Trouble Shooter. Ernest Haycox

      I

       Table of Contents

      This was April, 1868, with the combination work-passenger train running up the valley of the Lodgepole toward Cheyenne.

      More or less surrounded by the necessary junk that belonged to his job, Frank Peace sat with his long legs across the opposite seat and watched April's premature dusk slowly fill the desert's empty horizon. Spring broke late this year, for a gusty wind boiled against the car sides and the air scouring down the aisle laid its raw edge against him. Out in the bleak foreground a band of antelope rushed up from a coulee, scudding away into the farther darkness; a window behind Peace squalled open and the man sitting there pumped seven quick shots from his Spencer fruitlessly into that bitten plain and slammed the window down again.

      Fresher cold flowed along the car. They were cracking it up at forty miles, through a suddenly condensed night. The trucks of this car chattered a little and Frank Peace's body registered the sudden bite of a curve with a professional interest. Idle as he was, he could never divorce himself from this care; it had been so all the way from Omaha, his ears and eyes attentive to tangent and curve, to the rhythm of the wheels on the rail joints, to the flow of the train along a grade scooped up from the desert only a year before. At Hillsdale Station it was thoroughly dark, the lights of the station making a yellow shine on the squad of Soldiers drawn up along the platform. In the moment they stood to his view he saw their stolid faces whipped red by the wind; and then the train ran on, the engine's halloo roping back through the rush of weather. Conductor Paddy Miles came by.

      Peace said: "Stop at Archer, Paddy."

      "Sure, Mister Peace," said Paddy Miles and went on down the aisle, his broad shoulders pressing aside the men restlessly congesting it. For this April was the beginning of another construction season. The Union Pacific's steel rails, racing 240 miles across Nebraska from North Platte the year before, had stopped eight thousand feet high in the snowy jaws of Sherman Summit, beyond Cheyenne. But this was spring again and ten thousand men of all degrees and kinds—graders, steel layers, bridge builders, gamblers, freighters, gunmen, ex-soldiers, tradesmen, mule skinners, cowhands, doctors and lawyers, politicians—were bound back in one great tidal wave to Cheyenne and to the end of track beyond Cheyenne for another turbulent, wicked year. Young and old, worker and drone, reputable and disreputable—the five passenger coaches of this train were crowded with them.

      Looking them over with a candid eye, Frank Peace saw one common thing that held them together—a buoyancy, a high vigor that sang in their voices and turned their muscles impatient. He had it himself, a restlessness that made fifteen hours on the train most intolerable. The lamplight of the car diffused itself feebly through an air turned blue by the fumes of small-stemmed clay pipes clutched doggedly between Irish jaws. All faces were ruddy and all talk had the one major overtone; which was that tuneful and tenor lilt of Erin. Some of these men were fresh from the old sod; the rest of them were veterans of the shovel and, before that, soldiers under Grant. In their cowhide boots and formless store suits and round-brimmed hats they made a rough show, but Peace knew them well and understood that these were the kind of men who would stand the bitter blast of winter and the merciless heat of sun and alkali better than any other breed. They would curse and complain and fight, but they would work until work was done; and they would turn from shovel to the stacked guns beside them and stand fast when the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the Arapahoe raided the track. He liked them because he had fought with them and against them—and never had found them soft.

      And then his eyes turned to another part of the car and he was again puzzled, as he had been all the way from Omaha, to see the girl with the yellow hair and softly smiling face placed opposite Big Sid Campeaux.

      There were two women in this car, but of the one who sat down near the pot-bellied stove and seemed so cold and demure and frightened he had no illusions. For her name was Rose, and wherever the end of track would be there she would be.

      It was the other girl he could not understand. She seemed to know Big Sid, which was part of the puzzle, since Big Sid was no man to hide his talents. At each successive end of track town—north Platte, Julesburg, Sidney and Cheyenne—it was Big Sid's huge tent saloon that trapped a large part of the restless construction man's pay check. They burned for a while, these towns, like a crimson fire against a shocked prairie, and then the rails hurried on and they died and a new camp was born; yet as fast as the rails hurried, Big Sid was there at the vanguard with his saloon to meet the first engine chuffing with its load of Paddies. More than that, it was Big Sid who represented the crooks and desperadoes and gamblers clinging so relentlessly to the flanks of the road as it pressed on. When Big Sid spoke he spoke for all of them. A huge man, gray and bland of cheek, soft-spoken and well dressed, he sat quietly with the girl and showed her a marked courtesy.

      She wasn't, Peace decided, Campeaux's kind of a woman. There was a breeding about her, a pride in the lines of her features. She had put her fashionable wrap aside somewhere on the trip and now wore a long, blue military overcoat buttoned against the