“He gave me my degree.”
“Old Bug! He was Sam’s closest friend, McCloud. It’s good to see him getting the recognition he deserves, isn’t it? Do you know, I send him an annual every year? Yes, sir! And one year I had the whole blooming faculty out here on a fossil expedition; but, by Heaven, McCloud, some of them looked more like megatheriums than what they dug up did.”
“I heard about that expedition.”
“I never got to college. I had to hustle. I’ll get out of here before I tire you. Wilcox will be here all night, and my China boy is making some broth for you now. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
Ten weeks later McCloud was sent from Medicine Bend up on the Short Line as trainmaster, and on the Short Line he learned railroading.
“That’s how I came here,” said George McCloud to Farrell Kennedy a long time afterward, at Medicine Bend. “I had shrivelled and starved three years out there in the desert. I lived with those cattle underground till I had forgotten my 46 own people, my own name, my own face––and Bucks came along one day with Whispering Smith and dragged me out of my coffin. They had it ordered, and it being a small size and ‘onhandy,’ as the undertaker said, I paid for it and told him to store it for me. Well, do you think I ever could forget either of those men, Farrell?”
McCloud’s fortunes thus threw him first into the operating department of the mountain lines, but his heart was in the grades and the curves. To him the interest in the trainwork was the work of the locomotives toiling with the heavy loads up the canyons and across the uneven plateaus and through the deep gorges of the inner range, where the panting exhaust, choked between sheer granite walls, roared in a mighty protest against the burden put by the steep grades on the patient machines.
In all the group of young men then on the mountain division, obscure and unknown at the time, but destined within so few years to be scattered far and wide as constructionists with records made in the rebuilding operations through the Rocky Mountains, none was less likely to attract attention than McCloud. Bucks, who, indeed, could hardly be reckoned so much of the company as its head, was a man of commanding proportions physically. Like Glover, Bucks was a giant in stature, and the two men, when together, could nowhere escape 47 notice; they looked, in a word, their part, fitted to cope with the tremendous undertakings that had fallen to their lot. Callahan, the chess-player on the Overland lines, the man who could hold large combinations of traffic movement constantly in his head and by intuition reach the result of a given problem before other men could work it out, was, like Morris Blood, the master of tonnage, of middle age. But McCloud, when he went to the mountain division, in youthfulness of features was boyish, and when he left he was still a boy, bronzed, but young of face in spite of a lifetime’s pressure and worry crowded into three years. He himself counted this physical make-up as a disadvantage. “It has embroiled me in no end of trouble, because I couldn’t convince men I was in earnest until I made good in some hard way,” he complained once to Whispering Smith. “I never could acquire even a successful habit of swearing, so I had to learn to fight.”
When, one day in Boney Street in Medicine Bend, he threw open the door of Marion Sinclair’s shop, flung his hat sailing along the showcase with his war-cry, and called to her in the back rooms, she thought he had merely run in to say he was in town.
“How do you do? What do you think? You’re going to have an old boarder back,” he 48 cried. “I’m coming to Medicine Bend, superintendent of the division!”