O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 25

Noon of the third day came, and the Ozark Central became the detour route of every cross-Missouri mail train. Night, and Martin Garrity, snow-crusted, his face cut and cracked by the bite of wind and the sting of splintered, wind-driven ice, his head aching from loss of sleep, but his heart thumping with happiness, took on the serious business of moving every St. Louis-Kansas City pa.s.senger and express train, blinked vacuously when someone called him a wizard.

Railroad officials gave him cigars, and slapped him on his snow-caked shoulders. He cussed them out of the way. The telephone at Northport clanged and sang with calls from President Barstow; but Martin only waved a hand in answer as he ground through with the rotary.

"Tell him to send me tilegrams!" he bl.u.s.tered. "Don't he know I'm busy?"

Twelve hours more. The snow ceased. The wind died. Ten miles out of Kansas City Martin gave the homeward-bound order for Northport, then slumped weakly into a corner. Five minutes before he had heard the news--news that hurt. The O.R.& T., fighting with every available man it could summon, had partially opened its line, with the exception of one division, hopelessly snowed under--his old, his beloved Blue Ribbon.

"Tis me that would have kept 'er open," he mused bitterly. "And they fired me!"

He nodded and slept. He awoke--and he said the same thing again. He reached Northport, late at night, to roar at Jewel and the hot water she had heated for his frost-bitten feet--then to hug her with an embrace that she had not known since the days when her Marty wore a red unders.h.i.+rt.

"And do ye be hearin?" she asked. "The Blue Ribbon's tied up! Not a wheel----"

"Will ye shut up?" Martin suddenly had remembered something. The mail test! Not forty-eight hours away! He blinked. One big hand smacked into the other. "The pound of fles.h.!.+" he bellowed. "Be gar! The pound of fles.h.!.+"

"And what are ye talkin' ----"

"Woman, shut up," said Martin Garrity. "'Tis me that's goin' to bed.

See that I'm not disturbed. Not even for Mr. Barstow."

"That I will," said Jewel--but that she didn't. It was Martin himself who answered the pounding on the door four hours later, then, in the frigid dining room, stared at the message which the chief dispatcher had handed him:

GARRITY, NORTHPORT: If line is free of snow a.s.semble all snow-fighting equipment and necessary locomotives to handle same, delivering same fully equipped and manned with your own force to Blue Ribbon Division O.R. & T. Accompany this equipment personally to carry out instructions as I would like to have them carried out. Everything depends on your success or failure to open this line.

LEMUEL C. BARSTOW.

So! He was to make the effort; but if he failed that mail contract came automatically to the one road free to make the test, the Ozark Central! That was what Barstow meant! Make the effort, appear to fight with every weapon, that the O.R. & T. might have no claim in the future of unfairness but to fail! Let it be so! The O.R. & T. had broken his heart. Now, at last, his turn had come!

He turned to the telephone and gave his orders. Then up the stairs he clambered and into his clothes. Jewel snorted and awoke.

"Goo'by!" roared Martin as he climbed into his coat. "They've sent for me to open the Blue Ribbon."

"And have they?" Jewel sat up, her eyes beaming. "I'd been wis.h.i.+n'

it--and ye'll do it, Marty; I've been thinkin' about the old section snowed under--and all the folks we knew----"

"Will ye shut up?" This was something Martin did not want to hear. Out of the house he plumped, to the waiting double-header of locomotives attached to the rotary, and the other engines, parked on the switches, with their wedge ploughs, jull-ploughs, f.l.a.n.g.ers, and tunnel wideners.

The "high-ball" sounded. At daybreak, boring his way through the snow-clogged transfer at Missouri City, Martin came out upon the main line of the O.R. & T.--and to his duty of revenge.

On they went, a slow, deliberate journey, steam hissing, black smoke curling, whistles tooting, wheels crunching, as the rotary bucked the bigger drifts and the smaller ploughs eliminated the slighter raises, a triumphant procession toward that thing which Martin knew he could attack with all the seeming ferocity of desperation and yet fail--the fifty-foot thickness of Bander Cut.

Face to face, in the gaunt sun of early morning he saw it--a little shack, half covered with snow, bleak and forbidding in its loneliness, yet all in all to the man who stared at it with eyes suddenly wistful--his little old section house, where once the honour flag had flown.

He gulped. Suddenly his hand tugged at the bell cord. Voices had come from without, they were calling his name! He sought the door, then gulped again. The steps and platform of his car were filled with eager, homely-faced men, men he had known in other days, his old crew of section "snipes."

All about him they crowded; Martin heard his voice answering their queries, as though someone were talking far away. His eyes had turned back to that section house, seeking instinctively the old flag, his flag. It spoke for a man who gave the best that was in him, who surpa.s.sed because he worked with his heart and with his soul in the every task before him. But the flag was not there. The pace had not been maintained. Then the louder tones of a straw boss called him back:

"You'll sure need that big screw and all the rest of them babies, Garrity. That ole Bander Cut's full to the sky--and Sni-a-bend Hill!

Good-night! But you'll make 'er. You've got to, Garrity; we've made up a purse an' bet it down in Montgomery that you'll make 'er!"

