The Last Spike Part 17

"I'll come back," she seemed to say, peeping over the shoulder of a glacier that stood at the stage entrance; "I'll come back, but ere I come again there'll be strange scenes and sounds on this rude stage so new to you. First, you will have a short season of melodrama by a melancholy chap called Autumn, gloriously garbed in green and gold, with splashes and dashes of lavender and lace, but sad, sweetly sad, and sighing always, for life is such a little while."

With a sadder smile, she kissed her rosy fingers and was gone,--gone with her gorgeous garments, her ferns and flowers, her low, soft sighs and sunny skies, and there was not a man that was a man but missed her when she was gone.

The autumn scene, though sombre and sad, was far from depressing, but they all felt the change. John Hislop seemed to feel it more than all the rest; for besides being deeply religious, he was deeply in love. His nearest and dearest friend, Heney--happy, hilarious Heney--knew, and he swore softly whenever a steamer landed without a message from Minneapolis,--the long-looked-for letter that would make Hislop better or worse. It came at length, and Hislop was happy. With his horse, his dog, and a sandwich,--but never a gun,--he would make long excursions down toward Lake Linderman, to Bennett, or over Atlin way. When the country became too rough for the horse, he would be left picketed near a stream with a faithful dog to look after him while the pathfinder climbed up among the eagles.

In the meantime Foy kept pounding away. Occasionally a soiled pedestrian would slide down the slope, tell a wild tale of rich strikes, and a hundred men would quit work and head for the highlands. Foy would storm and swear and coax by turns, but to no purpose; for they were like so many steers, and as easily stampeded. When the Atlin boom struck the camp, Foy lost five hundred men in as many minutes. Scores of graders dropped their tools and started off on a trot. The prospector who had told the fable had thrown his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the general direction. n.o.body had thought to ask how far. Many forgot to let go; and Heney's picks and shovels, worth over a dollar apiece, went away with the stampeders. As the wild mob swept on, the tethered blasters cut the cables that guyed them to the hills, and each loped away with a piece of rope around one ankle.

Panting, they pa.s.sed over the range, these gold-crazed c.o.xeys, without a bun or a blanket, a crust or a crumb, many without a cent or even a sweat-mark where a cent had slept in their soiled overalls.

When Foy had exhausted the English, Irish, and Alaskan languages in wis.h.i.+ng the men luck in various degrees, he rounded up the remnant of his army and began again. In a day or two the stampeders began to limp back hungry and weary, and every one who brought a pick or a shovel was re-employed. But hundreds kept on toward Lake Bennett, and thence by water up Windy Arm to the Atlin country, and many of them have not yet returned to claim their time-checks.

The autumn waned. The happy wives of young engineers, who had been tented along the line during the summer, watched the wildflowers fade with a feeling of loneliness and deep longing for their stout-hearted, strong-limbed husbands, who were away up in the cloud-veiled hills; and they longed, too, for other loved ones in the lowlands of their childhood. Foy's blasters and builders b.u.t.toned their coats and buckled down to keep warm. Below, they could hear loud peals of profanity as the trailers, packers, and pilgrims pounded their dumb slaves over the trail. Above, the wind cried and moaned among the crags, constantly reminding them that winter was near at hand. The nights were longer than the days. The working day was cut from ten to eight hours, but the pay of the men had been raised from thirty to thirty-five cents an hour.

One day a black cloud curtained the canon, and the workmen looked up from their picks and drills to find that it was November and night. The whole theatre, stage and all, had grown suddenly dark; but they knew, by the strange, weird noise in the wings, that the great tragedy of winter was on. Hislop's horse and dog went down the trail. Hawkins and Hislop and Heney walked up and down among the men, as commanding officers show themselves on the eve of battle. Foy chaffed the laborers and gave them more rope; but no amount of levity could prevail against the universal feeling of dread that seemed to settle upon the whole army. This weird Alaska, so wild and grand, so cool and sweet and sunny in summer, so strangely sad in autumn,--this many-mooded, little known Alaska that seemed doomed ever to be misunderstood, either over-lauded or lied about,--what would she do to them? How cruel, how cold, how weird, how wickedly wild her winters must be! Most men are brave, and an army of brave men will breast great peril when G.o.d's lamp lights the field; but the stoutest heart dreads the darkness. These men were sore afraid, all of them; and yet no one was willing to be the first to fall out, so they stood their ground. They worked with a will born of desperation.

