The Night Operator Part 3

When Toddles left the despatcher's office that morning with Donkin's promise to teach him the key, Toddles had a hazy idea that Donkin had wings concealed somewhere under his coat and was an angel in disguise; and at the end of two weeks he was sure of it. But at the end of a month Bob Donkin was a G.o.d! Throw Bob Donkin down! Toddles would have sold his soul for the despatcher.

It wasn't easy, though; and Bob Donkin wasn't an easy-going taskmaster, not by long odds. Donkin had a tongue, and on occasions could use it.

Short and quick in his explanations, he expected his pupil to get it short and quick; either that, or Donkin's opinion of him. But Toddles stuck. He'd have crawled on his knees for Donkin anywhere, and he worked like a major--not only for his own advancement, but for what he came to prize quite as much, if not more, Donkin's approval.

Toddles, mindful of Donkin's words, didn't fight so much as the days went by, though he found it difficult to swear off all at once; and on his runs he studied his Morse code, and he had the "calls" of every station on the division off by heart right from the start. Toddles mastered the "sending" by leaps and bounds; but the "taking" came slower, as it does for everybody--but even at that, at the end of six weeks, if it wasn't thrown at him too fast and hard, Toddles could get it after a fas.h.i.+on.

Take it all around, Toddles felt like whistling most of the time; and, pleased with his own progress, looked forward to starting in presently as a full-fledged operator. He mentioned the matter to Bob Donkin--once. Donkin picked his words and spoke fervently. Toddles never brought the subject up again.

And so things went on. Late summer turned to early fall, and early fall to still sharper weather, until there came the night that the operator at Blind River muddled his orders and gave No. 73, the westbound fast freight, her clearance against the second section of the eastbound Limited that doomed them to meet somewhere head-on in the Glacier Canon; the night that Toddles--but there's just a word or two that comes before.

When it was all over, it was up to Sam Beale, the Blind River operator, straight enough. Beale blundered. That's all there was to it; that covers it all--he blundered. It would have finished Beale's railroad career forever and a day--only Beale played the man, and the instant he realized what he had done, even while the tail lights of the freight were disappearing down the track and he couldn't stop her, he was stammering the tale of his mistake over the wire, the sweat beads dripping from his wrist, his face gray with horror, to Bob Donkin under the green-shaded lamp in the despatchers' room at Big Cloud, miles away.

Donkin got the miserable story over the chattering wire--got it before it was half told--cut Beale out and began to pound the Gap call. And as though it were before him in reality, that stretch of track, fifteen miles of it, from Blind River to the Gap, unfolded itself like a grisly panorama before his mind. There wasn't a half mile of tangent at a single stretch in the whole of it. It swung like the writhings of a snake, through cuts and tunnels, hugging the canon walls, twisting this way and that. Anywhere else there might be a chance, one in a thousand even, that they would see each other's headlights in time--here it was disaster quick and absolute.

Donkin's lips were set in a thin, straight line. The Gap answered him; and the answer was like the knell of doom. He had not expected anything else; he had only hoped against hope. The second section of the Limited had pulled out of the Gap, eastbound, two minutes before.

The two trains were in the open against each other's orders.

In the next room, Carleton and Regan, over their pipes, were at their nightly game of pedro. Donkin called them--and his voice sounded strange to himself. Chairs sc.r.a.ped and crashed to the floor, and an instant later the super and the master mechanic were in the room.

"What's wrong, Bob?" Carleton flung the words from him in a single breath.

Donkin told them. But his fingers were on the key again as he talked.

There was still one chance, worse than the thousand-to-one shot; but it was the only one. Between the Gap and Blind River, eight miles from the Gap, seven miles from Blind River, was Ca.s.sil's Siding. But there was no night man at Ca.s.sil's, and the little town lay a mile from the station. It was ten o'clock--Donkin's watch lay face up on the table before him--the day man at Ca.s.sil's went off at seven--the chance was that the day man might have come back to the station for something or other!

Not much of a chance? No--not much! It was a possibility, that was all; and Donkin's fingers worked--the seventeen, the life and death--calling, calling on the night trick to the day man at Ca.s.sil's Siding.

Carleton came and stood at Donkin's elbow, and Regan stood at the other; and there was silence now, save only for the key that, under Donkin's fingers, seemed to echo its stammering appeal about the room like the sobbing of a human soul.

"CS--CS--CS," Donkin called; and then, "the seventeen," and then, "hold second Number Two." And then the same thing over and over again.

And there was no answer.

