The Mountain Divide by Frank H. Spearman (poetry books to read txt) 📖

He found Baxter needing a man in the office, and Bucks was asked to substitute until Collins, the despatcher who was ill, could take his trick again. This brought Bucks where he was glad to be, directly under Stanley’s eye, but it brought also new responsibilities, and opened his mind to the difficulties of operating a new and already over-taxed line in the far West, where reliable men and available equipment were constantly at a premium.

The problem of getting and keeping good men was the hardest that confronted the operating department, and the demoralization of the railroad men from the life in Medicine Bend grew steadily worse as the new town attracted additional parasites. When Bucks, after his return, took his first walk after supper up Front Street, he was not surprised at this. Medicine Bend was more than ten times as noisy, and if it were possible to add any vice to its viciousness this, too, it would seem, had been done.

As was his custom, he walked to the extreme end of Front Street and turning started back for the station, when he encountered Baxter, the chief despatcher. Baxter saw Bucks first and spoke.

“I thought you were taking your sleep at this time,” returned Bucks, greeting him.

“So I should be,” he replied, “but we are in trouble. Dan Baggs is to take out the passenger train to-night, and no one can find him. He is somewhere up here in one of these dives and has forgotten all about his engine. It is enough to set a man crazy to have to run trains with such cattle. Bucks, suppose you take one side of the street while I take the other, and help me hunt him up.”

“What shall we do?”

“Look in every door all the way down-street till we find him. If we don’t get the fellow on his engine, there will be no train out till midnight. Say nothing to anybody and answer no questions; just find him.”

Baxter started down the right-hand side of the long street and Bucks took the left-hand side. It 187 was queer business for Bucks, and the sights that met him at every turn were enough to startle one stouter than he. He controlled his disgust and ignored the questions sometimes hurled at him by drunken men and women, intent only on getting his eye on the irresponsible Baggs.

Half-way down toward the square he reached a dance hall. The doors were spread wide open and from within came a din of bad music, singing, and noise of every kind.

Bucks entered the place with some trepidation. In the rear of the large room was a raised platform extending the entire width of it. At one end of the platform stood a piano which a man pounded incessantly and fiercely. Other performers were singing and dancing to entertain a motley and disorderly audience seated in a still more disorderly array before them.

At the right of the room a long bar stretched from the street back as far as the stage, and standing in front of this, boisterous groups of men were smoking and drinking, or wrangling in tipsy fashion. The opposite side of the big room was given 188 over to gambling devices of every sort, and this space was filled with men sitting about small tables and others sitting and standing along one side of long tables, at each of which one man was dealing cards, singly, out of a metal case held in his hand. Other men clustered about revolving wheels where, oblivious of everything going on around them, they watched with feverish anxiety a ball thrown periodically into the disc by the man operating the wheel.

Bucks walked slowly down the room the full length of the bar, scanning each group of men as he passed. He crossed the room behind the chairs where the audience of the singers and dancers sat. He noticed, when he reached this, the difference in the faces he was scrutinizing. At the gambling tables the men saw and heard nothing of what went on about them. He walked patiently on his quest from group to group, unobserved by those about him, but without catching a sight of the elusive engineman. As he reached the end of the gambling-room, he hesitated for a moment and had finished his quest when, drawn by curiosity, 189 he stopped for an instant to watch the scene about the roulette wheels.

Almost instantly he heard a sharp voice behind him. “What are you doing here?”

Bucks, surprised, turned to find himself confronted by the black-bearded passenger conductor, David Hawk. Baxter’s admonition to say nothing of what he was doing confused Bucks for an instant, and he stammered some evasive answer.

Hawk, blunt and stern in word and manner, followed the evasion up sharply: “Don’t you know this is no place for you?” and before Bucks could answer, Hawk had fixed him with his piercing eyes.

“You want to hang around a gambling-table, do you? You want to watch how it is done and try it yourself sometime? You want to see how much smarter you can play the game than these sheep-heads you are watching?

“Don’t talk to me,” he exclaimed sternly as Bucks tried to explain. “I’ve seen boys in these places before. I know where they end. If I ever catch you in a gambling-den again I’ll throw you neck and heels into the river.”

