Whispering Smith. Spearman Frank Hamilton
is my family.”
“Then where is your fight? When I propose to put you into my car and pull you out of this, why do you say it is too late? It is never too late.”
McCloud made no answer, and Bucks ran on: “For a man that worked out as well as you did yesterday in a trial heat with a billiard-cue, I should say you could turn a handspring or two yet if you had to. For that matter, if you don’t want to be moved, I can run a spur in here to your door in three hours in the morning. By taking out the side-wall we can back the car right up to the bed. Why not? Or we can stick a few hydraulic jacks under the sills, raise the house, and push your bed right on the observation platform.” He got McCloud to laughing, and lighted a fresh cigar. A framed photograph hung on one of the bare walls of the room, and it caught the eye of the railroad man. He walked close to it, disinfected it with smoke, brushed the dust from the glass, and examined the print. “That looks like old Van Dyne College campus, hanged if it doesn’t!”
McCloud was watching him. “It is a photograph of the campus.”
“McCloud, are you a Van Dyne man?”
“I did my college work there before I went to Boston.”
Bucks stood motionless. “Poor little old Van Dyne! Why, my brother Sam taught at Van Dyne. No, you would not have known him; he’s dead. Never before west of the Missouri River have I seen a Van Dyne man. You are the first.” He shook his head as he sat down again. “It is crowded out now: no money, no prestige, half-starved professors with their elbows out, the president working like a dog all the week and preaching somewhere every Sunday to earn five dollars. But, by Heaven, they turned out men! Did you know Bug Robinson?” he asked suddenly.
“He gave me my degree.”
“Old Bug! He was Sam’s closest friend, McCloud. It’s good to see him getting the recognition he deserves, isn’t it? Do you know, I send him an annual every year? Yes, sir! And one year I had the whole blooming faculty out here on a fossil expedition; but, by Heaven, McCloud, some of them looked more like megatheriums than what they dug up did.”
“I heard about that expedition.”
“I never got to college. I had to hustle. I’ll get out of here before I tire you. Wilcox will be here all night, and my China boy is making some broth for you now. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
Ten weeks later McCloud was sent from Medicine Bend up on the Short Line as trainmaster, and on the Short Line he learned railroading.
“That’s how I came here,” said George McCloud to Farrell Kennedy a long time afterward, at Medicine Bend. “I had shrivelled and starved three years out there in the desert. I lived with those cattle underground till I had forgotten my own people, my own name, my own face–and Bucks came along one day with Whispering Smith and dragged me out of my coffin. They had it ordered, and it being a small size and ‘onhandy,’ as the undertaker said, I paid for it and told him to store it for me. Well, do you think I ever could forget either of those men, Farrell?”
McCloud’s fortunes thus threw him first into the operating department of the mountain lines, but his heart was in the grades and the curves. To him the interest in the trainwork was the work of the locomotives toiling with the heavy loads up the canyons and across the uneven plateaus and through the deep gorges of the inner range, where the panting exhaust, choked between sheer granite walls, roared in a mighty protest against the burden put by the steep grades on the patient machines.
In all the group of young men then on the mountain division, obscure and unknown at the time, but destined within so few years to be scattered far and wide as constructionists with records made in the rebuilding operations through the Rocky Mountains, none was less likely to attract attention than McCloud. Bucks, who, indeed, could hardly be reckoned so much of the company as its head, was a man of commanding proportions physically. Like Glover, Bucks was a giant in stature, and the two men, when together, could nowhere escape notice; they looked, in a word, their part, fitted to cope with the tremendous undertakings that had fallen to their lot. Callahan, the chess-player on the Overland lines, the man who could hold large combinations of traffic movement constantly in his head and by intuition reach the result of a given problem before other men could work it out, was, like Morris Blood, the master of tonnage, of middle age. But McCloud, when he went to the mountain division, in youthfulness of features was boyish, and when he left he was still a boy, bronzed, but young of face in spite of a lifetime’s pressure and worry crowded into three years. He himself counted this physical make-up as a disadvantage. “It has embroiled me in no end of trouble, because I couldn’t convince men I was in earnest until I made good in some hard way,” he complained once to Whispering Smith. “I never could acquire even a successful habit of swearing, so I had to learn to fight.”
When, one day in Boney Street in Medicine Bend, he threw open the door of Marion Sinclair’s shop, flung his hat sailing along the showcase with his war-cry, and called to her in the back rooms, she thought he had merely run in to say he was in town.
“How do you do? What do you think? You’re going to have an old boarder back,” he cried. “I’m coming to Medicine Bend, superintendent of the division!”
“Mr. McCloud!” Marion Sinclair clasped her hands and dropped into a chair. “Have they made you superintendent already?”
“Well, I like that! Do you want them to wait till I’m gray-headed?”
Marion threw her hands to her own head. “Oh, don’t say anything about gray hairs. My head won’t bear inspection. But I can’t get over this promotion coming so soon–this whole big division! Well, I congratulate you very sincerely–”
“Oh, but that isn’t it! I suppose anybody will congratulate me. But where am I to board? Have you a cook? You know how I went from bad to worse after you left Cold Springs. May I have my meals here with you as I used to there?”
“Why, I suppose you can, yes, if you can stand the cooking. I have an apprentice, Mr. Dancing’s daughter, who does pretty well. She lives here with me, and is learning the business. But I sha’n’t take as much as you used to pay me, for I’m doing so much better down here.”
“Let me run that end of it, will you? I shall be doing better down here myself.”
They laughed as they bantered. Marion Sinclair wore gold spectacles, but they did not hide the delightful good-nature in her eyes. On the third finger of her slender left hand she wore, too, a gold band that explained the gray in her hair at twenty-six.
This was the wife of Murray Sinclair, whom he had brought to the mountains from her far-away Wisconsin home. Within a year he had broken her heart so far as it lay in him to do it, but he could not break her charm nor her spirit. She was too proud to go back, when forced to leave him, and had set about earning her own living in the country to which she had come as a bride. She put on spectacles, she mutilated her heavy brown hair and to escape notice and secure the obscurity that she craved, her name, Marion, became, over the door of her millinery shop and in her business, only “M. Sinclair.”
Cold Springs, where Sinclair had first brought her when he had headquarters there as foreman of bridges, had proved a hopeless place for the millinery business–at least, in the way that Marion ran it. The women that had husbands had no money to buy hats with, and the women without husbands wore gaudy headgear, and were of the kind that made Marion’s heart creep when they opened the shop door. What was worse, they were inclined to joke with her, as if there must be a community of interest between a deserted woman and women who had deserted womanhood. To this business Marion would not cater, and in consequence her millinery affairs sometimes approached collapse. She could, however, cook extraordinarily well, and, with the aid of a servant-maid, could always provide for a boarder or two–perhaps a railroad man or a mine superintendent to whom she could serve meals, and who, like all mountain men, were more than generous in their accounting with women. Among these standbys of hers was McCloud. McCloud had always been her friend, and when she left Cold Springs and moved to Medicine Bend to set up her little shop in Boney Street near Fort, she had lost him. Yet somehow, to compensate Marion for other cruel things in the mountains, Providence seemed to raise up a new friend for her wherever she