Читать книгу Hands Up! - Frederick John Niven - Страница 6

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I find that others have felt, as I first felt on going West, "there is nothing here but the railway." The feeling is, of course, absurd. But it is very comprehensible. For mile after mile there is nothing to be seen but the wilderness. The sage-brush lands, after the East is past, roll everlastingly North and South.

I sat looking out at them, and instead of feeling more lonely and miserable, felt more at peace. For these spaces asked me as it were to live up to them, to put something in myself that they possessed. So, instead of the sage-brush lands depressing me, they made me adopt this outlook. I did not wish to weep for tangles and misunderstandings in the little isle back there across the Atlantic. The accepting mood was stronger. Very good; if that be Fate, let me bear it. It was only the mountains that depressed me.

As the train entered these cañons of the West where there seems hardly room for aught but the rivers that foam through them, though engineers have found a way, I felt again the fatuity of much of life. Restrictions and constrictions seemed a great part of life; also misunderstandings.

The train screamed on through the mountains; hummed, on a hollow note, across trestles; roared through cañons; and I was glad when we emerged at last, mounting upward, at Black Kettle which I had selected, looking on the great map in the railway booking-hall back East, because its name appealed to me, in the centre of a string of appealing names, thus: Placer, Antelope Spring, Adobe, Black Kettle, Lone Tree, Fort Lincoln, Montezuma. But by the time that we reached Black Kettle I had quite decided that there was nothing for me to do in that country but to help to keep the railway in repair!

Take Black Kettle for example. It consisted of seven houses: one hotel, one store, one boarding-house, four residential houses with their vegetable patches. The inhabitants were: the hotel proprietor, the store-keeper, the store-keeper's wife, the barman, the Chinese cook, four section men (including the section boss), a telegraph operator (who was also station agent).

Everybody was very decent to me when I went in. The hotel proprietor offered me a free drink before I had booked a room; the telegraph operator (a thin, wiry little Scotsman with a thin, wiry moustache, stained with tobacco juice) introduced himself to me when, after a wash, I came out again and walked on the deserted balcony, introduced himself and begged me to come and drink with him all in one breath. The store-keeper, when I stepped over past his door and caught his eye, gave me a nod and said "How-do" abruptly, but friendly enough; he looked an abrupt man, a philosophic dry old stick, very like pictures of Uncle Sam. The section men, when they came over to the hotel in the evening, stood near me as if to give me a chance to talk, if I wished to; and, when I did not speak, as I had read that in the West attempts at making acquaintance quickly are sometimes resented, their boss said: "Perhaps the gentleman setting there would care for a game?"

I turned my head.

"Good evening, sir," he said. "Kind of lonesome for a stranger in this town. Would you care for a game of chequers?"

And so I played a game of draughts with the boss on the first evening in Black Kettle. He was a Michigan man, all bones and joints and elasticity, with a great foot for a double shuffle, a nose like a door-knocker, chunks of cheek-bones, a thin, determined bony chin, and glittering eyes.

I have spoken of getting used to the strange surroundings. The surroundings were—across the railway track—green and silver benches (because of their grass and sand) going up, up, up, in rolls, as if they were for giants to sit on and watch some play going on in Black Kettle. These benches fascinated me. The immense sweep of them, and the way white clouds would look up away beyond the last one, and not as if just behind the last, as if, rather, there was immensity between them and that last roll of hill, charmed me. To lie on the verandah of the Palace Hotel of Black Kettle and watch the clouds go up behind the benches, all to the sound of grasshoppers chirping, seemed all that one could do in Black Kettle. If one had not to work to live, I think it all that one would desire to do also. I am no hobo, but I love to lie on the Palace verandah and listen to the silence.

So do all men who visit Black Kettle. And to see a cow-puncher with his back to the wall and his legs stretched half across the verandah there, while his horse waits for him with drooping head, almost too lazy-looking to flick the flies, is to see a picture not easily forgotten.

