echoed Dancing in scorn. “The only rabbits they shoot around here, young fellow, are Pittsburgh rabbits, that don’t keep their ears hid proper. When we go hunting, we go antelope-hunting, buffalo-hunting, grizzly-bear hunting, elk-hunting. Now I don’t say I don’t like you and I don’t say you won’t do. What I say is, you talk too much. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. I’ve learned not to say too much at a time. And when I say it, I don’t say it very loud. And if you don’t get killed, in advance, you will learn the same thing in the same way I learned it. Where are your blamed batteries?”
“Bill, you are all right.”
“I am, am I?”
“First help me enter these way-bills and check up the express packages so I can deliver them to this mob.”
“My business isn’t checking up express; but I like you, young fellow, so, go ahead. Only you talk too much.”
“Just a moment!”
At these words coming from the other end of the office, the lineman and the operator looked around. The military-looking man and his companion had entered the room unobserved and stood at the counter listening to the colloquy between the Eastern boy and the plainsman–for neither of the two were more than boys. Dancing saluted the new-comers. “It’s Colonel Stanley and Bob Scott,” he exclaimed.
Bucks walked forward. Stanley handed him a message. “You are the night operator? Here is a despatch for General Park. Get it out for me right away, will you?”
Dancing came forward to the railing. “How are you, Bill?” said Stanley, greeting the lineman as Bucks read the long message. “I am going up into the mountains next week, and I am just asking General Park for a cavalry detail.”
“Going to need me, Colonel?”
“Better hold yourself ready. Can you read that, young man?” he asked, speaking to Bucks.
“Yes, sir.”
“Lose no time in getting it off.”
With the words he turned on his heel and leaving the office went upstairs to the despatcher’s rooms. During the interval that the message was being sent, Dancing worked at the express matter. While the two were busy, Bob Scott, moving so quietly that he disturbed no one, laid carefully upon the smouldering paper in the stove such chips as he could pick from the wood-box, nursing and developing a little blaze until, without noise or fuss, he soon had a good fire going. In all of the mountain country there was but one kind of men who built fires in that way and these were Indians.
Such was Bob Scott, who, wet to the skin from his ride down the hills with Stanley, now stood slowly drying himself and watching Dancing and the new operator.
Scott was a half-blood Chippewa Indian, silent as a mountain night and as patient as time. He served Colonel Stanley as guide and scout wherever the railroad man rode upon his surveys or reconnoissances. Dancing, emerging presently from the batteries, greeted Scott again, this time boisterously. The Indian only smiled, but his face reflected the warmth of his friendship for the big lineman. And at this juncture Dancing, slapping him on the shoulder, turned to introduce him to Bucks. The three stood and talked a moment together, though, perhaps, without realizing what they were almost at once to go through together. The outgoing Eastern passenger train now pulled up to the platform and Bucks was kept busy for some time selling tickets.
His buyers were all sorts and conditions of men. And one forlorn-looking woman, with a babe in her arms and a little girl clinging to her skirt, asked the price of a ticket to Omaha. When told, she turned away to count her money. Among the men were traders and frontiersmen going to Missouri River markets with buffalo robes; trappers from the Big Horn country with furs; Mormon elders on their way from Utah to their Eastern settlements; soldiers on furlough and men from the railroad-construction camps on the front; adventurers, disgusted with the hardships of frontier life, and gamblers and desperadoes, restless and always moving.
Bucks needed his wits to watch the money that was pushed under his little wicket and to make change without mistake. There was elbowing and contention and bad language, but the troublesome crowd was finally disposed of, and when the last of the line had left the ticket window the waiting-room was pretty well cleared. There remained only a black-bearded man half-asleep in a chair by the stove, and in one corner on a bench the woman, who was trying to quiet the child she held in her lap.
CHAPTER II
As Bucks looked through his embrasure to see if all had been served, his eye fell on the group in the corner and he heard the woman suppressing the sobbing of her little girl. He walked out into the waiting-room to ask what the trouble was. He learned afterward that she was the wife of a gambler, but she told him only that she had followed her husband to Medicine Bend and was now trying to get back with her two children to her parents in Iowa. When she had ascertained the price of the railroad ticket she found that she lacked five dollars of the sum needed to make up the fare. Bucks had just a little money of his own, but he had counted on using that for his meals. While he was debating what to do, the elder child tugging still at the mother’s dress asked for something to eat, and while the mother tried to quiet it Bucks felt he could manage somehow without the price of the ticket better than this woman could.
“Give me what money you have,” he said. “I will get you a ticket.”
“But isn’t the train gone?”
“No.”
The black-bearded man dozing near the stove had his ears open although his eyes were closed. He had heard fragments of the talk and saw the boy dig into his own pocket, as he would have expressed it, to start the woman home. After Bucks had given her the ticket and she was trying to thank him and to quiet again the tired child, the drowsy man rose, picked up the woman’s hand-bag and told her gruffly he would put her on the train. As he started with her out into the drizzling rain, he carried her little girl, and, stopping down the platform at a sheltered lunch-counter, he bought a bag of doughnuts big enough to sink a ship. He offered no money to the man at the counter, but his credit seemed unquestioned. In the train the seats appeared all to be taken, but the drowsy man again showed his authority by rolling a tipsy fellow out of a seat and piling him up in a corner near the stove–which fortunately had no fire in it.
During all this time he had not said a word. But at the last, having placed the woman and the children in two seats and made them comfortable, he asked the mother one question–her husband’s name. She told him, and, without any comment or good-bys, he left the car and started through the rain uptown.
After the train pulled out, the wind shifted and the rain changed into a snow which, driven from the mountains, thickened on the wet window in front of the operator’s table. A message came for the night yardmaster, and the operator, seeing the head-light of the switch-engine which was working close by, put on his cap and stepped out to deliver the message. As he opened the waiting-room door, a man confronted him–the bearded man who had taken the woman and children to the train. Bucks saw under the visor of a cloth cap, a straight white nose, a dark eye piercingly keen, and a rather long, glossy, black beard. It was the passenger conductor, David Hawk. Without speaking, Hawk held out his hand with a five-dollar bank note in it.
“What is this?” asked Bucks.
“The money you gave the woman.”
Bucks, taking the bill, regarded his visitor with surprise. “Where did you get this?”
“What’s that to you?”
“But–”
