wouldn't put him back on a freight trick.”
“Oh, piff!” scoffed the superintendent. “That is some of Kitty Clare's nonsense! Kinney, my new shorthand man, gets his meals at the lunch counter now and then, and Kitty has been pumping him to try to find put if Darragh was going to be put on the fast train. Kinney says she is scared stiff for fear Jack's luck will turn and he won't live long enough to marry her.”
MacFarland was comparatively new to Brewster and the Red Butte Western, and he cocked his ear—his Scotch ear—apprehendingly.
“So that's it, is it?” he snorted. “That's why Darragh never opens his pay envelope till he gets to the savings bank with it? Kitty's a good girl, but she shouldn't be trying to chock the wheels of the service. I'll have a word or two with Pat Clare about that.”
“You'll do nothing of the sort, Mac,” said the superintendent, whose own first baby was just old enough to run to the gate to meet him when he went home after the day's work. “Of course, we'll swing Darragh into line. He's too good a man to take the back track in his trade for the anxious fears of the little lunch-counter girl. But we won't mess or meddle in the little girl's love affair—not any.”
This talk in the dispatcher's office befell only a few days before the deliveries of the new locomotives began, and something less than a fortnight before the new time card was to go into effect. For reasons wholly mysterious to the roundhouse contingent at Brewster, and to the railroad colony at large, Lucky Darragh was still trying to fight off his promotion on the very eve of its materialization; was still begging, so MacFarland reported, for a transfer to one of the slow freights.
Gossip—the gossip of the roundhouse tool room and the yard shanties—commented curiously and variously on young Darragh's sudden change of heart. From having been the most ambitious man in the service, he was apparently going to the opposite extreme.
“Needn't tell me,” said Broadbent, the fat machinist, who filed and fitted brasses in the roundhouse repair shop; “he's lost his nerve—that's what's the matter of him. He's never been the man he useter be since that night, a month 'r so ago, when he pulled Number Two through the crossover in the upper yard with the signals set ag'inst him.”
“How come him to do that?” queried Latham, a back-shop man, who had lately been assigned to Broadbent as his helper and extra fitter. “I nev' did get the straight o' that.”
“Gawd only knows—an' He won't tell,” grunted the fat one. “Jenksy, in the block tower, had opened the switches f'r the shifter to get out with a string o' boxes. He hadn't ort to done it on Two's leavin' time; but, anyhow, he did do it. Lucky pulled out on the dot as he always does, and was shakin' her up to a thirty-mile tune when he hit the crossover. Jenksy heerd him a-comin' and set the 'distance' ag'inst him. He underrun that without ever shettin' off, and, when he come to the red-light 'home,' he went under that, too.”
Clay, the lank Kentuckian who pulled the Limited with the biggest compound on the division, put down the oil cup he was clearing with a wire and grinned appreciatively.
“Darragh's tolerably sure to have his luck along with him, whatever he does,” he commented. “That shiftin' engine didn't have any back lights like the Book o' Rules says she ort to; but, just as Two was takin' the crossover, the shifter fireman happens to yank open his fire-box door. Lucky couldn't he'p seein' that; and he saw it quick enough to give him time to make an emergency stop and a back-away, I reckon.”
“Just the same, I'm tellin' you fellahs that Lucky's lost his sand; and that's the reason why he don't want to pull no train scheduled up to a mile a minute, with a five-hundred-dollar fine for not makin' the time,” insisted Broadbent.
Thus ran the comment in the roundhouse tool room; and elsewhere in the Brewster railroad gathering places the story was much the same. John Darragh, the lucky one and the pride of the Timanyoni Division, had lost his nerve, and with it his ambition. The men were sorry; but among the women there was a disposition to pity Bridge Foreman Clare's daughter, and to wonder how she could stand it.
On the evening of the second day preceding the installation of the new time card, Darragh, who was still running odd and even on the day express, came into Brewster two hours late; the delay, however, being due to a freight wreck on the P. S. W. main line, which had added the two hours to his Copah leaving time.
Turning his engine over to Gaston, the night hostler, at the Brewster station platform, Darragh, big and shapeless as a deep-sea diver in his jumper and overalls, swung into the station waiting room and put a leg over one of the high stools at the otherwise deserted lunch counter.
Behind the counter, a dainty slip of a girl, with swimming blue eyes and H face pretty enough to distract attention from the thick pompadour roll which Brewster fashion of the moment prescribed as the proper coiffure, came tripping to serve him.
“Oh, Jack, dear—I'm that glad!” she said. “I sent Tommie up to Mr. Crandall's office two hours ago, and he came back with a word that it was only a freight wreck that was holding you; but I couldn't be sure. They'd be telling a boy anything they pleased.”
