Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

“We’re in a norther,” Doug answered. “But we’re running out of it. But you’d better sleep. I’ll cant these slickers from under you, for the hands will want them. Now, sleep.”

Sard was so weary that he was almost asleep while Doug routed out the slicker rolls. He felt Doug heave a tarpaulin over him and smelt the overpowering sweet rum-like smell of the Lucky Hit being chewed in Doug’s mouth; he noticed the stars going out under trails of smoke; then the world ceased for him while the train jolted on.

He woke, or half woke, when the stopping of the train sent all the rear trucks one after the other with a bumping clank into the buffers of the truck in front of it. He did not know where he was and did not much care, being as weak and drowsy as one full of a drug. He noticed that Doug was gone, but heard, as it were far away, Doug’s voice saying something to someone about uncoupling the last three trucks. In his drowse he heard men swearing at chains which clanked: then he heard men pushing the truck in which he was a little further down the line. He heard their “O heave! O heave!” and “That’s got her. There she goes!” and the sound of their feet padding beside the rails. He heard someone say: “That’s you. Leave them there,” and then the motion stopped and the feet moved away. The wind seemed to have risen during the passage from the coast, but he could not care. He was not awake enough to care much about anything. He heard in his drowse the noise of engines, steam was being let off, a shunting engine went swiftly by, and above these noises there came at intervals a dull grunting thud or stamp from some machine or pump not far from the railway. Men moved to and fro, and voices called, there was a noise of running water and of wind. Afterwards, it seemed to him that while he was at this place, wherever it was, he heard men running. The thought came into his brain that he was at Tloatlucan, where he would presently get a shift-train to Las Palomas, but he felt that all that would be presently, mañana, not then, not anything like then. He lapsed into sleep again.

In his usual health, he would have been up and out striding on foot to Las Palomas, without waiting for any shift-train, but he was only the wreck of himself, all weak and weary. Perhaps a salvo of guns, a blast of trumpets, or the noise of all three masts going over the side, would have failed to rouse him then. He slept, as sailors say, “dead-oh.” He would not have wakened for less than a kick in the face.

Presently, however, he roused again at the battering clank of a train of trucks backing in upon the truck in which he was lying. He roused enough to hear voices and the clank of chain, with the thought that they were doing something with a steam winch, he could not care what. He drowsed off at once into the deeps of sleep into which none but harvesters and sailors ever sink. In his sleep, he became conscious of vibration, as though he were in a berth above the engines in some small steamer under way. It was soothing, or at least not unpleasant, to his mood of feverish drowsiness, to be shaken thus, perhaps he slept the better for it.

For some hours he slept. Gradually, as he came to himself, he found himself listening in his sleep for the bell, so that he might know how much of his watch remained to him. The bell did not strike, though he hearkened after it. He felt cold, and was aware that sprays were hitting the side of the deck-housecontinually.

Then, punctually at the “one bell,” at the moment at which he would have been called, he roused up wide awake with the knowledge that something was very wrong indeed.

He was accustomed to turning out and being on deck within a minute. He roused up now with one heave, weak, stiff and aching as he was, ready for action. He came to himself, remembering all the events of the night before, and at once took stock of things. He was in the truck, which was jolting along a bad line at about fifteen miles an hour. It was daylight, yet all dim with storm. The hitting on the truck which he had taken to be sprays on the deckhouse was sand, pelting in from the desert. The floor of the truck was covered with a fine layer of sand. A pelt of sand flew over the side of the car continually. As he stood shakily up to see where he was, the sand blew into his eyes, hair and mouth, down his neck, into his clothes, into his lungs. It came on a cold wind in little dry particular pellets. Hard snow coming in a gale has a similar power of annoying and confusing; this had a power beyond snow, of maddening. It stung like hard snow, but after it had stung it did not melt, it remained as grit where it had fallen, in the clothes, the eyes or the mouth.

He could see, perhaps, sixty yards to windward and a hundred yards to leeward of his truck, which seemed to be somewhere towards the end of a goods or freight train. The train was going along a waterless land which was sometimes a scrub of chaparral and mezquite and sometimes a desert, with cactus and prickly pear. Over all this expanse the accursed norther came down like a devil pelting sand, never in any great volume, but in a drift which never ceased. Sard noticed that the side of the next truck to his had already had a kind of polish given to it by the never-ceasing pitting of the pellets.

He knew that the “norther” being as cold as it was, must be blowing from within three points of north. This gave him the train’s course as roughly north-west. The sort of glow in the sky, which marked where the sun would be, as well as his own sense of time, always very acute, showed him that it was about eight o’clock in the morning. Reckoning that the train had picked up his trucks between three and four o’clock, he judged that he had been carried some sixty or seventy miles into the desert of Tloatlucan, and that the next stop would be fifty miles further on, in the foothills beyond the desert, where the railway began its climb into the Sierra.