But, as luck would have it, no cow-puncher was there to suggest, when I arrived, by his presence, that there were homes and work back from the track. Black Kettle was all alone with its handful of people for three weeks. The sitting-room of the Palace, inhabited by a dull suite of furniture, the bar-room inhabited by stolid casks, a few small tables and chairs empty beside them, and a white-faced nickel-in-the-slot hurdy-gurdy, and a large spittoon, plunged me in terror. The barman sometimes woke in that desolation. The proprietor sometimes coughed in the kitchen. Ah Sing sometimes sang, among his pots, in a high, thin, plaintive voice. I made up my mind that there was no room for another barman, even had I cared for the job or been considered capable. I also made up my mind that there was no scope for another hotel, even if I had the money to start one.

So, as the third week drew near an end, sick of doing nothing but worrying on the verandah, I approached the section gang boss and asked him if he knew of any work to be had in the vicinity.

He looked at me sidewise.

"What kind of job?" he asked. "Anything to do for the time being?"

"Anything at all," I said.

"Well, there's an extra gang coming to work up there—seven miles up the line. I reckon I could say a word for you to the boss. He'll be coming up with some men on the passenger train to-night."

The train was not due for an hour; but the inhabitants were already arranging themselves in picturesque, open-shirted attitudes, on the platform. By "inhabitants" I mean the three section men, hands in pockets: one standing, leaning against the wall of the little station house, one sitting, leaning against it and nursing one knee, the other leg thrust out; one sitting on a truck; the telegraph operator inside his room with his shoulder against the jamb, his hands in pockets, his neck stretching out ever and again as he spat across the platform on to the track.

When we appeared he spat and said: "How goes it?" and the section boss replied: "Well, how are you making out?"

The three section men looked stolid; silence fell. Then the operator spat again and said: "I was just telling the boys of when I was running one of the stations in Columbia for a gold-mining company there;" and he plunged into a story about yellow fever and how he kept the men all working and how they dropped "like flies, gents; yes, sir, like flies," and all the while his instrument behind him was giving little jerky "tick-tacks" as if some drowsy old woman napped over her knitting within.

Then the booming whistle of the approaching train sounded, the track began to sing. The engine shrieked, rounded the curve, and the "passenger" ran into the depôt with a whirl of dust and an odour of oil and hot iron. The conductor and one man alighted. A tin box shot out of one of the cars; the conductor called "All aboard!" and then, as the train moved on again, he stood, holding out a hand to catch a rail, foot slightly raised ready to step on when the end of a car would come level, and—"How-do gents!" he hailed. "How's things up here? On the boom?" laughed, stepped aboard, waved his hand; and the train slid out and we sat looking at the tail-light dwindling—then looked at the man who stood on the platform in the dusk.

I saw him loom big and heavy and withal easy despite his avoirdupois. The section boss advanced on him, he on the section boss, and they pump-handled each other cordially and stood chatting.

The operator said: "Oh, well!" and slipped in to his room and presently a slab of light fell from his door across the platform, and the sound of his instrument broke out. A little chill fell and the scent of sage-brush blessed the night.

"Cold," said one of the section men, rose, and drifted away with slow, heavy steps.

"Aye, aye!" said section man number two, and rose.

"Um!" said section man number three, and came erect from leaning against the wall. They followed their mate.

"Come here, sir! I want to introduce you. I've been telling the boss—this is Alf Douglas, boss of the extra gang coming up here; I don't know your name, sir?"

"Eh—er—Williams," I said. Why "Williams" don't ask me. It was the first that came to my mind, and so Williams I would be for the future, at least till I had an English paper and had my mind relieved. "John Williams," I said next. Why "John" don't ask me either.

"How do, sir?" said the boss. "Englishman?"

"How do you do?" I said. "No, I'm——"

"Oh—a Scotsman," he broke in. "That's better. Well, Mr. Dunnage, he told me you want a job. You want it badly?"

