DAYBREAK
Crouching under the mountains in the grip of the storm Medicine Bend slept battened in blankets and beds. All night at the Wickiup, O'Neill and Giddings, gray with anxiety, were trying to keep track of Glover's Special. It was the only train out that night on the mountain division. For the first hour or two they kept tab on her with little trouble, but soon reports began to falter or fail, and the despatchers were reduced at last to mere rumors. They dropped boards ahead of Special 1018, only to find to their consternation that she was passing them unheeded.
Once, at least, they knew that she herself had slipped by a night station unseen. Oftener, with blanched faces they would hear of her dashing like an apparition past a frightened operator, huddled over his lonely stove, a spectral flame shot across the fury of the sky—as if the dread night breathing on the scrap-pile and the grave had called from other nights and other storms a wraith of riven engines and slaughtered men to one last phantom race with death and the wind.
Within two hours of division headquarters a train ran lost—lost as completely as if she were crossing the Sweetgrass plains on pony trails instead of steel rails. Not once but a dozen times McGraw and Glover, pawning their lives, left the cab with their lanterns in a vain endeavor to locate a station, a siding, a rock. Numbed and bitten at last with useless exposure they cast effort to the wind, gave the engine like a lost horse her head, and ran through everything for headquarters and life. Consultation was abandoned, worry put away, one good chance set against every other chance and taken in silence.
At five o'clock that morning despatchers and night men under the Wickiup gables, sitting moodily around the big stove, sprang to their feet together. From up the distant gorge, dying far on the gale, came the long chime blast of an engine whistle; it was the lost Special.
They crowded to the windows to dispute and listen. Again the heavy chime was sprung and a second blast, lasting and defiant, reached the Wickiup—McGraw was whistling for the upper yard and the long night of anxiety was ended. Unable to see a car length into the storm howling down the yard, save where the big arc-lights of the platform glared above the semaphores, the men swarmed to the windows to catch a glimpse of the belated engine. When the rays of its electric headlight pierced the Western night they shouted like boys, ran to the telephones, and while the roundhouse, the superintendent, and the master-mechanic were getting the news the Special engine steamed slowly into sight through the whirling snow and stopped at the semaphore. So a liner shaken in the teeth of a winter storm, battered by heading seas, and swept by stiffening spray, rides at last, ice-bound, staggering, majestic, into port.
The moment they struck the mountain-path into the Bend, McGraw and Glover caught their bearings by the curves, and Glover, standing at Gertrude's elbow, told her they were safe.
Not until he had laughed into her ear something that the silent McGraw, lying on his back under the engine with a wrench, when he confessed he never expected to see Medicine Bend again, had said of her own splendid courage did the flood spring from her eyes.
When Glover added that they were entering the gorge, and laughingly asked if she would not like to sound the whistle for the yard limits, she smiled through tears and gave him her hand to be helped down, cramped and chilled, from her corner.
At the moment that she left the cab she faltered again. McGraw stripped his cap from his head as she turned to speak. She took from the breast of her blouse her watch, dainty as a jewel, and begged him to take it, but he would not.