The wind moaned hoa.r.s.ely. The temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees below zero, but the men, in sheltered places, kept pounding. Sometimes they would work all day cleaning the snow from the grade made the day before, and the next day it would probably be drifted full again. At times the task seemed hopeless; but Heney had promised to build to the summit of White Pa.s.s without a stop, and Foy had given Heney his hand across a table at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Skagway.

At times the wind blew so frightfully that the men had to hold hands; but they kept pegging away between blasts, and in a little while were ready to begin bridging the gulches and deep side-canons. One day--or one night, rather, for there were no days then--a camp cook, crazed by the cold and the endless night, wandered off to die. Hislop and Heney found him, but he refused to be comforted. He wanted to quit, but Heney said he could not be spared. He begged to be left alone to sleep in the warm, soft snow, but Heney brought him back to consciousness and to camp.

A premature blast blew a man into eternity. The wind moaned still more drearily. The snow drifted deeper and deeper, and one day they found that, for days and days, they had been blasting ice and snow when they thought they were drilling the rock. Heney and Foy faced each other in the dim light of a tent lamp that night. "Must we give up?" asked the contractor.

"No," said Foy, slowly, speaking in a whisper; "we'll build on snow, for it's hard and safe; and in the spring we'll ease it down and make a road-bed."

They did so. They built and bedded the cross-ties on the snow, ballasted with snow, and ran over that track until spring without an accident.

They were making mileage slowly, but the awful strain was telling on the men and on the bank account. The president of the company was almost constantly travelling between Was.h.i.+ngton and Ottawa, pausing now and again to reach over to London for another bag of gold, for they were melting it up there in the arctic night--literally burning it up, were these dynamiters of Foy's.

To conceive this great project, to put it into shape, present it in London, secure the funds and the necessary concessions from two governments, survey and build, and have a locomotive running in Alaska a year from the first whoop of the happy Klondiker, had been a mighty achievement; but it was what Heney would call "dead easy" compared with the work that confronted the President at this time. On July 20, 1897, the first pick was driven into the ground at White Pa.s.s; just a year later the pioneer locomotive was run over the road. More than once had the financial backers allowed their faith in the enterprise and in the future of the country beyond to slip away; but the President of the company had always succeeded in building it up again, for they had never lost faith in him, or in his ability to see things that were to most men invisible. In summer, when the weekly reports showed a mile or more or less of track laid, it was not so hard; but when days were spent in placing a single bent in a bridge, and weeks were consumed on a switch back in a pinched-out canon, it was hard to persuade sane men that business sense demanded that they pile on more fuel. But they did it; and, as the work went on, it became apparent to those interested in such undertakings that all the heroes of the White Pa.s.s were not in the hills.

In addition to the elements, ever at war with the builders, they had other worries that winter. Hawkins had a fire that burned all the company's offices and all his maps and notes and records of surveys. Foy had a strike, incited largely by jealous packers and freighters; and there was hand-to-hand fighting between the strikers and their abettors and the real builders, who sympathized with the company.

Brydone-Jack, a fine young fellow, who had been sent out as consulting engineer to look after the interests of the shareholders, clapped his hands to his forehead and fell, face down, in the snow. His comrades carried him to his tent. He had been silent, had suffered, perhaps for a day or two, but had said nothing. The next night he pa.s.sed away. His wife was waiting at Vancouver until he could finish his work in Alaska and go home to her.

