On the Iron at Big Cloud

by Frank L. Packard

The days and the weeks and the months went by, and then there came a morning when a sober-, serious-faced group of men stood gathered in the super’s office, as Number Two’s whistle, in from the Eastbound run, sounded down the gorge. They looked at Regan. Slowly, the master mechanic turned, went out of the room and down the stairs to the platform, as 505 shot round the bend and rolled into the station. For a moment Regan stood irresolute, then he started for the front-end. He went no further than the colonist coach, that was coupled behind the mail car. Here he stopped, made a step forward, changed his mind, climbed over the colonist’s platform, dropped down on the other side of the track, and began to walk toward the roundhouse—they changed engines at Big Cloud and 505, already uncoupled, was scooting up for the spur to back down for the’table.

The soles of Regan’s boots seemed like plates of lead as he went along, and he mopped his forehead nervously. There was a general air of desertion about the roundhouse. The’table was set and ready for 505, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. Regan nodded to himself in sympathetic understanding. He crossed the turntable, walked around the half circle, and entered the roundhouse through the engine doors by the far pit—the one next to that which belonged to 505. Here, just inside, he waited, as the big mogul came slowly down the track, took the’table with a slight jolt, and stopped. He saw Coogan, big, brawny, swing out of the cab like an athlete, and then he heard the engineer speak to his fireman.

“Looks like a graveyard around here, Jim. Wonder where the boys are. I won’t wait to swing the’table, they’ll be around in a minute, I guess. I want to get up to the little woman.”

“All right,” Dahleen answered. “Leave her to me, I’ll run her in. Good luck to you, Chick.”

Coogan was starting across the yards with a stride that was almost a run. Regan opened his mouth to shout—and swallowed a lump in his throat instead. Twice he made as though to follow the engineer, and twice something stronger than himself held him back; and then, as though he had been a thief, the master mechanic stole out from behind the doors, went back across the tracks, climbed the stairs to Carleton’s room with lagging steps, and entered.

The rest were still there: Carleton in his swivel chair, Harvey, the division engineer, Spence, the chief dispatcher, and Riley, the trainmaster. Regan shook his head and dropped into a seat.

“I couldn’t,” he said in a husky voice. “My God, I couldn’t” he repeated, and swept out his arms.

A bitter oath sprang from Carleton’s lips, lips that were not often profane, and his teeth snapped through the amber of his briar. The others just looked out of the window.

MacVicar, a spare man, took the Limited out that night, and it was three days before Coogan reported again. Maybe it was the fit of the black store-clothes and perhaps the coat didn’t hang just right, but as he entered the roundhouse he didn’t look as straight as he used to look and there was a queer inward slope to his shoulders and he walked like a man who didn’t see anything. The springy swing through the gangway was gone. He climbed to the cab as an old man climbs—painfully. The boys hung back and didn’t say anything, just swore under their breaths with full hearts as men do. There wasn’t anything to say—nothing that would do any good.

Coogan took 505 and the Limited out that night, took it out the night after and the nights that followed, only he didn’t talk any more, and the slope of the shoulders got a little more pronounced, a little more noticeable, a little beyond the cut of any coat. And on the afternoons of the lay-overs at Big Cloud, Coogan walked out behind the town to where on the slope of the butte were two fresh mounds—one larger than the other. That was all.