All the night it stormed at the Wickiup. In the morning the Irving Special, flying toward Chicago, was far down the Platte. Number One was steaming west, deep in the heart of the Rockies; Blackburn lay in Callahan's room. It was nine o'clock, and the sun was streaming through the east windows when Fred Norman opened the office door. Fred could do those things even when he was sickest. Have a hemorrhage one day, scare everybody to death, and go back to his trick the next. He asked right away for Kit, as he called Blackburn, and when they pointed to Callahan's door Fred pushed it open and went in. A cry brought the operators to him. Blackburn was stretched on his knees half on the floor, half face downward on the sofa. His head had fallen between his arms, which were stretched above it. In his hands, clasped tight, they found his watch with the picture of his wife and his baby. Had he asked, when he first went into that room that night—when he wrestled like Jacob of old in his agony of prayer—that his life be taken if only their lives, the lives of those in his keeping, might be spared? I do not know. They found him dead.
The Nightman's Story
BULLHEAD
His full name was James Gillespie Blaine Lyons; but his real name was Bullhead—just plain Bullhead.
When he began passenger braking the trainmaster put him on with Pat Francis. The very first trip he made, a man in the smoking car asked him where the drinking water was. Bullhead, though sufficiently gaudy in his new uniform, was not prepared for any question that might be thrown at him. He pulled out his book of rules, which he had been told to consult in case of doubt, and after some study referred his inquirer to the fire-bucket hanging at the front end of the car. The passenger happened to be a foreigner and very thirsty. He climbed up on the Baker heater, according to directions, and did at some risk get hold of the bucket—but it was empty.
"Iss no vater hier," cried the second-class man. Bullhead sat half way back in the car, still studying the rules. He looked up surprised but turning around pointed with confidence to the firepail at the hind end of the smoker.
"Try the other bucket, Johnnie," he said, calmly. At that every man in the car began to choke; and the German, thinking the new brakeman was making funny of him, wanted to fight. Now Bullhead would rather fight than go to Sunday-school any day, and without parley he engaged the insulted homesteader. Pat Francis parted them after some hard words on his part; and Kenyon, the trainmaster, gave Bullhead three months to study up where the water cooler was located in Standard, A pattern, smoking cars. Bullhead's own mother, who did Callahan's washing, refused to believe her son was so stupid as not to know; but Bullhead, who now tells the story himself, claims he did not know.
When he got back to work he tried the freight trains. They put him on the Number Twenty-nine, local, and one day they were drifting into the yard at Goose River Junction when there came from the cab a sharp call for brakes. Instead of climbing out and grabbing a brakewheel for dear life, Bullhead looked out the window to see what the excitement was. By the time he had decided what rule covered the emergency his train had driven a stray flat half way through the eating house east of the depot. Kenyon, after hearing Bullhead's own candid statement of fact, coughed apologetically and said three years; whereupon Bullhead resigned permanently from the train service and applied for a job in the roundhouse.
But the roundhouse—for a boy like Bullhead. It would hardly do. He was put at helping Pete Beezer, the boiler washer. One night Pete was snatching his customary nap in the pit when the hose got away from Bullhead and struck his boss. In the confusion, Peter, who was nearly drowned, lost a set of teeth; that was sufficient in that department of the motive power; Bullhead moved on, suddenly. Neighbor thought he might do for a wiper. After the boy had learned something about wiping he tried one day to back an engine out on the turn-table just to see whether it was easy. It was; dead easy; but the turn-table happened to be arranged wrong for the experiment; and Neighbor, before calling in the wrecking gang, took occasion to kick Bullhead out of the roundhouse bodily.