“It was a freight smash—somewhere back on the main line,” said Darragh. “We was all of the two hours late leavin' Copah. But I've had a scare, Kitty, girl.”
“I knew it—the first minute I laid eyes on you coming in at the door,” she quavered. And then: “Tell me, John. The ham and eggs'll be up in a minute. I ordered your supper when I heard the Eight Nine's whistle in the upper yards.”
Darragh pointed a big forefinger at the steaming coffee urn.
“Draw me one first,” he said. “I'm shakin' from it yet like a man with the ague.” And, when the coffee came, he drank it down black and hot in thirsty swallows.
“It was at Timanyoni Siding,” he told her when she removed the cup and saucer and was preparing another to go with the ham and eggs when they should come. “I saw the Timanyoni signals from the cañon mouth as plain as I can see your pretty eyes this blessed minute, Kitty. I looked again to make sure while we was comin' down the grade to the sidin'. You know the rules—the operator holds red against you till he hears your whistle; and then, if he has no orders, he gives you the go-by with a couple of wigwags—red to white and back again.”
“I know,” she nodded.
“Billy Carter was firin', and he was hangin' out o' the window on his own side o' the cab when I pulled the whistle. You know the racket the Eight Nine can make with the full head of steam; and I gave 'er all of it, thinkin' the operator must be asleep or crazy to be leaving his white signals out for annybody and' everybody that might come along. When we got nearer, I saw the white light turnin' to a kinda sickly yellow; and just then Billy pops his head in and screeches at me: 'Ain't you goin' to shut off? He's holdin' the red against you!'”
“You poor dear!” said the girl, with the love croon in the sweet Irish voice. “You were that tired you couldn't see straight. Don't I know how it is?”
Darragh passed his hand over his eyes.
“'Twas a hot day, this, crossin' the Red Desert, and the sand was blowin'. God knows I saw red enough all the way across from the Hills to Angels. Come night and the black dark in the cañon, and it was like droppin' into a warm bath when you're all in. Just the same, I didn't get Timanyoni's order signal—not even after Billy yelled at me. I just took his word f'r it and made the stop. It was a meet order with Mr. Maxwell's special, and we oughta got it at Angels. If I'd pulled through, as I was goin' to, we'd 'a' got 'em somewhere along about Dry Gulch—a head-ender, with a bunch of us chewed up and steam cooked.”
Kitty Clare was a coward for her lover; but she could be bravely unflinching for herself when fear pushed her over the edge into desperation.
“Tell me, John, when was it that you'd be taking the last eye test?” she asked, with the shadow of a great dread in her own limpid eyes,
“The last time Doctor Hudson's car was over the division; 'twas a month ago, wasn't it?”
“And you stood it all right?”
“No man of the bunch of us better. Sure, the doctor was jokin' me about it. He said when the railroad job was played out I could go to sellin' ribbons up in Einstein's department store.”
The young woman shook her head.
“I've been afraid—it was—the blindness,” she confessed gaspily.
Darragh was looking away through the waiting-room window at the red, white, and green switch lights starring the Brewster yard.
“No. Most times I can see as good as ever I could,” he asserted slowly; and then he added: “That's the trouble, Kitty, girl. I can see too good. I've seen my death.”
There was a shocked blankness in the pretty face when he let his gloomy eyes seek it again.
“Tell me, John, dear,” she whispered softly. “If it's the death you've seen, 'tis mine as well as yours.”
Darragh dragged out his watch and scowled at its face.
“You'll be off in five minutes 'r so, if the night girl's on time. Meet me at the roundhouse crossin', and I'll walk over home with you.”
“But your supper?” she began. “That's the cook whistling it up the dumbwaiter this minute.”
“I ain't hungry any more,” said the big engineer; and he slid from the high tool and went away to take off his overclothes.
He found her waiting for him a few minutes later when he came up from the roundhouse; and together they crossed the tracks and the bridge, walking slowly toward the new railroad suburb which had been laid out on the hills north of the river. When there were only the bridge electrics for silent witnesses, he made his confession.
“You'll remember, Kitty, girl, how I tried to tell you, the night o' the Brotherhood picnic, about the black day I'd left behind me up in the Medicine Bow Hills, and ye wouldn't listen?”
She nodded dumbly. “'Twas about another woman, John. I knew it by the way you began. And it came to me quick that it wouldn't be good for me to hear.”
“It was another woman,” he said soberly. “I was young and girl crazy them days, and she was the kind that would go through the world crookin' her finger at the men. She was Pete Grogan's daughter; and old Pete was foreman of the section that took in the tank and pump station I was chief engineerin'.”
“Was she pretty?” asked the girl.
