Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life

by Frank H. Spearman

It was November, and great weather for running, and when the rails were not springing under the soldiers westbound, they were humming under the steers eastbound. Maje Sampson, with his beer kegs and his crackers and his 264 and his be-knighted fireman, hugged the sidings pretty close that week. Some of the trains had part of the rights and others had the remainder. The 264 and her train took what was left, which threw Maje Sampson most of the time on the worn-out, run-down, scrap rails that made corduroy roads of the passing tracks. Then came the night that Moulton, the Philippine commandant, went through on his special. With his staff and his baggage and his correspondents and that kind he took one whole train. Syme Crowley pulled them, with Ben Sherer, conductor, and whatever else may be said of that pair, they deliver their trains on time. Maje Sampson left Medicine Bend with Twenty-nine at noon on his regular run and tried to get west. But between the soldiers behind him and the steers against him, he soon lost every visionary right he ever did possess. They laid him out nearly every mile of the way to the end of the run. At Sugar Buttes they held him thirty minutes for the Moulton Special to pass, and, to crown his indignities, kept him there fifteen minutes more waiting for an eastbound sheep train. Sampson afterward claimed that Barnes Tracy, the despatcher that did it, was a Gold Democrat, but this never was proved.

It was nearing dark when the crew of local freight Twenty-nine heard the dull roar of the Moulton Special speeding through the cañon of the Rat. A passenger train running through the cañon at night comes through with the far roll of a thousand drums, deepening into a rumble of thunder. Then out and over all comes the threatening purr of the straining engine breaking into a storm of exhausts, until like a rocket the headlight bursts streaming from the black walls, and Moore on the 811, or Mullen with the 818, or Hawksworth in the 1110, tear with a fury of alkali and a sweep of noise over the Butte switch, past caboose and flats and boxes and the 264 like fading light. Just a sweep of darkened glass and dead varnish, a whirl of smoking trucks beating madly at the fishplates, and the fast train is up, and out, and gone!

Twenty-nine, local, was used to all this. Used to the vanishing tail lights, the measured sinking of the sullen dust, the silence brooding again over the desert with, this night, fifteen minutes more to wait for the eastbound stock train before they dared open the switch. Maje Sampson killed the time by going back to the caboose to talk equities with the conductor. It was no trick for him to put away fifteen minutes discussing the rights of man with himself; and with an angel of a fireman to watch the cab, why not? The 264 standing on the siding was chewing her cud as sweet as an old cow, with maybe a hundred and forty pounds of steam to the right of the dial, maybe a hundred and fifty—I say maybe, because no one but Delaroo ever knew—when the sheep train whistled.

Sheep—nothing but sheep. Car after car after car, rattling down from the Short line behind two spanking big engines. They whistled, hoarse as pirates, for the Butte siding, and, rising the hill a mile west of it, bore down the grade throwing Dannah coal from both stacks like hydraulic gravel.

No one knew or ever will know how it happened. They cat-hauled men on the carpet a week about that switch. The crew of the Moulton Special testified; the crews of the stock train testified; Maje Sampson testified; his conductor and both brakemen testified; the roadmaster and the section boss each testified, and their men testified—but however or whatever it was—whether the Moulton Special fractured the tongue, or whether the pony of the lead engine flew the guard, or whether the switch had been opened, or whether, in closing, the slip rail had somehow failed to follow the rod—the double-headed stocker went into that Butte switch, into that Butte siding, into the peaceable old 264 and the Twenty-nine, local, like a lyddite shell, crashing, rearing, ripping, scattering two whole trains into blood and scrap. Destruction, madness, throes, death, silence; then a pyre of dirty smoke, a wail of sickening bleats, and a scream of hissing steam over a thousand sheep caught in the sudden shambles.

There was frightened crawling out of the shattered cabooses, a hurrying up of the stunned crews, and a bewildering count of heads. Both engine crews of the stock train had jumped as their train split the switch. The train crews were badly shaken; the head brakeman of the sheep train lay torn in the barbed-wire fencing the right of way; but only one man was missing—the fireman of Twenty-nine—Delaroo.

"Second 86 jumped west switch passing track and went into train 29, engine 264. Bad spill. Delaroo, fireman the 264, missing," wired Sugar Buttes to Medicine Bend a few minutes later.

Neighbor got up there by ten o'clock with both roadmasters and the wrecking outfit. It was dark as a cañon on the desert that night. Benedict Morgan's men tore splintered car timber from the débris, and on the knolls back of the siding lighted heaping bonfires that threw a light all night on the dread pile smoking on the desert. They dug by the flame of the fires at the ghastly heap till midnight; then the moon rose, an extra crew arrived from the Bend, and they got the derrick at work. Yet with all the toil when day broke the confusion looked worse confounded. The main line was so hopelessly blocked that at daylight a special with ties and steel was run in to lay a temporary track around the wreck.

"What do I think of it?" muttered Neighbor, when the local operator asked him for a report for Callahan. "I think there's two engines for the scrap in sight—and the 264, if we can ever find anything of her—and about a million sheep to pay for—" Neighbor paused to give an order and survey the frightful scene.

"And Delaroo," repeated the operator. "He wants to know about Delaroo—"