It had turned cold that night and there was a fire in the little heater. Donkin had opened the draft a little while before, and the sheet-iron sides now began to pur red-hot. n.o.body noticed it. Regan's kindly, good-humored face had the stamp of horror in it, and he pulled at his scraggly brown mustache, his eyes seemingly fascinated by Donkin's fingers. Everybody's eyes, the three of them, were on Donkin's fingers and the key. Carleton was like a man of stone, motionless, his face set harder than face was ever carved in marble.

It grew hot in the room; but Donkin's fingers were like ice on the key, and, strong man though he was, he faltered.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" he whispered--and never a prayer rose more fervently from lips than those three broken words.

Again he called, and again, and again. The minutes slipped away.

Still he called--with the life and death--the "seventeen"--called and called. And there was no answer save that echo in the room that brought the perspiration streaming now from Regan's face, a harder light into Carleton's eyes, and a chill like death into Donkin's heart.

Suddenly Donkin pushed back his chair; and his fingers, from the key, touched the crystal of his watch.

"The second section will have pa.s.sed Ca.s.sil's now," he said in a curious, unnatural, matter-of-fact tone. "It'll bring them together about a mile east of there--in another minute."

And then Carleton spoke--master railroader, "Royal" Carleton, it was up to him then, all the pity of it, the ruin, the disaster, the lives out, all the bitterness to cope with as he could. And it was in his eyes, all of it. But his voice was quiet. It rang quick, peremptory, his voice--but quiet.

"Clear the line, Bob," he said. "Plug in the roundhouse for the wrecker--and tell them to send uptown for the crew."

Toddles? What did Toddles have to do with this? Well, a good deal, in one way and another. We're coming to Toddles now. You see, Toddles, since his fracas with Hawkeye, had been put on the Elk River local run that left Big Cloud at 9.45 in the morning for the run west, and scheduled Big Cloud again on the return trip at 10.10 in the evening.

It had turned cold that night, after a day of rain. Pretty cold--the thermometer can drop on occasions in the late fall in the mountains--and by eight o'clock, where there had been rain before, there was now a thin sheeting of ice over everything--very thin--you know the kind--rails and telegraph wires glistening like the decorations on a Christmas tree--very pretty--and also very nasty running on a mountain grade. Likewise, the rain, in a way rain has, had dripped from the car roofs to the platforms--the local did not boast any closed vestibules--and had also been blown upon the car steps with the sweep of the wind, and, having frozen, it stayed there. Not a very serious matter; annoying, perhaps, but not serious, demanding a little extra caution, that was all.

Toddles was in high fettle that night. He had been getting on famously of late; even Bob Donkin had admitted it. Toddles, with his stack of books and magazines, an unusually big one, for a number of the new periodicals were out that day, was dreaming rosy dreams to himself as he started from the door of the first-cla.s.s smoker to the door of the first-cla.s.s coach. In another hour now he'd be up in the despatcher's room at Big Cloud for his nightly sitting with Bob Donkin. He could see Bob Donkin there now; and he could hear the big despatcher growl at him in his bluff way: "Use your head--use your head--_Hoogan_!" It was always "Hoogan," never "Toddles." "Use your head"--Donkin was everlastingly drumming that into him; for the despatcher used to confront him suddenly with imaginary and hair-raising emergencies, and demand Toddles' instant solution. Toddles realized that Donkin was getting to the heart of things, and that some day he, Toddles, would be a great despatcher--like Donkin. "Use your head, Hoogan"--that's the way Donkin talked--"anybody can learn a key, but that doesn't make a railroad man out of him. It's the man when trouble comes who can think quick and think _right_. Use your----"

Toddles stepped out on the platform--and walked on ice. But that wasn't Toddles' undoing. The trouble with Toddles was that he was walking on air at the same time. It was treacherous running, they were nosing a curve, and in the cab, Kinneard, at the throttle, checked with a little jerk at the "air." And with the jerk, Toddles slipped; and with the slip, the center of gravity of the stack of periodicals s.h.i.+fted, and they bulged ominously from the middle. Toddles grabbed at them--and his heels went out from under him. He ricochetted down the steps, s.n.a.t.c.hed desperately at the handrail, missed it, shot out from the train, and, head, heels, arms and body going every which way at once, rolled over and over down the embankment. And, starting from the point of Toddles' departure from the train, the right of way for a hundred yards was strewn with "the latest magazines" and "new books just out to-day."

Toddles lay there, a little, curled, huddled heap, motionless in the darkness. The tail lights of the local disappeared. No one aboard would miss Toddles until they got into Big Cloud--and found him gone.