“Not to be walkin' on the same side o' the earth with you, Kitty, darling; and that's God's truth. But she had a look in the black eyes of her, and a way with her that meant annything you like to a wild lad just peekin' over the far edge of his teens. Betwixt and between, there was another man—the foreman of the next section but one—and one night he came down to the tank house and said he was goin' to fight me for her. 'Twas a great scrap, Kitty, dear; and, after the first round, I'm thinkin' we'd both forgot what it was all about. My, my, them old days!” Darragh was looking back at them from the mature and hopelessly senile viewpoint of twenty-seven.
“And then what?” queried the bridge foreman's daughter.
“Then the old man, her father, came to me and said since I'd put a man in the hospital for his daughter, it was f'r me to keep her good name by marryin' her. With that I laughed in his face, and said, says I: 'I will not;' and he went away, cursin' and swearin' outrageous. The next night, or maybe it was two nights beyond that, the woman herself came down to the pump house where I was sittin' on the coal pile watchin' the steam gauge on the donkey boiler. What she said to me I'll never put into your innocent ears, Kitty, darling; but this was the end of it—if I didn't marry her, she'd kill herself.”
“Shameless!” said the girl hotly.
“'Twas what I said when I saw how matters stood with her; but you mustn't say it after me, Kitty, dear. It will be the death of you—as it's goin' to be the death o' me one of these fine nights.”
“Go on,” said Kitty Clare, dry-lipped.
“She went out o' the pump house cryin' that I killed the other man for nothing—but he was neither dead nor caring for her—and put the burnin' shame upon her. Then, out of a dark corner of the tank timberin', her little old daddy jumps up and heaves a track wrench at me, and all in the same breath Number Seven, the Portland Flyer, whistles for the tank sidin'. One minute past that, me and the old man was standin' over what was left o' the woman. I don't know how it happened; whether she meant to kill herself, or was only tryin' to cross the track ahead of the Flyer. Nobody'll ever know; and the man who was pullin' the throttle on the Flyer never knew that he'd hit anything until they told him at the end of his run.”
They had reached the gate in front of the bridge foreman's cottage in the new suburb; but, when Darragh would have lifted the latch, the girl stopped him.
“And what then, John?” she asked; and she made no attempt to hide the shaking horror in her voice.
“Then—then, Kitty, dear, the old man stood up and put the black curse on me. And what he said has come true.”
“What was it?—tell me!” she commanded.
“He prayed to God, or to his devil, to let me go on and prosper, and live, and not die until the time might come when I'd see myself havin' all that a man could have, or be wishful to have. Then he turned on me with his yellow teeth showin' in the moonlight, and said, says he: 'You come o' the Darraghs, of Inniskillen; and well do I know the black breed,' says he. 'When you're at the top o' your ladder, look down, me fine lad, and you'll see the Darragh dwarf climbin' up to ye.'”
“Jack!” said the girl. “You don't believe in such things!”
Darragh was leaning against the unopened gate, and the sweat was standing in fine beads on his forehead.
“I did not—then,” he asserted. “Nor for a long time this side of that bad night at Dry Creek tank. But before I came to the Timanyoni, I had a week with the old grandfather, who was still livin' in the little shack in the edge of St. Louis, where I was born. I asked him about the dwarf, and he told me. Back in Ireland 'twas the story that a humpbacked, crooked-legged little man with a long white beard always showed himself to any Darragh that was comin' to his death. The old grandfather believed it, but I didn't—then,”
Though there was a full generation intervening between Kitty Clare and her Irish-born forbears, the mysticism in the Celtic blood dies hard, and she shivered as one with a chill.
“Have you seen it, John?” she asked, with her heart in her throat.
“Three times, Kitty; and 'twas when I was at the top of the ladder, thinkin' no harm could ever come to me, that it began. Do you mind the night, three weeks ago, when I brought you home—the night when I had to double out extra on Two in Buck Bradford's place? 'Twas that night—when I was leaving you and goin' back across the bridge, saw it as plain as day; standing under one of the bridge lamps; a crumpled-up scrap of a man, that I took first for a boy playin' tricks in his mother's shawl, till I saw the long white beard of it. Only for the look of it, I'd 'a' broke and run; but, when I took a grip o' myself and made for it, it was gone.”
“That was once,” said Kitty Clare hurriedly. “And it might have been only a boy playing tricks, after all, Jack.”
“'Twas none so good as that,” Darragh went on gloomily. “Two hours past the bridge crossin', I got my orders to go out on Two in Bradford's place. Three train len'ths beyond the platforms, when I was lettin' the Ten Sixteen out a notch 'r two, I saw it again, standing in the middle of the track and wavin' its arms at me. I went crazy, Kitty; stark mad; and, but for the fireman's pullin' me down, I'd 'a' gone, not only against the red of the tower block, but into that switchin' engine.”