The words fell upon Bucks like a cloud-burst. Before he could return a word or catch his breath Hawk strode away.

As Bucks stood collecting his wits, Baggs, the man for whom he was looking, passed directly before his eyes. Bucks sprang forward, caught Baggs by the arm, and led him toward the door, as he gave him Baxter’s message. Baggs, listening somewhat sheepishly, made no objection to going down to take his train and walked through the front door with Bucks out into the street.

As they did this, a red-faced man who was standing on the doorstep seized Bucks’s sleeve and attempted to jerk him across the sidewalk. Bucks shook himself free and turned on his assailant. He needed no introduction to the hard cheeks, one of which was split by a deep scar. It was Perry, Rebstock’s crony, whom Stanley had driven out of Sellersville on the Spider Water.

“What are you doing around here interfering with my business?” he demanded of Bucks harshly. “I’ve watched you spying around. The next time I catch you trying to pull a customer out of my place, I’ll knock your head off.”

Bucks eyed the bully with gathering wrath. He was already upset mentally, and taken so suddenly and unawares lost his temper and his caution. “If you do, it will be the last head you knock off in Medicine Bend,” he retorted. “When I find trainmen in your joint that are needed on their runs, I’ll pull them out every time. The safest thing you can do is to keep quiet. If the railroad men ever get started after you, you red-faced bully, they’ll run you and your whole tribe into the river again.”

It was a foolish defiance and might have cost him his life, though Bucks knew he was well within the truth in what he said. Among the railroad men the feeling against the gamblers was constantly growing in bitterness. Perry instantly attempted to draw a revolver, when a man who had been watching the scene unobserved stepped close enough between him and Bucks to catch Perry’s eye. It was Dave Hawk again. What he had just heard had explained things to him and he stood now grimly laughing at the enraged gambler.

“Good for the boy,” he exclaimed. “Want to get strung up, do you, Perry? Fire that gun just 192 once and the vigilantes will have a rope around your neck in five minutes.”

Perry, though furious, realized the truth of what Hawk said. He poured a torrent of abuse upon Bucks, but made no further effort to use his gun. The dreaded word “vigilantes” had struck terror to the heart of a man who had once been in their hands and escaped only by an accident.

“You know what he said is so, don’t you?” laughed Hawk savagely. “What? You don’t?” he demanded, as Perry tried to face him down. “You’ll be lucky, when that time comes, if you don’t get your heels tangled up with a telegraph pole before you reach the river,” concluded Hawk tauntingly.

“Let him keep away from me if he doesn’t want trouble,” snarled the discomfited gambler, eying Bucks threateningly. But he was plainly out-faced, and retreated, grumbling, toward the dance-hall steps.

Dan Baggs, at the first sign of hostilities, had fled. Bucks, afraid of losing him, now followed, leaving Hawk still abusing the gambler, but when 193 he overtook the engineman he found he was going, as he had promised, straight to the roundhouse.

It was almost time for the night trick. Bucks hastened upstairs to the despatchers’ office and reported to Baxter, who had returned ahead of him and was elated at Bucks’s success. Before the young substitute took up his train-sheet, he told the chief despatcher of how strangely the conductor, Dave Hawk, had talked to him.

“He has a reason for it,” responded Baxter briefly.

“What reason?”

“There is as good a railroad man as ever lived,” said Baxter, referring to the black-bearded conductor. “He is the master of us all in the handling of trains. He could be anything anybody is on this line to-day that he might want to be but for one thing. If he hadn’t ruined his own life, Dave Hawk could be superintendent here. He knows whereof he speaks, Bucks.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he is a gambler. Did you hear the shooting after I left you?”

“No, what was it?”

“It must have been while you were in Perry’s. Not five minutes after we parted, a saloon-keeper shot a woman down right in front of me; I was standing less than ten feet from her when she fell,” said the despatcher, recounting the incident. “But I was too late to protect her; and I should probably have been shot myself if I had tried to.”

“Was the brute arrested?”

“Arrested! Who arrests anybody in this town?”

“How long is this sort of thing going on?” asked Bucks, sitting down and signing a transfer.

“How long!” echoed the despatcher, taking up his hat to go to his room. “I don’t know how long. But when their time comes––God help that crowd up Front Street!”