With sad and heavy hearts Hawkins and Hislop and Heney climbed back to where Foy and his men were keeping up the fight. Like so many big lightning-bugs they seemed, with their dim white lamps rattling around in the storm. It was nearly all night then. G.o.d and his sunlight seemed to have forsaken Alaska. Once every twenty-four hours a little ball of fire, red, round, and remote, swung across the canon, dimly lighted their lunch-tables, and then disappeared behind the great glacier that guards the gateway to the Klondike.

As the road neared the summit, Heney observed that Foy was growing nervous, and that he coughed a great deal. He watched the old fellow, and found that he was not eating well, and that he slept very little.

Heney asked Foy to rest, but the latter shook his head. Hawkins and Hislop and Heney talked the matter over in Hislop's tent, called Foy in, and demanded that he go down and out. Foy was coughing constantly, but he choked it back long enough to tell the three men what he thought of them. He had worked hard and faithfully to complete the job, and now that only one level mile remained to be railed, would they send the old man down the hill? "I will not budge," said Foy, facing his friends; "an' when you gentlemen ar-re silibratin' th' vict'ry at the top o' the hill ahn Chuesday nixt, Hugh Foy'll be wood ye. Do you moind that, now?"

Foy steadied himself by a tent-pole and coughed violently. His eyes were gla.s.sy, and his face flushed with the purplish flush that fever gives.

"Enough of this!" said the chief engineer, trying to look severe. "Take this message, sign it, and send it at once."

Foy caught the bit of white clip and read:--

"CAPTAIN O'BRIEN,

SKAGWAY.

"Save a berth for me on the 'Rosalie.'"

They thought, as they watched him, that the old road-maker was about to crush the paper in his rough right hand; but suddenly his face brightened, he reached for a pencil, saying, "I'll do it," and when he had added "next trip" to the message, he signed it, folded it, and took it over to the operator.

So it happened that, when the last spike was driven at the summit, on February 20, 1899, the old foreman, who had driven the first, drove the last, and it was _his_ last spike as well. Doctor Whiting guessed it was pneumonia.

When the road had been completed to Lake Bennett, the owners came over to see it; and when they saw what had been done, despite the prediction that Dawson was dead and that the Cape Nome boom would equal that of the Klondike, they authorized the construction of another hundred miles of road which would connect with the Yukon below the dreaded White Horse Rapids. Jack and Foy and Hislop are gone; and when John Hislop pa.s.sed away, the West lost one of the most modest and unpretentious, yet one of the best and bravest, one of the purest minded men that ever saw the sun go down behind a snowy range.

NUMBER THREE

One winter night, as the west-bound express was pulling out of Omaha, a drunken man climbed aboard. The young Superintendent, who stood on the rear platform, caught the man by the collar and hauled him up the steps.

The train, from the tank to the tail-lights, was crammed full of pa.s.senger-people going home or away to spend Christmas. Over in front the express and baggage cars were piled full of baggage, bundles, boxes, trinkets, and toys, each intended to make some heart happier on the morrow, for it was Christmas Eve. It was to see that these pa.s.sengers and their precious freight, already a day late, got through that the Superintendent was leaving his own fireside to go over the road.

The snow came swirling across the plain, cold and wet, pasting the window and blurring the headlight on the black locomotive that was climbing laboriously over the kinks and curves of a new track. Here and there, in sheltered wimples, bands of buffalo were bunched to s.h.i.+eld them from the storm. Now and then an antelope left the rail or a lone coyote crouched in the shadow of a telegraph-pole as the dim headlight swept the right of way. At each stop the Superintendent would jump down, look about, and swing onto the rear car as the train pulled out again.

At one time he found that his seat had been taken, also his overcoat, which had been left hanging over the back. The thief was discovered on the blind baggage and turned over to the "city marshal" at the next stop.