“And the third time?” said the girl, with a shudder.
“'Twas this same night we're living in,” said Darragh solemnly; “at Timanyoni Siding. The thing was on the track, at the upper switch. I saw it as plain as I can see them bridge electrics this minute. And that time I went crazy, too—so crazy that I couldn't see that Timanyoni was holding the red against me for orders till Billy Carter yelled at me.”
Kitty Clare had put one round, white arm on top of the gate palings, and was crying softly into the crook of it.
“And still they'll be making you take the fast mail run,” she sobbed brokenly. “'Tis your grandfather and my grandmother—she's always saying that your luck would turn.”
It is not often that the man becomes the comforter; but this time Darragh proved the exception.
“Don't cry, Kitty, colleen. The luck's with us yet. Three times have I seen the Darragh dwarf, and twice death has leaped at me. But I've got to be a man, darlin'; and they're all sayin' that Jack Darragh's lost his nerve. Ye couldn't live through that, I'm thinking.”
She looked up, crushed by the finality in his tone.
“That means that you're going to take the mail run, after all, Jack, dear?” she faltered.
“I can do no less and be a man.”
She was wiping her eyes furtively. “It will be the death of you, John—and of me. When does it begin?”
“The first train through—the 'Flyinging Postal' they'll be callin' it—will be to-morrow night. MacFarland tells me that I'm to take it east with one of the new ten-wheelers.”
“I'll be praying for you, dear,” she said, with a catch in her voice; and with that she opened the gate and was gone.
As the through schedules had been arranged, it so happened that the first eastward flight of the Flying Postal dovetailed quite accurately with the change of time cards on the Red Butte Western district. The trial-trip train had left San Francisco on time, had held its own over the Sierras, and had actually overrun its schedule some five or six minutes when it was turned over to the P. S. W. System at Lorchi, the western terminus of the Nevada line.
From this time on, Brewster interest in the time-making experiment quickened. Since the new time card, in which the train would have its regular place, would not go into effect until one minute past midnight, the fast mail was running on orders as a “special”; incidentally with the track cleared for it, as if it had been a wrecking train hurrying to a scene of disaster. From time to time reports came clicking through the Brewster sounders. At Latiga, eleven minutes had been lost owing to a hot box under one of the postal cars; but at Sancho, the point at which the steep climb up the western slope of the Hophras begins, ten of the eleven minutes had been regained.
Relay, the first station on the eastern slope, was the next to report; and the little group of trainmen watching the bulletin board in Dispatcher Crandall's office broke into the chattering clamor of the telegraph instruments applausively when the Relay man ticked off the passing of the new train with a loss of only seven minutes on the stiff mountain climb.
“If Barney Giddings don't make it into Brewster on the eight-o'clock dot, it'll be because the wheels won't stay under her,” was Buck Bradford's comment; and MacFarland, who had been hanging over the dispatcher's table for the better part of the afternoon, looked up and nodded.
“Giddings'll do it,” he said; and then: “Any of you fellows seen Darragh this afternoon?”
Gaston, the night hostler whose trick began at seven, was able to give the required information.
“He's down at the roundhouse tunin' up that new ten-wheeler of his, as if he was due to bu'st all the records on the Short Line.”
“Lucky's got it dead easy,” put in young Cargill, who was one of the bulletin-board watchers. “He'll catch up with the new card somewheres along about Navajo, in the desert, and with 'regardless' orders up to that, he'll be able to take the Crosswater Hills on a freight schedule, if he wants to.”
“Yes; if his nerve holds out,” put in Crawford, a new freight puller from the Oregon country, and a man at whom the Brewster railroad colony was beginning to look askance as a “knocker.”
“Shut up,!” said Bradford, in low tones; and then it was seen that Darragh had come in to get the freshest news from the Postal. Whether he had heard Crawford's comment or not, no one knew at the moment; but they were not left long in doubt. Having got the train report from Crandalf, Darragh strode across to the group at the bulletin board.
“This is neither the time nor the place, Jim Crawford,” he began hotly. “But the day we're both off duty, we'll step across to the shadows on the other side of the Timanyoni, and I'll show you wan or two things about that lost nerve o' mine.”
“Aw, give us a rest!” said the Oregonian, who at least had the courage of his rancor. “What I said was only what everybody's sayin'. If the coat don't fit, you needn't wear it.”
Darragh turned away without another word. It was true, then, as he had feared. His repute as a fearless runner of fast trains was already assailed, and he had fairly set his feet in the downward path, which, in the railroad service, can so rarely be retraced. Manlike, he craved sympathy. There was a hard night's work ahead; a trial-trip race, in which he would hold the honor and credit of the Short Line in his hand. If he should fail——
He looked at his watch as he went down the corridor. It was seven-fifteen; and the Flying Postal was only forty-five minutes away. He had had his supper, but there was time for a word with Kitty Clare and a cup of coffee at the lunch counter.
