“Well, if they’re right, why don’t you stand by them, then? We’re being robbed every day we work, ain’t we?”
“Ye-e-es, I suppose we are,” McQueen admitted reluctantly; “but I didn’t figure it out for the purpose of——”
“Mac,” Noonan interrupted unctuously, “‘tain’t for you nor me to say the purpose it’s to be put to. There’s others besides us. But I do say, Mac, you’re almighty smart.”
McQueen shook his head. “I’m a company man,” he said dubiously.
“Company man! Of course you are. We’re all company men. But right’s right and wrong’s wrong before anything else. Well, ta ta, Mac, see you again. I’m off. There’s Hake with the tissue. I’ll tell the boys where you stand.”
It was a somewhat dazed McQueen that in turn pulled himself up into his own cab. He stood in the gangway and squinted meditatively at the coal heaped high on the tender. To his conscientious self-communion, his triumphant vindication had somewhat the appearance of a boomerang. “I don’t know,” he reflected. “It is damn poor coal, and—and figures don’t lie. We—we’ve been getting the worst of it, and—and a man should stand up for his rights.” And while McQueen, busy with new and momentous problems, was steaming west into the Rockies, Noonan, with his tongue in his cheek, was cutting along for Big Cloud with a wide-flung throttle.
That night, at Big Cloud, Noonan’s cronies got the story. That is, they got what Noonan saw fit to tell them. And the burden of his tale was that McQueen was with the Brotherhood and against the company. That was sufficient. They looked with appreciative admiration at the man who had done the trick, and then they flew to obey his orders.
By morning, every engineer on the division had the news. On way freights, on stray freights, on regulars, specials, and sections, they got it—every last one of them. And McQueen coming east again on Number Two got it, and marvelled a little at his new importance, never seeing Noonan’s hand in the marked deference paid to him.
First and last it was a bad business. Bad for the company, bad for the hot heads led by Noonan, bad for the others, and bad for McQueen. It caught the company none too well prepared, and Carleton, for this happened in the days of his superintendency, was hard put to it to move anything. There was pretty bitter feeling; and before it was over there was blood spilled. But the roughs at Big Cloud, who didn’t know the pilot from a horn-block, were responsible for the most of that, though, in their own way, too, they ended it.
It came to a show-down the night they carried young Carl Davis home from the yard on a door they had wrenched from a box-car. Davis was braking in the yard then, and he was a nephew of McQueen’s. He had lived with the engineer ever since, as a little chap of ten, he had come out to the West. Childless themselves, McQueen and his wife thought as much of the lad as though he had been their own.