Which is Irish for saying that no one would attempt to keep track of a newsboy's idiosyncrasies on a train; it would be asking too much of any train crew; and, besides, there was no mention of it in the rules.

It was a long while before Toddles stirred; a very long while before consciousness crept slowly back to him. Then he moved, tried to get up--and fell back with a quick, sharp cry of pain. He lay still, then, for a moment. His ankle hurt him frightfully, and his back, and his shoulder, too. He put his hand to his face where something seemed to be trickling warm--and brought it away wet. Toddles, grim little warrior, tried to think. They hadn't been going very fast when he fell off. If they had, he would have been killed. As it was, he was hurt, badly hurt, and his head swam, nauseating him.

Where was he? Was he near any help? He'd have to get help somewhere, or--or with the cold and--and everything he'd probably die out here before morning. Toddles shouted out--again and again. Perhaps his voice was too weak to carry very far; anyway, there was no reply.

He looked up at the top of the embankment, clamped his teeth, and started to crawl. If he got up there, perhaps he could tell where he was. It had taken Toddles a matter of seconds to roll down; it took him ten minutes of untold agony to get up. Then he dashed his hand across his eyes where the blood was, and cried a little with the surge of relief. East, down the track, only a few yards away, the green eye of a switch lamp winked at him.

Where there was a switch lamp there was a siding, and where there was a siding there was promise of a station. Toddles, with the sudden uplift upon him, got to his feet and started along the track--two steps--and went down again. He couldn't walk, the pain was more than he could bear--his right ankle, his left shoulder, and his back--hopping only made it worse--it was easier to crawl.

And so Toddles crawled.

It took him a long time even to pa.s.s the switch light. The pain made him weak, his senses seemed to trail off giddily every now and then, and he'd find himself lying flat and still beside the track. It was a white, drawn face that Toddles lifted up each time he started on again--miserably white, except where the blood kept trickling from his forehead.

And then Toddles' heart, stout as it was, seemed to snap. He had reached the station platform, wondering vaguely why the little building that loomed ahead was dark--and now it came to him in a flash, as he recognized the station. It was Ca.s.sil's Siding--_and there was no night man at Ca.s.sil's Siding_! The switch lights were lit before the day man left, of course. Everything swam before Toddles' eyes.

There--there was no help here. And yet--yet perhaps--desperate hope came again--perhaps there might be. The pain was terrible--all over him. And--and he'd got so weak now--but it wasn't far to the door.

Toddles squirmed along the platform, and reached the door finally--only to find it shut and fastened. And then Toddles fainted on the threshold.

When Toddles came to himself again, he thought at first that he was up in the despatcher's room at Big Cloud with Bob Donkin pounding away on the battered old key they used to practise with--only there seemed to be something the matter with the key, and it didn't sound as loud as it usually did--it seemed to come from a long way off somehow. And then, besides, Bob was working it faster than he had ever done before when they were practising. "Hold second"--second something--Toddles couldn't make it out. Then the "seventeen"--yes, he knew that--that was the life and death. Bob was going pretty quick, though. Then "CS--CS--CS"--Toddles' brain fumbled a bit over that--then it came to him. CS was the call for Ca.s.sil's Siding. _Ca.s.sil's Siding_!

Toddles' head came up with a jerk.

A little cry burst from Toddles' lips--and his brain, cleared. He wasn't at Big Cloud at all--he was at Ca.s.sil's Siding--and he was hurt--and that was the sounder inside calling, calling frantically for Ca.s.sil's Siding---where he was.

The life and death--_the seventeen_--it sent a thrill through Toddles'

pain-twisted spine. He wriggled to the window. It, too, was closed, of course, but he could hear better there. The sounder was babbling madly.

"Hold second----"

He missed it again--and as, on top of it, the "seventeen" came pleading, frantic, urgent, he wrung his hands.

"Hold second"--he got it this time--"Number Two."

Toddles' first impulse was to smash in the window and reach the key.

And then, like a dash of cold water over him, Donkin's words seemed to ring in his ears: "Use your head."

With the "seventeen" it meant a matter of minutes, perhaps even seconds. Why smash the window? Why waste the moment required to do it simply to answer the call? The order stood for itself--"Hold second Number Two." That was the second section of the Limited, east-bound.

Hold her! How? There was nothing--not a thing to stop her with. "Use your head," said Donkin in a far-away voice to Toddles' wobbling brain.

Toddles looked up the track--west--where he had come from--to where the switch light twinkled green at him--and, with a little sob, he started to drag himself back along the platform. If he could throw the switch, it would throw the light from green to red, and--and the Limited would take the siding. But the switch was a long way off.