When he took his seat on one of the high stools near the coffee urn, it was Bridget Callahan, the night girl, who came to take his order.
“Where's Kitty?” he demanded.
“Didn't you know, then?” was the arch query. “Sure, she's gone and left you, Lucky.”
“Gone? Where to?”
“How should I know?” said the substitute teasingly.
“But somebody must know. Has she gone home? Was she sick?”
The night girl had drawn his cup of coffee, and was slamming the accompaniments down in front of him in a way to make him suddenly homesick for Kitty Clare's deft servings.
“No; she's not sick, and she didn't go home. She wint away on Number Six—wid a pass from Misther Maxwell to some place over in the Red Desert, where her mother's brother kapes a cattle ranch. She did be sinding a tillegram first, and that's all I know. Now, then, what will ye be having to go wid the coffee?”
“Nothing,” said Darragh; and, when he had absently gulped the black draft without remembering to put either cream or sugar in it, he went out to the east spur, where Gaston was already placing the new 1098 in readiness for the quick coupling when the Flying Postal should arrive.
“How's she handling, Tom?” asked Darragh, when he had climbed to the cab.
“Fine as silk. Foaming a little yet from the grease in her boiler, Baldrick says; but nothing to hurt. They washed her out again with hot water this morning.”
“I ain't goin' to turn any crown sheets on this trip,” said Darragh mechanically.
He was still thinking of Kitty, and wondering what family misfortune had befallen to make her run away without leaving word for him. Also, he was trying to recall what he knew of the ranchman uncle, whose shipping station was at Navajo, in the very heart of the Red Desert. It was little or nothing. He merely knew that Mrs. Clare had a brother who was a cattleman, and that his ranch was somewhere in the foothills of the Little Vermillons north of Navajo.
After Gaston had gone, and while Carter, the fireman, was putting his lamps and signals in order, Darragh got down to “oil around,” a duty which he never intrusted to any one else. Mixed up with the Kitty Clare perplexity was the recollection of what Crawford had said in the dispatcher's office. All through the long afternoon, while he had been tinkering and tuning on the new ten-wheeler, he had been striving to put away the creeping dread inspired by the fear that the thrice-seen misshapen thing, with its humped back and flowing white beard, would jump out at him from some dark corner of the roundhouse.
And now, as he passed from oil cup to oil cup in his methodical round of the big flyer, the fear was again growing upon him; growing so that he had to force himself to straighten up and look around him now and then to be convinced that the commonplace and familiar surroundings of the Brewster yards were still at hand; that nothing was happening to warrant the unreasoning terror that hung like a millstone about his neck. If he could only have had a word with Kitty before the moment of supreme trial came——
He was climbing to the cab with his oil can, when the fireman leaned out of the window and whispered to him;
“Whisht f'r a minute till I'm heavin' a chunk of coal up on the back end of the tender; there's a ride-stealin' hobo up there hidin' behind the manhole.”
Darragh swung himself up to the gangway with a sudden jerk.
“Not for your life, Billy!” he forbade; and then his bones turned to water. If Carter had seen anything, it was no hobo—nor any other human being.
“All the same, I'm goin' to see,” said the fireman; and forthwith he disappeared over the piled-up heap of the coal supply. There were sounds of a struggle, a blast of bad language, and a weird scream, and then Carter came back to drop into the gangway.
“'Twas a 'bo!” he panted. “When I told him t' fade away, he grabbed me by the leg.”
“Well?” said Darragh, with his heart in his mouth.
“He's gone. I t'rew him off. He was on'y a boy f'r size, but I'm thinkin' he was a man grown f'r all that. Did you hear the screech he let out? Ye'd 'a' thought I was killin' him.”
Darragh had heard it, and his nerves were still quivering. Just then the trial-trip mail train, ten minutes late, came thundering through the western yards, with the recalcitrant housing under the second mail car once more blazing to high heaven to account for the lost time. Darragh set his teeth and took his place on the running step. Looking back, he saw Giddings drop from the gangway of the 1098's twin, and saw Gaston swing up to make the cut-out. A minute later, the engine to be relieved came clanking up the main track, with Gaston at the throttle; and Darragh saw, as a man in a dream, the flick of the spur switch from white to red, which was his signal to pull up and couple on.
He did it mechanically, with his eyes fixed upon the section of track illuminated by the dazzling cone of the electric headlight. Nothing happened. The red light of the turned switch burned steadily as he approached and passed it; and, when he looked back, he saw it turn normally to white as the yard switchman gave him the backing signal. With his nerves still on edge, he eased the big ten-wheeler down to a touch coupling with the postal train. While the yardmen were coupling the air hose and linking up the safety chains, he was conscious only of a huge impatience. If they would only let him get away and out of the yards before the Thing showed itself, he would see to it that the fleetest imp in Satan's following should never catch him.