Martin went within and the crew waited for a high-ball order that did not come. In his private car, alone, Martin Garrity was pacing the floor. The call of the old division, which he had loved and built, was upon him, swaying him with all the force of memory.

"I guess we could sell the flivver----" he was repeating. "Then I've got me diamond ... and Jewel ... she's got a bit, besides what we've saved bechune us. And he'll win the test, anyhow ... they'll never beat him over this division ... if I give him back what I've earned ... and if he wins anyhow------"

Up ahead they still waited. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. At last a figure appeared in the cab of the big rotary, looking for a last time at that bleak little section house and the bare flagpole. Then:

"Start 'er up and give 'er h.e.l.l!"

Martin was on the job once more, while outside his old section snipes cheered, and reminded him that their hopes and dreams for a division still beloved in spite of a downfall rested upon his shoulders. The whistles screamed. The bells clanged. Smoke poured from the stacks of the double-header, and the freshening sun, a short time later, glinted upon the white-splotched equipment, as the great auger followed by its lesser allies, bored into the ma.s.s of snow at Bander Cut.

Hours of backing and filling, of retreats and attacks, hours in which there came, time after time, the opportunity to quit. But Martin did not give the word. Out the other side they came, the steam shooting high, and on toward the next obstacle, the first of forty, lesser and greater, which lay between them and Montgomery City.

Afternoon ... night. Still the crunching, whining roar of the rotary as it struck the icy stretches fought against them in vain, then retreated until pick and bar and dynamite could break the way for its further attack. Midnight, and one by one the exhausted crew approached the white-faced, grim-lipped man who stood tense and determined in the rotary cab. One by one they asked the same question:

"Hadn't we better tie up for the night?"

"Goon! D'ye hear me? Goon! What is it ye are, annyhow, a bunch of white-livered cowards that ye can't work without rest?"

The old, dynamic, bulldozing force, the force that had made men hate Martin Garrity only to love him, had returned into its full power, the force that had built him from a section snipe to the exalted possessor of the blue pennon which once had fluttered from that flagpole, was again on the throne, fighting onward to the conclusion of a purpose, no matter what it might wreck for him personally, no matter what the cost might be to him in the days to come. He was on his last job--he knew that. The mail contract might be won a thousand times over, but there ever would rest the stigma that he had received a telegram which should have been plain to him, and that he had failed to carry out its hidden orders. But with the thought of it Martin straightened, and he roared anew the message which carried tired, aching men through the night:

"Go on! Go on! What's stoppin' ye? Are ye going to let these milk-an'-water fellys over here say that ye tried and quit?"

Early morning--and there came Sni-a-bend Hill, with the snow packed against it in a new plane which obliterated the railroad as though it had never been there. Hot coffee came from the containers, sandwiches from the baskets, and the men ate and drank as they worked--all but Garrity. This was the final battle, and with it came his battle cry:

"Keep goin'! This is the tough one--we've got to go on--we've got to go on!"

And on they went. The streaking rays of dawn played for a moment upon an untroubled mound of white, smooth and deep upon the eastern end of Sni-a-bend. Then, as though from some great internal upheaval, the ma.s.s began to tremble. Great heaps of snow broke from their place and tumbled down the embankment. From farther at the rear, steam, augmented by the vapours of melting snow and the far-blown gushes of spitting smoke, hissed upward toward the heights of the white-clad hill. Then a bulging break--the roar of machinery, and a monster came grinding forth, forcing its way hungrily onward, toward the next and smaller contest. Within the giant auger a man turned to Garrity.

"Guess it's over, Boss. They said up at Glen Echo--"

A silent nod. Then Garrity turned, and reaching into the telegram-blank holder at the side of the cab, brought forth paper and an envelope. Long he wrote as the rotary clattered along, devouring the smaller drifts in steady succession, a letter of the soul, a letter which told of an effort that had failed, of a decision that could not hold. And it told, too, of the return of all that Martin had worked for--Mr. Barstow had been good to him, and he, Martin Garrity, could not take his money and disobey him. He'd pay him back.

Whistles sounded, shrieking in answer to the tooting of others from far away, the wild eerie ones of yard engines, the deeper, throatier tones of factories. It was the end. Montgomery City!

Slowly Martin addressed the envelope, and as the big bore came to a stop, evaded the thronging crowds and sought the railroad mail box. He raised the letter....

"Mr. Garrity!" He turned. The day agent was running toward him. "Mr.

Garrity, Mr. Barstow wants to see you. He's here--in the station. He came to see the finish."

So the execution must be a personal one! The letter was crunched into a pocket. Dimly, soddenly, Martin followed the agent. As through a haze he saw the figure of Barstow, and felt that person tug at his sleeve.

"Come over here, where we can talk in private!" There was a queer ring in the voice and Martin obeyed. Then--"Shake, Old Kid!"

Martin knew that a hand was clasping his. But why?

"You made it! I knew you would. Didn't I tell you we'd get our pound of flesh?"

"But--but the contract----"

"To thunder with the contract!" came the happy answer of Barstow. "If you had only answered the 'phone, you wouldn't be so much in the dark.