Bob didn't rise in the service quite so fast as Martin. He was rather for having a good time. He did more of the social act, and that pleased his mother, who, on account of her bonnet-and-shawl complexion, didn't achieve much that way. Martin, too, was proud of his brother, and as soon as Bob could handle a wire, which was very soon (for he learned things in no time) Martin got Callahan to put him up at Grant as operator. Bob got the place because he was Martin's brother, nothing else. He held it about two months, then he resigned and went to San 'Frisco. He was a restless fellow; it was Bob up and Bob down. For a year he wandered around out there, telegraphing, then he bobbed up again in Medicine Bend out of a job. He wanted to go to work, and—well, Callahan—Martin's brother, you know—sent him up to Montair as night operator. Three months he worked steady as a clock. Then one night the despatchers at the Bend couldn't get Montair for two hours. It laid out Number Six and a Special with the General Manager and made no end of a row.
Martin said right off he ought to go. But there was the little mother up home, silent, I expect, but pleading-like. It was left largely to Martin, for the young fellow was already chief; and that was the trouble—he hated to bear down too hard; so he compromised by asking his superintendent not to fire Bob but to set him back. They sent him up as night man to Rat River, the meanest place on the whole system. That was the summer of the Templars' Conclave at San 'Frisco.
We worked the whole spring getting things up along the line, from Omaha to the Sierras, for that Conclave. Engines were overhauled, rolling stock touched up, roadbed put in shape, everything shaken from end to end. Not only were the passenger records to be smashed, but beyond that a lot of our big general officers were way-up Masons and meant that our line should get not merely the cream of the business but the cream of the advertising out of the thing. The general tenor of the instructions was to nickel-plate everything, from the catalpas to the target rods. For three months before the Conclave date we were busy getting ready for it, and when the big day drew near on which we were to undertake the moving and the feeding of six thousand people one way on one track through the mountains, the car-tinks smoked cross-cut and the Russian sectionmen began to oil their hair.
Callahan was superintendent under Bucks, then General Manager, and Martin Duffy, Chief Despatcher, Neighbor, Superintendent of Motive Power, and Doubleday, Division Master Mechanic, and with everything buttoned up on the West End we went that Sunday morning on the firing line to take the first of the Templar Specials.
Medicine Bend had the alkali pretty well washed out of its eyes, and never before in its history had it appeared really gay. The old Wickiup was decorated till it looked like a buck rigged for a ghost dance. Right after daybreak the trains began rolling in on Harold Davis's trick. Duffy had annulled all local freights and all through odds and evens, all stock tramps east and all westbound empties—everything that could be, had been suspended for that Sunday; and with it all there were still by five times more trains than ever before rolled through Medicine Bend in twenty-four hours.
It was like a festival day in the mountains. Even the Indians and the squaw men turned out to see the fun. There was a crowd at the depot by five o'clock, when the first train rolled up the lower gorge with St. John's Commandery, Number Three from Buffalo; and the Pullmans were gay with bunting. The Medicine Bend crowd gave them an Indian yell and in two minutes the Knights, with their scalps in their hands as a token of surrender, were tumbling out of their sleepers into the crisp dawn. They were just like schoolboys, and when Shorty Lovelace—the local curiosity who had both feet and both hands frozen off the night he got drunk with Matt Cassidy at Goose River Junction—struck up on his mouth-organ "Put Me Off at Buffalo," they dropped seven dollars, odd, and three baggage checks into his hat while the crews were changing engines. It appeared to affect them uncommon, to see a fellow without any hands or feet play the mouth-organ and before sundown Shorty made the killing of his life. With what he raked in that day he kept the city marshal guessing for three months—which was also pretty good for a man without any hands or feet.
All day it was that way: train after train and ovation after ovation. The day was cool as a watermelon—August—and bright as a baby's face all through the mountains; and the Templars went up into the high passes with all the swing and noise we could raise. Harold Davis took it all morning steady from 4 A. M. at the despatcher's key. He was used up long before noon; but he stayed, and just at twelve o'clock, while a big Templar train from Baltimore was loading its commandery in front of the Wickiup after an early dinner, and a big Templar band played a tingling two-step, Martin Duffy stuck his dry, parchment face into the platform crowd, elbowed his way unnoticed through it, climbed the Wickiup stairs, walked into the despatcher's room, and, throwing off his hat and coat, leaned over Harold Davis's shoulder and took a transfer.
Young Giddings had been sitting there in a perspiration half an hour then; he copied for Martin Duffy that day. At noon they figured to get the last Templar over the Eagle Pass with the set of the sun. When Duffy took the key he never looked his force cleaner, only he was tired; Giddings could see that. The regular man had been sick a week and Martin had been filling in. Besides that, all Saturday, the day before, he had been spiking the line—figuring what could be annulled and what couldn't; what could be run extra and what could be put into regulars. Callahan had just got married and was going out to the Coast on his wedding tour in Bucks's car. He had refused to look at an order after Saturday night. Sunday morning, and from Sunday morning on, it was all against Duffy. When the Chief took the middle trick there were fourteen Templar Specials still to come with the last one just pulling out of McCloud on the plains. They were ordered to run with right of track over all eastbound trains thirty minutes apart all the way through.
A minute after Martin Duffy sat in, the conductor of the train below registered out. There was a yell pretty soon, and away went the Baltimore crowd—and they were corkers, too, those Baltimore fellows, and travelled like lords.
At five o'clock in the evening the trains in the West Division were moving just like clocks on the hour and the half—thirty minutes, thirty minutes, thirty minutes—and, as far as young Giddings could see, Duffy, after five booming hours, was fresher than when he took the chair. The little despatcher's capacity for work was something enormous; it wasn't till after supper-time, with the worst of the figuring behind him, and in the letting down of the anxiety, that Martin began to look older and his dry Indian hair began to crawl over his forehead. By that time his eyes had lost their snap, and when he motioned Giddings to the key, and got up to walk up and down the hall in the breeze, he looked like a wilted potato vine. His last batch of orders was only a little one compared with those that had gone before. But with the changes to the different crews they read about like this—