But there was more delay. An emergency crew was hurriedly replacing the defective brass of the hot box under the second car; and the throng of station loungers, gathered to see the fast train go through, massed itself about the hastening workers. Darragh leaned out of his cab window and babbled curses. Five minutes only had been allowed on the special schedule for the engine changing at Brewster; and they were gone, with five more on top of them to add to the ten minutes lost by the late arriving—fifteen minutes to make up, and a promise of more.
Darragh snapped out an order at Carter.
“Get back there and tell them thumb-fingered dope men to get a move on!” he rasped.
Carter obeyed promptly; and, when he was gone, Darragh leaned farther out of his window to get the better look backward. And because his attention was entirely focused upon the anchoring obstacle to the rear, he missed the sight of a bent and misshapen figure dodging around the front end of the engine; dodging and clambering with monkeylike handholds and footholds to a crouching seat directly under the sizzling headlight.
Before Carter had reached the emergency men, they were pulling the jacks out, and the onlookers were scattering to watch the start. Darragh saw Jenkins, the conductor, coming down the stairs from the dispatcher's room on the jump, with the clearance orders in his hand. Just then the superintendent and, MacFarland came up.
“It's up to you, Darragh,” shouted Maxwell, bellowing, to make himself heard above the sudden stuttering roar of the 1098's pop valve. “You've got the honor of the Red Butte Western in your hand to-night. Go to it like a man.”
Darragh nodded without taking his eyes from the hurrying conductor. Carter, returning from his errand, caught Jenkins in mid flight, and, snatching the duplicate copy of the train order, hurled himself up the engine steps.
“First meet is Number Seventeen, at Angels,” he gaped, thrusting the tissue order under Darragh's seat cushion; and, at the clang of the bell, Darragh sent the steam whistling into the cylinders. The pop valve went silent with a sharp phut! there was a shuddering grind and a spitting of fire as the six great driving wheels gripped the rails, a sharp staccato from the stack, and the Flying Postal shot away through the upper yards, gathering speed at each fresh wheel turn.
Men spoke of the initial night flight of the Postal afterward as a record run for the district, spreading the honor of it out to cover the entire R. B. W. from Lorchi to Copah. By the time the Brewster distance signals were flicking to the rear, Darragh had read his clearance order, and was humped over his levers, nursing the big ten-wheeler up to its speed by all the little arts known to the skilled time cutter.
Through the tangents in the park, and around the looping curves in the foothills, the five-car train raced in a spark-throwing projectile flight, with the engineer crouching motionless on his high seat, and the agile little fireman dancing back and forth on the foot-board, hearing nothing but the roar of the exhaust, and seeing nothing but the sliding cataract of coal and the white-hot cavern he was skillfully filling against the fire-cutting grades of the cañon run just ahead.
As the miles fled to the rear, Darragh's nerve came slowly to its own; and with the return came the skilled engineer's joy of mastery over matter in motion. From time to time, as the familiar signals flitted past, he glanced at his watch. Slowly but surely he was eating a hole into the lost time.
At Timanyoni it was only a few seconds over thirteen minutes; at the cañon portal it had shrunk to less than twelve. And when the storming fifty-minute rush up the great gorge was ended, and the train was dodging the foothill curves in the race from the river gorge to Angels on the desert's edge, Darragh found that he had a little more than held his own; had, in point of fact, managed to win back a few more of the precious seconds.
At Angels, the order signal was out; but there was no delay. Train 17, the through westbound freight, was already on the siding; and, while the 1098's wheels were still grinding to the sudden stop under Carter's hand, Darragh was joining Jenkins at the operator's counter in the station.
“Crandall's clearing for you fellows as if you was taking the company doctors to a wreck,” laughed the telegraph man, handing his order pad up for the signatures. “All straight to Last Chance, where you're to meet the Limited.”
Darragh took his copy of the order, and held it up to the light to read it.
Postal special, Eng. 1098, Jenkins conductor, Darragh engineer, will run regardless to Navajo, twelve-one a.m., when it will take its place as Train Number 20 on new time card.
This was the wording of it; and Darragh crumpled it into his pocket and turned on his heel.
“come on; let's go!” he barked at Jenkins; and two minutes later the race had been resumed, and the Angels distance signals were losing themselves in the rearward darkness.
One hour and fifty-five minutes was the time allowance for the special from Angels to the mid-desert station of Navajo, where it would take its new time-card rights as regular train Number 20; and Darragh, taking advantage of the long, level desert tangents, pushed the big ten-wheeler so successfully that his watch was ticking off the last half minute of the one hundred and fifteen when the lonely little cattle-loading station in the midst of the desolations came into sight.
