Bucks
in his tired way, "what's the matter with Bucks?"
Now, I myself never knew Bucks. He left the West End before I went on. Bucks is second vice-president which means the boss of a transcontinental line now, and a very great swell. But no man from the West End who calls on Bucks has to wait for an audience, though bigger men do. They talk of him out there yet. Not of General Superintendent Bucks, which he came to be, nor of General Manager Bucks. On the West End he is just plain Bucks; but Bucks on the West End means a whole lot.
"He saved the company $300,000 that night the Ogalalla train ran away," mused Callahan. Callahan himself is assistant superintendent now.
"Three hundred thousand dollars is a good deal of money, Callahan," I objected.
"Figure it out yourself. To begin with, fifty passengers' lives that's $5000 apiece, isn't it?" Callahan had a cold-blooded way of figuring a passenger's life from the company standpoint. "It would have killed over fifty passengers if the runaway had ever struck 59. There wouldn't have been enough left of 59 to make a decent funeral. Then the equipment, at least $50,000. But there was a whole lot more than $300,000 in it for Bucks."
"How so?"
"He told me once that if he hadn't saved 59 that night he would never have signed another order anywhere on any road."
"Why?"
"Why? Because, after it was all over, he found out that his own mother was aboard 59. Didn't you ever hear that? Well, sir, it was Christmas Eve, and the year was 1884."
Christmas Eve everywhere; but on the West End it was just plain December 24th.
"High winds will prevail for ensuing twenty-four hours. Station agents will use extra care to secure cars on sidings; brakemen must use care to avoid being blown from moving trains."
That is about all Bucks said in his bulletins that evening; not a word about Christmas or Merry Christmas. In fact, if Christmas had come to McCloud that night they couldn't have held it twenty-four minutes, much less twenty-four hours; the wind was too high. All the week, all the day, all the night it had blown a December wind; dry as an August noon, bitter as powdered ice. It was in the early days of our Western railroading, when we had only one fast train on the schedule the St. Louis-California Express; and only one fast engine on the division the 101; and only one man on the whole West End Bucks.
Bucks was assistant superintendent and master-mechanic and train-master and chief dispatcher and storekeeper and a bully good fellow. There were some boys in the service; among them, Callahan. Callahan was seventeen, with hair like a sunset, and a mind quick as an air-brake. It was his first year at the key, and he had a night trick under Bucks.
Callahan claims it blew so hard that night that it blew most of the color out of his hair. Sod houses had sprung up like dog-towns in the buffalo grass during the fall. But that day homesteaders crept into dugouts and smothered over buffalo chip fires. Horses and cattle huddled into friendly pockets a little out of the worst of it, or froze mutely in pitiless fence corners on the divides. Sand drove gritting down from the Cheyenne hills like a storm of snow. Streets of the raw prairie towns stared deserted at the sky. Even cowboys kept their ranches, and through the gloom of noon the sun cast a coward shadow. It was a wretched day, and the sun went down with the wind tuning into a gale, and all the boys in bad humor except Bucks. Not that Bucks couldn't get mad; but it took more than a cyclone to start him.
No. 59, the California Express, was late that night. All the way up the valley the wind caught her quartering. Really the marvel is that out there on the plains such storms didn't blow our toy engines clear off the rails; for that matter they might as well have taken the rails, too, for none of them went over sixty pounds. 59 was due at eleven o'clock; it was half-past twelve when she pulled in and on Callahan's trick. But Bucks hung around the office until she staggered up under the streaked moonlight, as frowsy a looking train as ever choked on alkali.
There was always a crowd down at the station to meet 59; she was the big arrival of the day at McCloud, even if she didn't get in until eleven o'clock at night. She brought the mail and the express and the landseekers and the travelling men and the strangers generally; so the McCloud livery men and hotel runners and prominent citizens and prominent loafers and the city marshal usually came down to meet her. But it was not so that night. The platform was bare. Not even the hardy chief of police, who was town watch and city marshal all combined, ventured out.
The engineer swung out of his cab with the silence of an abused man. His eyes were full of soda, his ears full
of sand, his mustache full of burrs, and his whiskers full of tumble-weeds. The conductor and the brakemen climbed sullenly down, and the baggage-man shoved open his door and slammed a trunk out on the platform without a pretence of sympathy. Then the outgoing crew climbed aboard, and in a hurry. The conductor-elect ran down-stairs from the register, and pulled his cap down hard before he pushed ahead against the wind to give the engineer his copy of the orders as the new engine was coupled up. The fireman pulled the canvas jealously around the cab end. The brakeman ran hurriedly back to examine the air connections, and gave his signal to the conductor; the conductor gave his to the engineer. There were two short, choppy snorts from the 101, and 59 moved out stealthily, evenly, resistlessly into the teeth of the night. In another minute, only her red lamps gleamed up the yard. One man still on the platform watched them recede; it was Bucks.