On the Iron at Big Cloud

by Frank L. Packard

But while the yard crew worked others were not idle. Regan and Carleton, both of them, had caught the first flash from the windows of the super’s room, and they were down the stairs, across the yards and into the game from the start. Joined by the nightmen and the hostlers and the wide-eyed call-boys they tackled the blaze. By the time they had dragged and coupled the fifty-foot hose lengths, it took five lengths, along the tracks from the roundhouse, the needle on the stationary’s gauge, luckily not yet quite dead from the day’s work and whose fire-box Clarihue, the turner, now crammed with oil-soaked packing, began to climb, and they got an uncertain, weakly stream playing—uncertain, but a stream. After that, things went with a rush—both ways—the fire and the fight.

From the gambling hells and the saloons, from the streets and their homes came the population of Big Cloud, the Polacks, the Russians, the railroad men, the good and the bad whites, the half-breeds—and the local fire brigade. Two more streams they ran from the roundhouse and that was the limit—the rest of the hose was liquid rubber somewhere under the blaze.

Regan, with a bitter, hard look on his face for the shops were Regan’s, was everywhere at once, and what man could do he did; but, inch by inch, the flames were getting the better of him. The yards were as bright as day now, and the heat was driving the circle of fighters back, stubbornly as they fought to hold their ground. It looked like a grand slam for the fire with the four aces in one hand. Twice Regan had been on the point of ordering the men to the roof, and twice he held back—once he had even ordered a ladder planted, only to order it away again. The building was only wood, and old, and the roof was none too strong at best; but now, under and supported by the roof of the fitting-shop, put in a month before in lieu of the old system of jacking and blocking by hand, making the risk a hundredfold greater, were the heavy steel girders and hydraulic traveling cranes that whipped the big moguls like jack-straws from their wheels preparatory to stripping them to their bare boiler-shells. Regan shook his head—it was asking a man to take his life in his hands. For the moment he stood a little apart in front of the crowd and just behind the nozzle end of one of the streams. Again he measured the chances, and again he shook his head.

“I can’t ask a man to do it,” he muttered; “but we ought to have a stream up there, it’s——”

“Why don’t you take it there yourself, then?”—the words came sharp and quick from his elbow, stinging hot like the cut of a whip-lash. It was “King” Gilleen, red-haired, blue-blooded, freckled-skinned Gilleen.

The master mechanic whirled like a shot, and for a minute the two men stared into each other’s eyes, stared as the leaping flames sent flickering shadows across the grim, set features of them both, stared at each other face to face for the first time since that noon in the roundhouse days before.

“Why don’t you take it there yourself, then?” said Gilleen again, and his laugh rang hard and cold. “You ain’t a quitter, are you? There’s nothin’ wrong with your blood, is there? If you’re not afraid—come on!”—as he spoke he stepped forward, pushed the men from the nozzle—and looked back at the master mechanic.

Regan’s lips were like a thin, white line.

Gilleen laughed out again, and it carried over the roar and the crackle of the flames, the snapping timbers, the hiss and spit of the water, the voices of the crowd.

“Put up the ladder!”—it was Regan’s voice, deadly cold. “Lash a short end around that nozzle, an’ stand by to pass it up”—he was at the foot of the ladder almost before they got it in position, and the next instant began to climb.