Navajo, long since abandoned as a night telegraph station, showed no lights; but every detail of the surroundings, the single sidetrack, the red station building, with its iron roof contrasting with the weathered gray of the platforms, the whitewashed corral and loading chute, and, beyond the station, the huge bulk of the water tank—all these were struck out vividly in the brilliant beam of the headlight as Darragh shut off the steam and sent the air hissing into the brake cylinders to make the watering stop.
He was leaning out of the cab window and staring fixedly at something on the station platform when the train shot over the westward switch of the siding and Carter climbed over the coal to be ready to pull down the spout of the watering tank. Almost as soon as it took shape, the “something” evolved itself into the figure of a woman starting to her feet from her seat on a rude bench at the end of the building, and shading her eyes with her hand from the dazzling glare of the upcoming headlight.
For a single instant Darragh lost his head, and thought he was seeing a ghost—the ghost of Kitty Clare. Then he remembered Bridget Callahan's story of the hurry call and Kitty's flight on Number Six, and sanity came back. For some cause——
It was a thing that she did that made him stop trying to reason it out and catch his breath with an oath that was more an exclamation of horror than an imprecation. At the instant of the train's uprush, he saw her lower the shading hand, saw her eyes wide open and full of terror, staring, not at him, but at the front end of the 1098; saw her reel and stagger, and fall back upon the wooden bench, again covering her eyes as if to shut out a sight too dreadful to be borne.
Carter was up on the tender, waiting for Darragh to “spot” the manhole under the tank spout, when the Flying Postal stopped with a jerk. Having his own job to attend to, he did not notice that Darragh swung off to run quickly back to the platform of the deserted “day” station; nor did he hear Kitty Clare's glad little shriek when Darragh gathered her in his arms.
“What in the name o' common sense!” raged the lover; but she sobbed out the explanation at once.
“'Twas all a mistake, somehow, Jack, dear; and I've been scared stiff!” she wept. “Aunt Janey is dreadful sick, and Uncle Dan was to meet me with the buckboard. Something has happened, and he didn't come; and I've been here all alone since—since I got off of Number Six, and—and——”
“Alone? In the nighttime? Where is that blasted operator? I'll wring his neck if it's the last thing I ever lay hands on!” stormed Darragh.
“He doesn't know. He was gone when I got here. And I could do nothing but wait, and wait. And the coyotes howled and barked, and I saw things—horrible things! Oh, Jackie, dear, take me with you. Don't leave me here!”
“Sure I will, darling. 'Tis only the postal train, and no place for a woman. But you'll go on the engine with me—on over to Copah, where we can get a wire to your uncle. That'll be the way of it. come, now, and we'll be fadin' away out o' this.”
The tank spout was clanging to the perpendicular, when Darragh ran her forward to the engine and lifted her to the gangway. A scant half minute later he had made her comfortable on his box, with a bunch of waste at her feet, to keep the hot boiler head from touching them, and the flight of the postal train was resumed, Darragh standing on the running step, with an arm at the girl's back to steady her against the swing and lurch of the high-hung flyer.
It was not until the Navajo stop had become only a backward, flitting memory that Darragh took the new time card from its clip and held it under the light of the gauge lamp. Train Number 20, taking time at 12:01, midnight, was ranked as a train of the first class having the right-of-road precedence even over the trains of its own class.
The first scheduled “meet”—and it was the only one with an opposing “first-class” train—was with the Limited at Last Chance; a lonely siding, which was at once the last passing track in the desert and the first in the edge pf the Crosswater Hills. Darragh took his time and glanced at his watch. There were fifty-one miles to cover, and fifty-six minutes in which to cover them; and he gave the storming 1098 another notch or' two of the throttle.
From the lunging start at Navajo, the girl had not spoken. Utterly weary, as it seemed, she had leaned her head against the cushioned box back and closed her eyes. Darragh did not try to make her talk. The cab clamor of a fast locomotive in full flight bars anything milder than a shout with lips to ear; and, besides, the young Irishman had all of the rough man's gentleness and compassion for the woman loved.
He was making the slow-down for the siding at Last Chance before she opened her eyes and started, awake.
“Where are we, Jack, dear?” she asked, in weak bewilderment.
“At Last Chance Siding. We meet the Limited.”
She sat up and began to take notice.
“Are you making the time, Jack?”
“More than making it. We've got three full minutes of our own to t'row to the puppies,” he laughed.
Carter had dropped off and gone ahead to set the inlet switch, and Darragh was flicking the air valve to keep the train in motion until he should get the “come ahead” from the fireman. When the switch light flipped from white to red, Darragh released the brakes and the Flying Postal slid quietly into the sidetrack.
