Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life

by Frank H. Spearman

But our men had the job to do with one half the money they needed. The lines to run, the grades to figure, the culverts to put in, the fills to make, the blasting to do, the tunnel to bore, the bridge to build—in a limit; that was the curse of it—the limit. And they did the best they could. But I will be candid: if a section and elevation of Rosamond's bower and a section and elevation of our Peace River work were put up to stand for a prize at a civil engineers' cake-walk the decision would go, and quick, to the Peace River track. There are only eight miles of it; but our men would back it against any eighty on earth for whipping curves, tough grades, villainous approaches, and railroad tangle generally.

The directors always have promised to improve it; and they are promising yet. Thanks to what Hailey taught them, there's a good bridge there now—pneumatic caissons sunk to the bed. It's the more pity they haven't eliminated the dread main line curves that approach it, through a valley which I brief as a cañon and the Mauvaises Terres rolled into one single proposition.

Yet, we do lots of business along that stretch. Our engineers thread the cuts and are glad to get safely through them. Our roadmasters keep up the elevations, hoping some night the blooming right of way will tumble into perdition. Our despatchers, studying under shaded lamps, think of it with their teeth clinched and hope there never will be any trouble on that stretch. Trouble is our portion and trouble we must get; but not there. Let it come; but let it come anywhere except on the Peace.

It was in the golden days of the battered old Wickiup that the story opens; when Blackburn sat in the night chair. The days when the Old Guard were still there; before Death and Fame and Circumstance had stolen our first commanders and left only us little fellows, forgotten by every better fate, to tell their greater stories.

Hailey had the bridges then, and Wetmore the locating, and Neighbor the roundhouses, and Bucks the superintendency, and Callahan, so he claimed, the work, and Blackburn had the night trick.

I

When Blackburn came from the plains he brought a record clean as the book of life. Four years on a station key; then eight years at Omaha despatching, with never a blunder or a break to the eight years. But it was at Omaha that Blackburn lost the wife whose face he carried in his watch. I never heard the story, only some rumor of how young she was and how pretty, and how he buried her and the wee baby together. It was all Blackburn brought to the West End mountains, his record and the little face in the watch. They said he had no kith or kin on earth, besides the wife and the baby back on the bluffs of the Missouri; and so he came on the night trick to us.

I was just a boy around the Wickiup then, but I remember the crowd; who could forget them? They were jolly good fellows; sometimes there were very high jinks. I don't mean anybody drunk or that sort; but good tobacco to smoke and good songs to sing and good stories to tell—and Lord! how they could tell them. And when the pins slipped, as they would, and things went wrong, as they will, there were clear heads and pretty wits and stout hearts to put things right.

Blackburn, as much as I can remember, always enjoyed it; but in a different way. He had such times a manner like nobody else's—a silent, beaming manner. When Bucks would roll a great white Pan-Handle yarn over his fresh linen shirt-front and down his cool clean white arms, one of them always bared to the elbow—sanding his points with the ash of a San Francisco cigar—and Neighbor would begin to heave from the middle up like a hippopotamus, and Callahan would laugh his whiskers full of dew, and Hailey would yell with delight, and the slaves in the next room would double up on the dead at the story, Blackburn would sit with his laugh all in a smile, but never a noise or a word. He enjoyed it all; not a doubt of that; only it was all tempered, I reckon, by something that had gone before. At least, that's the way it now strikes me, and I watched those big fellows pretty close—the fellows who were to turn, while I was growing up among them, into managers and presidents and magnates; and some of them from every day catch-as-catch-can men with the common alkali flecking their boots into dead men for whom marble never rose white enough or high enough.

Blackburn was four years at the Wickiup on the night trick; it wouldn't have seemed natural to see him there in daylight. It needed the yellow gloom of the old kerosene lamp in the room; the specked, knotted, warped, smoky pine ceiling losing itself in black and cobwebbed corners; the smoldering murk of the soft-coal fire brooding in the shabby old salamander, and, outside in the darkness, the wind screwing down the gorge and rattling the shrunken casements, to raise Blackburn in the despatcher's chair. Blackburn and the lamp and the stove and the ceiling and the gloom—in a word, Blackburn and the night trick—they went together.