"Not going back this morning. Why don't you wait for Four to-night?"
"Ed, will you get those staybolts and chuck them into the baggage car for me when Two pulls in? I'm going over to the house for a minute."
They knew what that meant. He was going over to tell the folks he wouldn't be home for Sunday as he expected—as the children expected. Going to tell the wife—the old man—that he was out. Out of the railroad system he had given his life to help build up and to make what it was. Out of the position he had climbed to by studying like a hermit and working like a hobo. Out—without criticism or reason or allegation. Simply, like a dog, out.
Bucks and Callahan looked down on the departing train soon afterward, and saw Healey climbing into the smoker. Every minute he had before the new order beheaded him he spent at the Spider. One thing he meant to make sure of—that they shouldn't beat him out of the finish of the Spider bridge as he had planned it. One monument Healey meant to have; one he has.
After he let go on the West End, Healey wanted to look up something East. But Bucks told him frankly it would be difficult to get a place without a regular engineer's degree. It seemed as if there was no place for Healey but just the mountains, and after a time finding nothing, and Bucks losing a roadmaster, Healey—Callahan urging—agreed to take the little job and stay with his old superintendent. It was a big drop, but Healey took it.
Agnew meantime had stopped all construction work not too far along to discontinue. The bridge at the Spider was fortunately beyond his mandate; it was finished to a rivet as Healey had planned it. But the Peace River bridge was caught in the air, and Healey's great caissons gave way to piles, and the cost came down from a hundred to seventy-five thousand dollars. Incidentally it was breathed from headquarters that the day for extravagant appropriations on the West End was passed.
That year we had no winter till spring, and no spring till summer; and it was a spring of snow and a summer of water. The mountains were lost in snow even after Easter. When the snow let up, and it was no longer a matter of keeping the track clear, it was a matter of lashing it to the right-of-way to keep it from swimming clear. Healey caught it worse than anybody. He knew Bucks looked to him for the track, and he worked like two men, for that was his way in a pinch. He strained every nerve making ready for the time the mountain snows should go out.
There was nobody easy on the West End. Healey least of all, for that spring, ahead of the suns, ahead of the thaws, ahead of the waters, came a going out that unsettled the oldest calculator in the wickiup. Brodie's old friends began coming out of the up-country, out of the Spider Valley. Over the Eagle Pass and through the Peace Cañon came the Sioux in parties and camps and tribes. And Bucks stayed them and talked with them. But the Sioux did not talk, they grunted—and traveled. After Bucks Healey tried, for the braves knew him and would listen. But when he accused them of fixing for a fight, they denied and turned their faces to the mountains. They stretched their arms straight out under their blankets like stringers, and put their palms downward and muttered to Healey, "Plenty snow."
"I reckon they're lying," growled Bucks listening. Healey made no comment; only looked at the buried mountains.
Now the Spider wakes regularly twice; at all other times irregularly. Once in April; that is the foothills water. Once in June; that is the mountain water.