A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

Sullivan was such another waif as Farrell, but older, and with not so fair a chance of settling ever into the framework of conventional living. Twice he had crossed the Atlantic as a deck-hand on a cattle-ship, and, therefore, he knew the nether depths of depravity, but he boasted nothing of his knowledge. Once only, there came into his voice a note of exultation. It was at the end of an account of a thirty days’ term that he once served in the Bridewell, at Chicago. The description was admirable, for the memory of it was strong upon him, and he unconsciously made you see the prison and the keepers, and the flocking of the prisoners into the inner court in the morning, each from his separate cell.

“They knowed me there for Cuckoo Sullivan,” he said, “which was the name the cops in Chicago give me; and I guess they’d know yet who you was after, if you asked at the Harrison Street Station for Cuckoo Sullivan.”

We moved presently to a little platform near the line and were sitting on the steps smoking contentedly while there came to us the soughing of the night air in the corn. Sullivan was telling me of a long stay in Oklahoma and the Indian Territory, of the wild days of the opening of the reservation, and wilder days, when, with other adventurers, he roamed the new lands and lived at give and take with strange fortune. He told me of his loves, and they were many and some of them were dusky; and of the fights that he had fought, not all of them good; and how, finally, he had drifted north again as far as Scotia, Neb., and had worked there as a section-hand before coming to Buda.

Sullivan and I were friends when we turned in that night to our cots in the attic under the shanty roof. Next morning Osborn paired us as partners, when the day’s work began. On the stroke of seven we four opened the tool-house and loaded the car with the crowbars and wrenches and picks and shovels that would be needed, then placing our dinner pails on top, we ran the car out to the line and lifted it into position.

Twenty years earlier our predecessors, who laid the line and who used the same tool-house, took with them each a rifle every day in readiness for attacks of Indians. The worn sockets and rests were still to be seen, where the rifles had stood at night against an inner wall. Giving the car a start in the direction of Kearney we jumped aboard, and each taking a handle of the crank, we were soon flying over the rails. The sun was obscured, the early morning air was cool, and the rapid movement exhilarating, so that the first impression of the job was a jolly one. But pumping a hand-car is not the whole of a navvy’s work. Soon we reached the western end of our section, where there met us on their car the gang of the section next our own. Osborn had some talk with the other boss about certain details of the work, then lifting the car from the line, we settled to the day’s task. Osborn and Tyler worked together and Sullivan and I. Sullivan seemed not to mind having a green hand to break in, for he set about it with energy and not a little skill. There were sunken sleepers that had to be raised and tamped, and new coupling bars put in to replace those that had split, and spikes to be driven where the old ones were loose, and nuts to be tightened that were working free of their bolts.

Five hours on end of this were fatiguing; it was the drill, drill of rough manual labor, but with the difference of some variety, and there could not have been a better partner than Sullivan. He taught me how to tamp about the sleepers and put the new bars in place and tighten the nuts, but the noon signal was welcome as we heard it sounded by the steam whistles in Kearney.

We joined Osborn and Tyler then, and taking our dinner-pails from the hand-car, we all sat down in the prairie grass, settling ourselves to an hour of keen enjoyment. Slices of bread and cold meat and a bit of sausage and a piece of pie and cheese with cold tea, made up each man’s ration and laid the foundation for a smoke. Rough hand labor is always hard, however trained to it one’s muscles may have been, and ten hours of it daily are apt to have a deadening effect upon the mind, and time drags heavily to the end. Yet, when the nooning is reached, or the day’s work is done, there come with meat and drink a feeling of renewal that others cannot know as workingmen know it, and a solace in tobacco that is the very lap of ease.

As we lay there in the prairie grass, our eyes following, dreamily, the smoke as it curled in the warm sunlight, the talk drifting aimlessly, eddying now and then about a topic that held it for a moment, then flowing free again. Once it came my way.

“When you was living East, did you ever go to New York?” asked the boss.

“Yes, quite often,” I said.