"Yes," I said.

"Um!" he said, and shook his head. "The trouble is that I've got only a gang of Dagoes to work for me and I never heard of a white man working with Dagoes before. The money's all right, two and a half, just as if they were white, but maybe you wouldn't care to tackle that—even temporar'y till the white gang comes up?"

"There is a white gang?" I asked.

We were standing near the operator's door and the light showed Douglas's face. I thought he gave a quick, keener look at me, as if thinking I was none so eager for work after all; and we in the Old Country are told to look eager in the States!

"In about a month," he said.

"Good," I said. "I can work in the Dago gang till then."

I saw that they both felt a little bad about it, then, as if they liked me for taking the job on, but felt some remorse for having nothing better to offer me. Still—I had to work and, as I have explained, being green to the country, there seemed to me to be no other work in the country but railroad work. The place looked, to my new eyes, wholly a void—with the railroad running through it.

But things were not so bad as I had prepared to find them at the Gravel Pit. Black Kettle lay seven miles away and to my imagination the place was quite cut off from the world!

The passage of occasional freight-trains served but to emphasise the loneliness of the country; for, after they had gone screaming past, even before the dust swirls by the track side had settled, the silence came again. Facing a great hill, a little west of the pit, a steam shovel had been set. That steam shovel, in its own little siding, that steam shovel, all covered with tarpaulins, seemed a melancholy sight. I could hardly believe that white men would be coming anon to get steam up in it and set it nosing and scooping into the hill. It wore the air of having been left there for the Spirit of the Dry Belt to cover over with sand, and blot out, and forget.

The camp consisted of two old freight-cars, one used for a store-house and dining-room and kitchen and sleeping-room for a Chinaman; the other used for a "bunk-house" for the men, with bunks fitted up inside it and just the end partitioned off as a boss's room. In the boss's room were two bunks, and one of them he told me I could occupy.

"I can't see a white man sleeping with these Dagoes," he said.

It was very good of him and I appreciated it very deeply. That was the only difference made between me and the gang. I slept in the cut-off apartment with the boss, but, at work, I was treated just as a unit of the gang. When Douglas chose to be abusive he was abusive to us all; his curses rang in my ears as sharply as in the ears of his "Eye-talians."

Our work was to undermine the hill along the railway track, with pick, shovel and dynamite, preparing a path for the steam shovel. Here was new work indeed for me; but what made it trying was the attitude of the "Eye-talians." They resented my presence; and I went upon the principle of ignoring their resentment. If a man working above me let a boulder plunge down on me without any shout of warning, I slipped aside, as if it was all in the day's work, never so much as looked up—and went on working. I acted also upon the principle of showing, as well as no resentment, a good example. If I was working above an Italian and loosened a boulder I would shout: "Look out!" (or "Look up!" when I found that "Look up!" takes the place of "Look out!" in the West). In a way it was a mistake. These Italians seemed mostly of the order of humanity that requests and begs to be brow-beaten. Douglas's wild language, and the way he had of raising a clenched fist after a command, accelerating the gang's movements, he had learnt, doubtless, just as I was learning. I sometimes saw his eye on me after such episodes as I tell of—when a boulder rolled towards me without warning and I merely dodged—saw his eye on me, and at first wondered if he thought I was not agile enough! Saw his eye on me when I shouted: "Look up!"—thoughtful, watchful, considering. He seemed to say: "He'll learn!" That was what, eventually, his glance seemed always to imply when he looked on such scenes.

I did learn too.

At the end of the first week the boss called to me and one of the Italians and told us to lift a log that lay by the railway track and throw it down the further side of the embankment.