Carter reset the switch and came on leisurely. There was apparently plenty of time. As yet, there was neither sight nor sound of the coming Limited. Away up the line, where the siding dovetailed again into the main track through the outlet switch, a light twinkled and stared glassily, stared red; but neither Darragh nor the upcoming fireman saw it or suspected the trap that an absent-minded brakeman on a freight, passing Last Chance an hour earlier, had set for them.
None the less, the trap was there, as the red eye of the switch lamp sufficiently advertised; and malignant ingenuity could scarcely have devised a better one. The passing freight, in pulling out eastward, had left the switch open for the siding, and the approach to it, down the steep Crosswater grade, was around a sharp curve. Last Chance was not a stop for the Limited; and, barring quick work on somebody's part, the open switch promised a good chance for a head-on collision between the westward-rushing passenger and the standing postal train.
Kitty Clare was stirring again when Darragh set the air lightly to keep his train from drifting backward down the slight grade of the sidetrack.
“Was it all a bad dream, John?” she asked softly.
“What was a dream?”
“The things that I saw at Navajo—the awful things that kept coming out of the dark? And at the last—just under the Ten Ninety-eight's headlight—oh, I'm sure that must have been a dream!”
“What was it, Kitty, darling?”
“The—the dwarf; the Darragh dwarf. I saw it as plain as day, Jack. The old-fashioned Irish hat, the huddling cloak, and the long white beard! And the thought that came to me was that death was riding on your engine with you!”
“'Twas nothing but the scare of you, Kitty,” said the big engineer; though, in his heart of hearts, the nameless fear was stirring again. “Forget it, little woman. In a couple of hours we'll be in Copah, and you'll be safe in bed at Mother Flanagan's.”
As he spoke, the far-off song of the Limited's chime whistle rose, on the still night air, followed by the low diapason of the Steel humming to the myriad hammer blows of flying wheels.
“There she comes!” cried Carter, swinging himself up to the gangway of the ten-wheeler; and the saying was punctuated by a shrill scream from the young woman on Darragh's box.
When the two men looked in the direction of her pointing finger, they saw a sight to freeze the blood in any veins holding a single drop of the Celtic superstitions. On the forward end of the 1098's right-hand running board danced a frantic figure, with blazing eyes and a long, flowing beard, its apelike arms going like the sails of a windmill, and its thin lips loosing a series of blood-curdling shrieks.
Carter was the first of the three in the cab to come alive to the threatened catastrophe.
“The switch!” he yelled. “He's pointin' at the switch—it's turned wrong!” and he flung himself out of the gangway to begin a hopeless race against the down-coming passenger, which was just then swerving around the curve of approach at full speed.
It was all over in a twinkling. Grimsby, engineer of the passenger train, saw the trap when he was fairly upon it, and did his best; and Darragh, who had come to his senses at Carter's yell, slammed the 1098 into the reverse motion, and spun its drivers in a fierce attempt to back away from the awful menace thundering down upon him. At the same instant, the misshapen figure disappeared from the running board, to reappear a moment later, dancing its fantastic breakdown fairly in front of the onrushing Limited.
The girl on Darrag's box cried out and hid her eyes; and, when she opened them again, she was alone in the cab, a pop valve was roaring deafeningly, the white, unblinking headlight eye of the passenger engine was staring blankly at the veiled eye of the 1098, both trains were at a stand, and a crowd of men was gathering at the track side a little way off.
Darragh came to her presently, and his story was short and to the point.
“'Twas old Pete Grcgan,” he said. “They've had him in the asylum these four years, and he broke loose and blew in here—with the wan idea in his crazy old head that he had to get square with me for a thing I didn't do, I guess.” And then: “You'll be goin' back to Brewster in the sleeper of the Limited, and take a fresh start for your Uncle Dan's another day. I've fixed it with Shaughnessy to get you a berth in the Pullman. You'll go, like a good girl? After what's happened——”
She let him lift her from the high seat and help her to the ground—on the side away from the little crowd of curious investigators.
“And you'll go on and make your time, Jack? You'll not be needing me?” she asked anxiously.
“I was just a poor, crazy fool, Kitty, darlin'; and I'm that no more. I'm a man grown; and 'twas the thought that I was askin' you to marry wan less than that that was breakin' me heart, acushla.” And, at the steps of the Pullman, he took her in his arms and kissed her good-by, saying: “Pray for the soul of a poor old man that's gone this night to whatever was waitin' for 'im, Kitty, girl. He'd suffered a cruel wrong in the days gone by, and he meant us no harm. Good night, darlin'; that's Carter pullin' the bell for me.”
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.
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