CHAPTER XIII
THE TURN IN THE STORM
The beginning of the Crawling Stone Line marked the first determined effort under President Bucks, while undertaking the reconstruction of the system for through traffic, to develop the rich local territory tributary to the mountain division. New policies in construction dated from the same period. Glover, with an enormous capital staked for the new undertakings, gave orders to push the building every month in the year, and for the first time in mountain railroad-building winter was to be ignored. The older mountain men met the innovation as they met any departure from their traditions, with curiosity and distrust. On the other hand, the new and younger blood took hold with confidence, and when Glover called, “Yo, heave ho!” at headquarters, they bent themselves clear across the system for a hard pull together.
McCloud, resting the operating on the shoulders of his assistant Anderson, devoted himself wholly to forwarding the construction plans, and his first clash over winter road-building in the Rockies came 123 with his own right-hand man, Mears. McCloud put in a switch below Piedmont, opened a material-yard, and began track-laying toward the lower Crawling Stone Valley, when Mears said it was time to stop work till spring. When McCloud told him he wanted track across the divide and into the lower valley by spring, Mears threw up his hands. But there was metal in the old man, and he was for orders all the time. He kept up a running fire of protests and forebodings about the danger of exposing men during the winter season, but stuck to his post. Glover sent along the men, and although two out of every three deserted the day after they arrived, Mears kept a force in hand, and crowded the track up the new grade as fast as the ties and steel came in, working day in and day out with one eye on the clouds and one on the tie-line and hoping every day for orders to stop.
December slipped away to Christmas with the steel still going down and the disaffected element among the railroad men at Medicine Bend waiting for disaster. The spectacle of McCloud handling a flying column on the Crawling Stone work in the face of the most treacherous weather in the mountain year was one that brought out constant criticism of him among Sinclair’s sympathizers and friends, and while McCloud laughed and pushed ahead on the work, they waited only for his discomfiture. 124 Christmas Day found McCloud at the front, with men still very scarce, but Mears’s gang at work and laying steel. The work train was in charge of Stevens, the freight conductor, who had been set back after the Smoky Creek wreck and was slowly climbing back to position. They were working in the usual way, with the flat cars ahead pushed by the engine, the caboose coupled to the tender being on the extreme hind end of the train.
At two o’clock on Christmas afternoon, when there was not a cloud in the sky, the horizon thickened in the east. Within thirty minutes the mountains from end to end of the sky-line were lost in the sweep of a coming wind, and at three o’clock snow struck the valley like a pall. Mears, greatly disturbed, ordered the men off the grade and into the caboose. McCloud had been inspecting culverts ahead, and had started for the train when the snow drove across the valley. It blotted the landscape from sight so fast that he was glad after an anxious five minutes to regain the ties and find himself safely with his men.
But when McCloud came in the men were bordering on a panic. Mears, with his two foremen, had gone ahead to hunt McCloud up, and had passed him in the storm; it was already impossible to see, or to hear an ordinary sound ten yards away. McCloud ordered the flat cars cut off the train and 125 the engine whistle sounded at short intervals, and, taking Stevens, buttoned his reefer and started up the grade after the three trackmen. They fired their revolvers as they went on, but the storm tossed their signals on the ears of Mears and his companions from every quarter of the compass. McCloud was standing on the last tie and planning with his companion how best to keep the grade as the two advanced, when the engine signals suddenly changed. “Now that sounds like one of Bill Dancing’s games,” said McCloud to his companion. “What the deuce is it, Stevens?”
Stevens, who knew a little of everything, recognized the signals in an instant and threw up his hands. “It’s Morse code, Mr. McCloud, and they are in––Mears and the foremen––and us for the train as quick as the Lord will let us; that’s what they’re whistling.”
“So much for an education, Stevens. Bully for you! Come on!”
They regained the flat cars and made their way back to the caboose and engine, which stood uncoupled. McCloud got into the cab with Dancing and Stevens. Mears, from the caboose ahead, signalled all in, and, with a whistling scream, the engine started to back the caboose to Piedmont. They had hardly more than got under full headway when a difficulty became apparent 126 to the little group around the superintendent. They were riding an unballasted track and using such speed as they dared to escape from a situation that had become perilous. But the light caboose, packed like a sardine-box with men, was dancing a hornpipe on the rail-joints. McCloud felt the peril, and the lurching of the car could be seen in the jerk of the engine tender to which it was coupled. Apprehensive, he crawled back on the coal to watch the caboose himself, and stayed long enough to see that the rapidly drifting snow threatened to derail the outfit any minute. He got back to the cab and ordered a stop. “This won’t do!” said he to Stevens and the engineman. “We can’t back that caboose loaded with men through this storm. We shall be off the track in five minutes.”