When I dropped off the train at Track’s End I saw by the moonlight that the railroad property consisted of a small coal-shed, a turntable, a roundhouse with two locomotive stalls, a water-tank and windmill, and a rather long and narrow passenger and freight depot. The town lay a little apart, and I could not make out its size. There were a hundred or more men waiting for the train, and one of them took the two mail-sacks in a wheelbarrow and went away toward the lights of the houses. There were a lot of mules and wagons and scrapers and other tools of a gang of railroad graders near the station; also some tents in which the men lived; these men were waiting for the train with the others, and talked so loud and made such a disturbance that it drowned out all other noises.
The train was left right on the track, and the engine put in the roundhouse, after which Burrdock took me over town to the hotel. It was called the Headquarters House, and the proprietor’s name was Sours. After I got a cold supper he showed me to my room. The second story was divided into about twenty rooms, the partitions being lathed but 6 not yet plastered. It made walls very easy to talk through, and, where the cracks happened to match, as they seemed to mostly, they weren’t hard to look through. I thought it was a good deal like sleeping in a squirrel-cage.
The railroad men that I had seen at the station had been working on an extension of the grade to the west, on which the rails were to be laid the next spring. They had pushed on ten miles, but, as the government had stopped making a fuss, the company had decided to do no more that season, and the train I came up on brought the paymaster with the money to pay the graders for their summer’s work; so they all got drunk. There were some men from Billings in town, too. They were on their way east with a band of four hundred Montana ponies, which they had rounded up for the night just south of town. Two of them stayed to hold the drove, and the rest came into town, also to get drunk. They had good luck in doing this, and fought with the graders. I heard two or three shots soon after I went to bed, and thought of my mother. 7
Some time late in the night I was awakened by a great rumpus in the hotel, and made out from what I heard through the laths that some men were looking for somebody. They were going from room to room, and soon came into mine, tearing down the sheet which was hung up for a door. They crowded in and came straight to the bed, and the leader, a big man with a crooked nose, seized me by the ear as if he were taking hold of a bootstrap. I sat up, and another poked a lantern in my face.
“That’s him,” said one of them.
“No, he was older,” said another.
“He looks like he would steal a dog, anyhow,” said the man with the lantern. “Bring him along, Pike.”
“No,” said the man who had hold of my ear, “he ain’t much more’n a boy–we’re looking for grown men to-night.”
Then they went out, and I could feel my ear drawing back into place as if it were made of rubber. But it never got quite back, and has always been a game ear to this day, with a kind of a lop to it.
Sours told me in the morning that they 8 were looking for the man that stole their dog, though he said he didn’t think they had ever had a dog. Pike, he said, had come out as a grader, but it had been a long time since he had done any work.