I stooped to lift one end; the Italian stooped to the other. I lifted the log to my right shoulder; but the Italian, who was a left-handed man, lifted by the left and eased his end on to his left shoulder. Thus we were back to back; and when I started off in a slow step, never thinking of left-handed men, I headed one way and he the other way. Thus he fell backwards. I felt the jar, and looking round smartly, saw him also looking round, off his balance. Instead of trying to hold the log—though, just at that, he regained his balance, with legs spraddled like a slack pair of compasses—he flung it from him. My shoulder and collar-bone received a pretty jar, for I—still unlike the "Dago Push," as they were called by the Black Kettle section gang—was bent upon, as I would say, being "decent," and was clutching the log to save the Italian. Down went his end thud, and he called me what no man may call another in earnest.

My blood boiled. I wanted, in one stammering speech, to explain to this Dago what I thought of him—and his gang. I wanted to tell him that I had tried to help him when I saw what he had done, to tell him that he and his fellows deliberately rolled boulders upon me without warning, that I always warned, that—every single item of the strained week. Instead, at that oath, and seeing the Dago come for me, I simply saw nothing but his ugly face and determined to pound it. I made three swift steps to meet him. I had no intention to stand him off. If he thought he could advance on me and I do the standing off he was all out of his reckoning. I went to meet him mightily rejoicing.

He paused then and made a grab for a pinch-bar, snatched it up and rushed afresh on me. There flashed into my head a yarn told by the operator at Black Kettle that ended: "Fists are all very good, but in a brown gang of any kind a white man is going to have no show with his fists. If he ain't got a gun let him take the edge of a shovel." So, when the whole gang dropped their tools and came plunging on me I grabbed a shovel and rushed at them. I was glad they all came on me. That one was not nearly enough. I could have knocked Italy off the map of Europe at the moment!

They simply parted feebly at that, made abortive swipes at me and circled wide. My man even dropped his pinch-bar, so I dropped the shovel and smashed him with my fist. There was a thud of feet in the sand, a bellow of oaths, and I was caught by the shoulders and sent flying.

"Come on! The lot of ye! Get a move on!" And Douglas, having flung me from my enemy, shot past us to the gang, routing them back to work. I stood up and looked on the scene. The "Eyetalian" rose with bleeding nose and held out his hand.

"All right," he said. "We shake hand. Everyt'ing all right."

And he meant it—as you shall hear. I took his hand and we shook.

"Come on! Come on! Get a move on!" came Douglas's voice.

We went back to our log. The "Eyetalian" lifted by the right this time and was very careful, when we had carried the log across the track, to lower from the shoulder to the carry in unison with me, even said "Ready?" waited for my "Right!" and then we flung the great log over.

He was then my very good friend and kept repeating, as we clambered up to the gang: "All right. Everyt'ing all right. Ver' good."

But there was a man, Pietro, in the gang, for whom I had, as the West says, "no use." And, as luck would have it, I was sent off in his company to bring up a push-car load of cord-wood that had been thrown from a train for the camp, but thrown off beside the steam-shovel, a quarter of a mile away.

"Here Scotty—and you Pietro—you go down and get the push-car on the track and fetch up a load of cord-wood from down at the steam-shovel."

Pietro gave me a malevolent look and Douglas, I noticed, smiled. We placed the wheels on the rails and the push-car atop and trotted off behind the car along the track. Just round the bend a grade begins and the car required no pushing but, instead, had to be kept hold of by the handles. A little further on was the trestle bridge, built, as you know these bridges are, quite open, so that any one going over has to step from tie to tie and can look clear down to the bottom of the gorge below.

Suddenly, as we came near the bridge and were hidden from the gang by the bend, Pietro said: "Why you not run?" and began to speed the car toward the bridge. "Run! Can you no' run?"

"Take care at the bridge," I said.

"You scared!" he cried, and leant on the car and sent it fiercely before him. I gave but one glance and then saw his game. He was getting ready to leap to a sitting position on the car when we should gain the bridge. I noticed his left shoulder (he running on my right) edging toward me.

What I expected happened.

