With Bob Scott to lead an occasional hunting trip, Bucks found the time go fast at Goose Creek and no excitement came again until later in the summer.
Where Goose Creek breaks through the sand-hills the country is flat, and, when swollen with spring rains, the stream itself has the force and fury of a mountain river. Then summer comes; the rain clouds hang no longer over the Black Hills, continuing sunshine parches the face of the great plains, and the rushing and turbulent Goose Creek ignominiously evaporates––either ascending to the skies in vapor or burrowing obscurely under the sprawling sands that lie within its course. Only stagnant pools and feeble rivulets running in widely separated channels––hiding under osiers or lurking within shady stretches of a friendly bank––remain to show where in April the noisy Goose engulfs everything within reach of its foaming 162 wings. The creek bed becomes in midsummer a mere sandy ford that may be crossed by a child––a dry map that prints the running feet of snipe and plover, the creeping tread of the mink and the muskrat, and the slouching trail of the coyote and the wolf.
Yet there is treachery in the Goose even in its apparent repose, and the unwary emigrant sometimes comes to grief upon its treacherous bed. The sands of the Goose have swallowed up more than one heedless buffalo, and the Indian knows them too well to trust them at all.
When the railroad bridge was put across the creek, the difficulties of securing it were very considerable and Brodie, the chief engineer, was in the end forced to rely upon temporary foundations. Trainmen and engineers for months carried “slow” orders for Goose Creek bridge, and Bucks grew weary with warnings from the despatchers to careless enginemen about crossing it.
Among the worst offenders in running his engine too fast over Goose Creek bridge was Dan Baggs, who, breathing fire through his bristling 163 red whiskers and flashing it from his watery blue eyes, feared nobody but Indians, and obeyed reluctantly everybody connected with the railroad. Moreover, he never hesitated to announce that when “they didn’t like the way he ran his engine they could get somebody else to run it.”
Baggs’s great failing was that, while he often ran his train too fast, he wasted so much time at stations that he was always late. And it was said of him that the only instance in which he ever reached the end of his division on time was the day he ran away from Iron Hand’s band of Sioux at Goose Creek––on that occasion he had made, without a doubt, a record run.
But when, one hot afternoon in August, Baggs left Medicine Bend with a light engine for Fort Park, where he was to pick up a train-load of ties, he had no thought of making further pioneer railroad history. His engine had been behaving so well that his usual charges of inefficiency against it had not for a long time been registered with the roundhouse foreman, and Dan Baggs, dreaming in the heat and sunshine of nothing worse than losing 164 his scalp to the Indians or winning a fortune at cards––gambling was another of his failings––was pounding lightly along over the rails when he reached, without heeding it, Goose Creek bridge.
There were those who averred that after his experience with Iron Hand he always ran faster across the forbidden bridge than anywhere else. On this occasion Baggs bowled merrily along the trestle and was getting toward the middle of the river when the pony trucks jumped the rail and the drivers dropped on the ties. Dan Baggs yelled to his fireman.
It was unnecessary. Delaroo, the fireman, a quiet but prudent fellow, was already standing in the gangway prepared for an emergency. He sprang, not a minute too soon, from the engine and lighted in the sand. But Dan Baggs’s fixed habit of being behind time chained him to his seat an instant too long. The bulky engine, with its tremendous impetus, shot from the trestle and plunged like a leviathan clear of the bridge and down into the wet sand of the creek-bed.