On the Iron at Big Cloud

by Frank L. Packard

A pretty hard man Spirlaw was, but under the rough and the brutal, the horny, thick-shelled exterior was another self, a strange side of self that he had never known until he had known Keating. It got into him pretty deep and pretty hard, the boy and his ambitions; and the irony of it, grim and bitter, deepened his pity and roused, too, a sense of fierce, hot resentment against the fate that mocked in its pitiless might so defenseless and puny a victim. To himself he came to call Keating “The Builder,” and one day when Harvey came down on an inspection trip, he told the division engineer about it—that’s how it got around.

Carleton, when he heard it, didn’t say anything—just crammed the dottle in his pipe down with his forefinger and stared out at the switches in the yards. They were used to seeing the surface of things plowed up and the corners turned back in the mountains, there weren’t many days went by when something that showed the raw didn’t happen in one way or another, but it never brought callousness or indifference, only, perhaps, a truer sense of values.

They had been blasting in the Canon for a matter of two months when the first signs of trouble began to show themselves, and the beginning was when the shop hands at Big Cloud went out—the boiler-makers and the blacksmiths, the painters, the carpenters and the fitters. The construction camp, that is Spirlaw, didn’t worry very much about this for the very simple reason that there didn’t appear to be any reason why it, or he, should—that was Regan’s hunt. But when the train crews followed suit and stray rumors of a fight or two at Big Cloud began to come in, with the likelihood of more hard on the heels of the first, it put a different complexion on things; for the rioting, what there had been of it, lay, not at the door of the railroad boys, but with the town’s loafers and hangers-on, these and the foreign element—particularly the foreign element—the brothers and the cousins of the Polacks who were swinging the picks and the shovels under the iron hand of Spirlaw, their temporary lord and master—the Polacks, gently ungentle, when amuck, as starved pumas.

Then the Brotherhood said “quit,” and the engine crews followed the trainmen. Things began to look black, and headquarters began to find it pretty hard to move anything. The train schedule past the Canon was cut better than in half, and the faces of the men in the cabs and the cabooses were new faces to those in camp—the faces of the men the company were bringing in on hurry calls from wherever they could get them, from the plains East or the coast West.

Every day brought reports of trouble from one end of the line to the other, more rioting, more disorder at Big Cloud; and, in an effort to nip as much of it in the bud as possible, Carleton issued orders to stop all construction work—all except the work in Glacier Canon, for there the temporary trestle lay uneasy on his mind.

The day the stop orders went out elsewhere a letter went out to Spirlaw. Spirlaw read it and his face set like a thunder cloud. He handed it to Keating.

Keating read it—and looked serious.

“I guess things aren’t any too rosy down there,” he commented; then slowly: “I’ve noticed our men seemed a bit sullen lately. They don’t care anything much about the strike, it must be a sort of sympathetic movement with the rest of their crowd that’s running wild at Big Cloud—only I don’t just figure how they can know very much about what’s going on. We don’t ourselves, for that matter.”

Spirlaw smiled grimly.

“I’ll tell you how,” he said. “I caught a Polack in the camp last night that didn’t belong here—and I broke his head for the second time, see? He used to work’ for me about a year ago—that’s when I broke it the first time. He’s one of their influential citizens—name’s Kuryla. Sneaked in here to stir up trouble—guess he’s sorry for it, I guess he is.”