Upon entering the train again, the Superintendent went forward to find a seat in the express car. It was near midnight now. They were coming into a settlement and pa.s.sing through prosperous new towns that were building up near the end of the division. Near the door the messenger had set a little green Christmas tree, and grouped about it were a red sled, a doll-carriage, some toys, and a few parcels. If the blond doll in the little toy carriage toppled over, the messenger would set it up again; and when pa.s.sing freight out he was careful not to knock a twig from the tree. So intent was he upon the task of taking care of this particular s.h.i.+pment that he had forgotten the Superintendent, and started and almost stared at him when he shouted the observation that the messenger was a little late with his tree.

"'Tain't mine," he said sadly, shaking his head. "B'longs to the fellow 't swiped your coat."

"No!" exclaimed the Superintendent, as he went over to look at the toys.

"If he'd only asked me," said the messenger, more to himself than to the Superintendent, "he could 'a' had mine and welcome."

"Do you know the man?"

"Oh, yes--he lives next door to me, and I'll have to face his wife and lie to her, and then face my own; but I can't lie to her. I'll tell her the truth and get roasted for letting Downs get away. I'll go to sleep by the sound of her sobs and wake to find her crying in her coffee--that's the kind of a Christmas I'll have. When he's drunk he's disgusting, of course; but when he's sober he's sorry. And Charley Downs is honest."

"Honest!" shouted the Superintendent.

"Yes, I know he took your coat, but that wasn't Charley Downs; it was the tarantula-juice he'd been imbibing in Omaha. Left alone he's as honest as I am; and here's a run that would trip up a missionary. For instance, leaving Loneville the other night, a man came running alongside the car and threw in a bundle of bills that looked like a bale of hay. Not a sc.r.a.p of paper or pencil-mark, just a wad o' winnings with a w.a.n.g around the middle. 'A Christmas gift for my wife,' he yelled.

'How much?' I shouted. 'Oh, I dunno--whole lot, but it's tied good'; and then a cloud of steam from the cylinder-c.o.c.ks came between us, and I haven't seen him since.

"For the past six months Downs has tried hard to be decent, and has succeeded some; and this was to be the supreme test. For six months his wife has been saving up to send him to Omaha to buy things for Christmas. If he could do that, she argued, and come back sober, he'd be stronger to begin the New Year. Of course they looked to me to keep him on the rail, and I did. I shadowed him from shop to shop until he bought all the toys and some little trinkets for his wife. Always I found he had paid and ordered the things to be sent to the express office marked to me.

"Well, finally I followed him to a clothing store, where, according to a promise made to his wife, he bought an overcoat, the first he had felt on his back for years. This he put on, of course, for it is cold in Omaha to-day; and I left him and slipped away to grab a few hours'

sleep.

"When I woke I went out to look for him, but could not find him, though I tried hard, and came to my car without supper. I found his coat, however, hung up in a saloon, and redeemed it, hoping still to find Charley before train time. I watched for him until we were signalled out, and then went back and looked through the train, but failed to find him.

"Of course I am sorry for Charley," the messenger went on after a pause, "but more so for the poor little woman. She's worked and worked, and saved and saved, and hoped and dreamed, until she actually believed he'd been cured and that the sun would s.h.i.+ne in her life again. Why, the neighbors have been talking across the back fence about how well Mrs.

Downs was looking. My wife declared she heard her laugh the other day clear over to our house. Half the town knew about her dream. The women folks have been carrying work to her and then going over and helping her do it as a sort of surprise party. And now it's all off. To-morrow will be Christmas; and he'll be in jail, his wife in despair, and I in disgrace. Charley Downs a thief--in jail! It'll just break her heart!"

The whistle proclaimed a stop, and the Superintendent swung out with a lump in his throat. This was an important station, and the last one before Loneville. Without looking to the right or left, the Superintendent walked straight to the telegraph office and sent the following message to the agent at the place where Downs had been ditched:--