The Night Operator

by Frank L. Packard

MacCaffery? Dan was an engineer, one of the old-timers, blue-eyed, thin—but you'd never get old Dan that way, he wouldn't look natural! You've got to put him in the cab of the 304, leaning out of the window, way out, thin as a bent toothpick, and pounding down the gorge and around into the straight making for the Big Cloud yards, with a string of buff-colored coaches jouncing after him, and himself bouncing up and down in his seat like an animated piece of rubber. Nobody ever saw old Dan inside the cab, that is, all in—he always had his head out of the window—said he could see better, though the wind used to send the water trickling down from the old blue eyes, and generally there were two little white streaks on his cheeks where no grime or coal dust ever got a chance at a strangle hold on the skin crevices. For the rest, what you could see sticking out of the cab over the whirling rod as he came down the straight, was just a black, greasy peaked cap surmounting a scanty fringe of gray hair, and a wizened face, with a round little knob in the center of it for a nose.

But that isn't altogether old Dan MacCaffery, either—there was Mrs. MacCaffery. Everybody liked Dan, with his smile, and the cheery way he had of puckering up his lips sympathetically and pushing back his cap and scratching near his ear where the hair was, as he listened maybe to a hard-luck story; everybody liked Dan—but they swore by Mrs. MacCaffery. Leaving out the railroaders who worshipped her anyway, even the worst characters in Big Cloud, and there were some pretty bad ones in those early days, hangers-on and touts for the gambling hells and dives, used to speak of the little old lady in the lace cap with a sort of veneration.

Lace cap? Yes. Sounds queer, doesn't it? An engineer's wife, keeping his shanty in a rough and ready, half baked bit of an uncivilized town in the shadow of the Rockies, and a lace cap don't go together very often, that's a fact. But it is equally a fact that Mrs. MacCaffery wore a lace cap—and somehow none of the other women ever had a word to say about her being "stuck up" either. There was something patrician about Mrs. MacCaffery—not the cold, stand-offish effect that's only make-believe, but the real thing. The Lord knows, she had to work hard enough, but you never saw her rinsing the washtub suds from her hands and coming to the door with her sleeves rolled up—not at all. The last thing you'd ever think there was in the house was a washtub. Little lace cap over smoothly-parted gray hair, little black dress with a little white frill around the throat, and just a glad look on her face whether she'd ever seen you before or not—that was Mrs. MacCaffery.

As far back as any one could remember she had always looked like that, always a little old lady—never a young woman, although she and Dan had come there years before, even before the operating department had got the steel shaken down into anything that might with justice be called a permanent right of way. Perhaps it was the gray hair—Mrs. MacCaffery's hair had been gray then, when it ought to have been the glossy, luxuriant brown that the old-fashioned daguerreotype, hanging in the shanty's combination dining and silting room, proclaimed that it once was.

Big Cloud, of course, didn't call her patrician—because they didn't talk that way out there. They said there was "some class" to Mrs. MacCaffery—and if their expression was inelegant, what they meant by it wasn't. Not that they ranked her any finer than Dan, for the last one of them ranked Dan as one of God's own noblemen, and there's nothing finer than that, only they figured, at least the women did, that back in the Old Country she'd been brought up to things that Dan MacCaffery hadn't.

Maybe that accounted for their sending young Dan East, and pinching themselves pretty near down to bed rock to give the boy an education and a start. Not that Mrs. MacCaffery had any notions that railroading and overalls and dirt was plebeian and beneath her—far from it! She was proud of old Dan, proud of his work, proud of his record; she'd talk about Dan's engine to you by the hour just as though it were alive, just as Dan would, and she would have hung chintz curtains on the cab windows and put flower pots on the running boards if they had let her. It wasn't that—Mrs. MacCaffery wasn't that kind. Only there were limitations to a cab, and she didn't want the boy, he was the only one they had, to start out with limitations of any kind that would put a slow order on his reaching the goal her mother's heart dreamed of. What goal? Who knows? Mothers always dream of their boy's future in that gentle, loving, all-conquering, up-in-the-clouds kind of a way, don't they? She wanted young Dan to do something, make a name for himself some day.

And young Dan did. He handed a jolt to the theory of heredity that should, if it didn't, have sent the disciples of that creed to the mat for the full count. When he got through his education, he got into a bank and backed the brain development, the old couple had scrimped to the bone to give him, against the market—with five thousand dollars of the bank's money. Old Dan and Mrs. MacCaffery got him off—Mrs. MacCaffery with her sweet old face, and Dan with his grim old honesty. The bank didn't prosecute. The boy was drowned in a ferryboat accident the year after. And old Dan had been paying up ever since.

He was always paying up. Five thousand dollars, even in instalments for a whole lot of years, didn't leave much to come and go on from his monthly pay check. He talked some of dropping the benefit orders he belonged to, and he belonged to most of them, but Mrs. MacCaffery talked him out of that on account of the insurance, she said, but really because she knew that Dan and his lodge rooms and his regalias and his worshipful titles were just part and parcel of each other, and that he either was, or was just going to be, Supreme High Chief Illustrious Something-or-other of every Order in town. Besides, after all, it didn't cost much compared with the other, just meant pinching a tiny bit harder—and so they pinched.

Old Dan and Mrs. MacCaffery didn't talk about their troubles. You'd never get the blues on their account, no matter how intimate you got with them. But everybody knew the story, of course, for everybody knows a thing like that; and everybody knew that dollars were scarce up at the MacCafferys' shanty for, though they didn't know how much old Dan sent East each year, they knew it had to be a pretty big slice of what was coming to him to make much impression on that five thousand dollars at the other end—and they wondered, naturally enough, how the MacCafferys got along at all. But the MacCafferys got along somehow, outwardly without a sign of the hurt that was deeper than a mere matter of dollars and cents, got along through the years—and Mrs. MacCaffery got a little grayer, a little more gentle and patient and sweet-faced, and old Dan's hair narrowed to a fringe like a broken tonsure above his ears, and—but there's our "clearance" now, and we're off with a clean-swept track and "rights through" into division.

Dan was handling the cab end of one of the local passenger runs when things broke loose in the East—a flurry in Wall Street. But Wall Street was a long, long way from the Rockies, and, though the papers were full of it, there didn't seem to be anything intimate enough in a battle of brokers and magnates, bitter, prolonged, and to the death though it might be, to stir up any excitement or enthusiasm on the Hill Division. The Hill Division, generally speaking, had about all it could do to mind its own affairs without bothering about those of others', for the Rockies, if conquered, took their subjection with bad grace and were always in an incipient state of insurrection that kept the operating, the motive power and the maintenance-of-way departments close to the verge of nervous prostration without much let-up to speak of. But when the smoke cleared away down East, the Hill Division and Big Cloud forgot their bridge troubles and their washouts and their slides long enough to stick their tongues in their cheeks and look askance at each other; and Carleton, in his swivel chair, pulled on the amber mouthpiece of his brier and looked at Regan, who, in turn, pulled on his scraggly brown mustache and reached for his hip pocket and his plug. The system was under new control.