he turned away, the engineer of Number Sixteen slapped Aloysius on the back:
"Kid, why the blazes didn't you thank him?"
"Who?"
"Bucks."
"What for?"
"What for? Jiminey Christmas! What for? Didn't he just make you an engineer? Didn't he just say, 'Run your train back behind us to Wind River'?"
"My train?"
"Sure, your train. Do you think Bucks ever says a thing like that without meaning it? You bet not."
Bucks's clerk, too, was a little uncertain about the promotion. "I suppose he's competent to run the train back, isn't he?" he asked of Bucks, suggestively.
Bucks was scrawling a message.
"A man that could hold a train from Wind River here on whiskers, with nothing but a tankful of sand and a hobo fireman, wouldn't be likely to fall off the right of way running back," he returned dryly. "He's been firing for years, hasn't he? We haven't got half enough men like McGraw. Tell Neighbor to give him an engine."
The Roadmaster's Story
THE SPIDER WATER
Not officially; I don't pretend to say that. You might travel the West End from fresh water to salt – and we dip into both – without ever locating the Spider Water by map or by name.
But if you should happen anywhere on the West End to sit among a gang of bridge carpenters; or get to confidence with a bridge foreman; or find the springy side of a roadmaster's heart; then, you might hear all you wanted about the Spider Water – maybe more; anyway, full plenty, as Hailey used to say.
The Sioux named it; and whatever may be thought of their interpretation of Scriptural views on land-grabbing, no man with sense ever attempted to improve on their names for things, whether birds, or braves, or winds, or waters – they know.
Our General Managers hadn't always sense – this may seem odd, but on the system it would excite no comment – and one of them countenanced a shameful change in the name of the Spider Water. Some polytechnical idiot at a safe distance dubbed it The Big Sandy; and the Big Sandy it is to this day on map and in folder – but not in the lingo of trackmen nor the heart of the Sioux. Don't say Big Sandy to trackmen and hand out a cigar. It will not go. Say Spider Water without any cigar and you will get a word and a stool, and if you ask it, fine cut.
The Spider Water – although ours is the pioneer line – was there when we first bridged it. It is probably as old as sundown, and nothing like as pretty. The banks – it has none to speak of. Its stones – they are whiskered. Its bed – full of sand-burs. Everything about the villain stream has a dilapidate, broken-down air: the very mud of the Spider Water is rusty.
So our people bridged it; and the trouble began. A number of matters bothered our pioneer managements – Indians, outlaws, cabinet officers, congressional committees, and Wall Street magnates – but at one time or another our folks managed all of them. The only thing they couldn't at any time satisfactorily manage was the Spider Water. Bridge after bridge they threw across it – and into it. Year after year the Spider Water toyed with our civil engineers and our material department. One man at Omaha given to asthma and statistics estimated, between spells, that the Spider Water had cost us more money than all the water courses together from the Missouri to the Sierras.
Then came to the West End a masterful man, a Scotchman, pawky and hard. Brodie was his name, an Edinburgh man with no end of degrees and master of every one. Brodie came to be superintendent of bridges on the Western Division, and to boss every water course on the plains and in the mountains. But the Spider Water took a fall even out of Brodie. It swept out a Howe truss bridge for Brodie before he got his bag unpacked, and thereafter Brodie, who was reputed not to care a stringer for anybody, did not conceal a distinct respect for the Spider.
Brodie went at it right. He tried, not to make friends with the Spider, for nobody could do that, but to get acquainted with it. For this he went to its oldest neighbors, the Sioux. Brodie spent weeks and weeks up the Spider Water hunting, summers; and with the Sioux he talked Spider Water and drank fire-water. That was Brodie's shame – the fire-water.
But he was pawky, and he chinned unceasingly the braves and the medicine men about the uncommonly queer water that took the bridges so fast. The river that month in and month out couldn't squeeze up water enough to baptize a pollywog and then, of a sudden, and for a few days, would rage like the Missouri, restore to the desert its own and living image, and leave our bewildered rails hung up either side in the wind.
Brodie talked cloudbursts up country; for the floods came, times, under clear skies – and the Sioux sulked in silence. He suggested an unsuspected inlet from some mountain stream which maybe, times, sent its storm water over a low divide into the Spider – and the red men shrugged their faces. As a last resort and in desperation he hinted at the devil; and the sceptics took a quick brace with as much as to say, now you are talking; and muttered very bad Medicine.
Then they gave him the Indian stuff about the Spider Water; took him away up where once a party of Pawnees had camped in the dust of the river bed to surprise the Sioux; and told Brodie how the Spider, more sudden than buck, fleeter than pony, had come down in the night and surprised the Pawnees – and so well that the next morning there wasn't enough material left for a scalp dance.
They took Brodie out into the ratty bed himself and when he said, heap dry, and said, no water, they laughed, Indianwise, and pointed to the sand. Scooping little wells with their hands they showed him the rising and the filling; the instant water where before was no water. And dropping into the wells feathers of the grouse, they showed Brodie how the current carried them always across the well – every time, and always, Brodie noticed – southeast.
Then Brodie made Hailey dig many holes, and the Spider welled into them, and he threw in bits of notebooks and tobacco wrappers, but always they travelled southeast – always the same; and a bigger fool than Brodie could see that the water was all there, only underground. But when did it rise? asked Brodie. When the Chinook spoke, said the Sioux. And why? persisted Brodie. Because the Spider woke, said the Sioux. And Brodie went out of the camp of the Sioux wondering.
And he planned a new bridge which should stand the Chinook and the Spider and the de'il himself, said Brodie, Medicine or no Medicine. And full seven year it lasted; then the fire-water spoke for the wicked Scotchman – and he himself went out into the night.
And after he died, miserable wreck of a man – and of a very great man – the Spider woke and took his pawky bridge and tied up the main line for two weeks and set us crazy – for we were already losing our grip on the California fast freight business. But at that time Hailey was superintendent of bridges on the West End.
His father was a section foreman. When Hailey was a kid – a mere kid – he got into Brodie's office doing errands; but whenever he saw a draughtsman at work he was no good for errands. At such times he went all into a mental tangle that could neither be thrashed nor kicked out of him, though both were conscientiously tried by old man Hailey and Superintendent Brodie; and Brodie, since he could do nothing else with him, finally kicked him into learning to read – and to cipher, Brodie called it. Then, by and by, Hailey got an old table and part of a cake of India ink himself, and himself became a draughtsman, and soon, with some cursing from Brodie and a "Luk a' that now!" from his paralyzed daddy, became chief draughtsman in Brodie's office. Hailey was no college man – Hailey was a Brodie man. Single mind on single mind – concentration absolute. Mathematics, drawing, bridges, brains – that was Hailey. But no classics