Suddenly he leapt, intending to spin round and sit on the car, at the same time intending to jolt me with his left shoulder. Just as he leapt I dodged—with the result that he did not cannon off me on to the car, but fell between me and it. I hung on to the car and yanked it to a standstill and waited for him to rise. He scrambled to his feet, muttering, with his eyes glinting on me.

"You missed it," I said.

"Yes, I miss," he said, and took hold again and we trotted on afresh. Now came my turn.

"Run," said I and, full tilt, I started for the bridge which was just about a score of ties distant.

I like nothing better than taking his own weapons to a man who is determined to prove himself a menial person. He gripped tight to his handle and fell into step. I put on every ounce of pressure I had in my body. I stretched my body too, and my arms, so that I could see the ties before coming to them, and thus not lose a step; for I knew that we were almost on the bridge. Then we were on it! And I was glad that I had stretched out so—for our speed was now so great that I could hardly keep up with the push-car; and the ties, and the depth of the gulch between them, made, together, just a blur below me.

"Run!" I cried.

He simply caught tight hold of the car and hung on. Suddenly he slipped. But I was ready for that, to grasp him if he showed signs of falling between the ties. No! He was too fond of life. He clung to the car, and to life, so tenaciously that he made a drag on the car as, with his body stretched out, his toes caught, caught, caught on the edges of the ties. He had almost stopped the car by the time we gained the opposite bank. There he scrambled to his feet. And now I had my eye on him.

"What you do?" he said.

"What you tried to do to me," I said, "and don't try again."

We trudged on thoughtfully to the cord-wood pile. He was silent; but, as you can surmise, the air was full of trouble. It broke at the cord-wood pile.

"You block that wheel to keep car from running down," he ordered.

At first I resented the order—you see by now what kind of kid I was and will understand me doing so. I thought to tell him to do the blocking himself, but quickly argued: "What's the sense? I don't want to dominate him. I only want fair play;" so I blocked the wheel, with a billet of wood from the side of the track, and as I rose from doing so, I saw a shadow leapin' along the ground—gave a jump sidewise to keep whatever caused it from falling on me, and smack came a billet down on the car-end just where I had stood.

I had been far too patient with him. I should (as I expect you have already thought) have made him block that wheel. However, he had got so much rope that he was eager to hang himself.

"Oh!" he said. "I not see you—I begin to load car."

"If you are going to load the car like that," I said, "you'll have to do it yourself," and I stood back.

"I not notice where you stand," said he.

I was pondering exactly what to do. Again I made a mistake. I did what is called "leaving it at that"; I walked over to the cord-wood pile and began loading the car. When I was at the car he would be at the pile—when I was at the pile he was at the car. So we came and went.

Then, just as I was putting on what looked as if it would have to be the last billet, he yelled: "Look up!" and flung a billet, from where he stood, right to the top of the load, with the result that it all came rattling down to both ends of the car. More intent on saving the work of reloading than in attending to Pietro, I leapt to an end and thrust up the pile there, balancing it. Pietro stood watching me, grinning. Then he pointed to some billets that had rolled off at the other end.

"Lift these—too many!" he said.

That was enough. He had coaxed the fight out of me in earnest and I lifted a billet as he ordered—but sent it bang at his head and followed it up with myself. I had never learnt to box; but that which followed was hardly a boxing contest. I assure you that before we were through I was battered black and blue, and yet I felt not one single blow, knew no pain until afterwards. All that I knew was that every now and then I got a smash in at Pietro, keeping my eyes on his all the time.

The most terrible thing to remember is when I found myself on the top of him, after he had fallen, and with my hands on his windpipe. It was his eyes, protruding, that brought me to myself, horrified.

I cannot tell you the relief I felt when he lurched to his legs and staggered to the car, kicked aside the billets that blocked the wheels and began to strain against the car to set it in motion.

I walked over and leant to the task with him and so, both bleeding and bruised, we urged the car back to camp. When we gained the other bank, beyond the trestle, I stopped and held out my hand.

"All right?" I asked.

He looked at my hand. He half extended his. Then: "No!" he said and swore in Italian.

"Oh, all right," I said, and we pushed on, rounded the bend, and came back to where the gang worked on the gravel slope.

Douglas stood by the track-side; the gang toiled up on the hill-face. As we passed Douglas I squinted up at him, where I bent pushing the load, and he looked round hastily, was just going to look away again—and then he saw our faces, wheeled about, looked at Pietro—at me—back again—then chuckled to himself. That was all. But the incident was not closed.

When we had unloaded beside the cook's car and lifted the push-car off the wheels, and the wheels off the track, we returned to the gang and clambered to our places on the hill. Immediately Pietro began to talk wildly in Italian while using his pick. But he became so excited anon that he ceased to wield the pick.

"Pietro, you so-and-so," came Douglas's voice. "I've got my eye on you."

Pietro cursed under his breath, but either wonderful is the carrying capacity of atmosphere in the Dry Belt or else wonderfully accurate was Douglas's knowledge of his man.

"Don't curse at me!" came Douglas's voice.

Pietro picked on, and quietly his mates discharged questions at him. As I picked into the hill around a boulder I saw their eyes glinting towards me.

Pietro began again; and one or two of the gang now grew so excited that they ceased to work too. Douglas's voice bellowed, and they fell to work again.

We were now confronted with rock.

"Is that rock?" hailed Douglas.

"Yes!" we shouted down.

"All right;" and he clambered up to us and the two men who did the blasting as a rule fell to work making the holes for the charge.

I don't know how it befell—for Douglas generally erred on the safe side and drew us off far further than seemed necessary when a blast was made; indeed I have heard the men laugh at his care over them, and they have looked at him so insolently when he ordered them to go well back, that he has had (as the phrase is) to put the screw on extra tight afterwards—I don't know how it befell, but this time he neither ordered us off nor went off himself.

Always, I must say, he stood far nearer than he allowed any man to stand when a charge was made. I grew to admire Douglas immensely, and I want to note that fact about him. However, this time he seemed hardly thinking about the detonation; stood just at the foot of the hill, and we twenty yards along the grade.

"Boom!" and up went a cascade of dirt and rocks.

It was so vigorous that we raised our shovels and held them over our heads to shield us from the falling shower of dirt and stones. Suddenly we saw that Douglas had been hit. A chunk of rock had smashed his head. I ran to him at once and bent over him. The gang followed.

"He hurt bad?" asked one.

"My God!" I cried. "Look!"

His head was gashed frightfully.

"He dead!" cried Pietro. "He dead!"

And then he gave a screech—there is no other word for it—and leapt on me.

I slipped aside, but they seemed all to be upon me, these Dagoes; and wildly I clutched a shovel and whirled round with my back to the hill. And then that left-handed man, with whom I had had the altercation, showed his genuineness. He gave a kind of scream.

"Ver' good. Everyt'ing all right. I stick to you!" and he snatched a shovel and stood beside me and poured forth a cascade of voluble Italian on the gang.

A showman in a cage of wild cats must feel somewhat as we felt then. They rushed on me and I brought down the shovel on a pate, felt my legs wobbly with fear and my heart big with determination all at one time; swung the shovel round and smashed again, standing away from my one friend so as not to hit him.

And then there came a whoop and a slither of stones, and the gang fell back, and I too stepped back and gave a quick look up hill in the direction of their gaze. And coming down the incline, with forefeet taut in the sliding soil, hind legs bent, sliding down in the wonderful way that they have the knack of, came a white Western pony, with a big, broad-chested man upon its back, he balanced exquisitely like the God Apollo to my eye.

But there was nothing of ancient Greece in his weapon. His left hand lightly held the reins, his right was raised in air, holding a long-nosed Colt, raised with the elbow toward us and the wrist backward, ready to slam down forward, and aim, and fire, all in one quick gesture.