wondered if he would ever have to be outside, to be driven before darkness as a small thing before wind.
DURING THE RAINY months of winter, after the wagon-wheels of autumn had left long knolls and low ridges far over the prairie, when rooftops were sometimes white of a morning, then talk of a coal train coming through would spread like wildfire in the town. Some would say it was coming on the Southern Pacific; others would have it straight from the station-master himself that it was due on the Santa Fe: and this made a difference, for the trains took water at different points. Usually the majority of those who sought the coal were driven off by brakemen or detectives before they secured so much as a single lump, but there were times when a coal train did come through and neither brakeman nor bull came near. These times were rare in Great-Snake Mountain, and they were remembered for long weeks after as a holiday is remembered.
One morning in February of 1927, there came the usual afternoon whisper—two coal cars were coming through on the Santa Fe at three o’clock! Clark Casner, the ticket agent, had just let the cat out of the bag. There wouldn’t be so much as one bull riding, Clark had said. The train would stop fifteen minutes for water, and the coal cars would be toward the tender. Fifteen minutes! No bulls! Could such a thing be? Then someone, of course, had to refute it—the car, this one said (and he too had it straight), would come through on the S. P. about four in the morning—“An’ when it do y’all best be in yo’ baids, ’cause thet man ain’t gonna stop fo’ fifteen secon’s—ain’t gonna stop ay-tall—he’s gonna come thoo heah shoutin’ lak th’ manifest t’ Waco.” Rumor and conflicting rumor rose then and strove, and only the actual arrival of the train on the Santa Fe put an end to argument.
Cass and Johnny Portugal, a halfbreed boy who lived near the roundhouse, went down to the tracks together that afternoon with a gunny-sack between them. It took two boys, working swiftly together, to fill such a sack.
They found a dozen children huddled on the pumping station with chapped blue lips. All carried gunny-sacks, and one held a clothes-pole besides. This man was Luther Gulliday, the McKays’ next-door neighbor. The clothes-pole had a purpose.
Beside Luther Gulliday stood a little Mexican girl in a long black shawl, clutching behind her the handle of a wobble-wheeled doll buggy. In the bottom of this carriage Cass observed a carnival kewpie doll that had no head lying sprawled on its back with arms outspread.
It looked somehow odd to see such a doll, so helpless and headless in cold and wind.
The girl surveyed Cass and Johnny with an Indian antagonism in her eyes. When Johnny greeted her familiarly, in Spanish, she did not reply. Merely stood waiting in mute hostility there, bare baby-knuckles clutching a doll buggy’s handle.
“She’s half Osage,” Johnny whispered. “Her folks come down from Pawhuska last week.”
“Osage or Little Comanche,” Cass replied, “she won’t git enough coal fo’ two nights in that contraption.”
Cass wondered what the child would do if he stepped over and lifted the doll out of the carriage as though he intended to take it from her. Then he looked at her, out of one eye’s corner, and concluded immediately that she would do plenty. No one was getting very far ahead of this girl on this trip, that was plain enough to be seen.
“She don’t have to look so fix-eyed at everyone,” he thought. “If that man really comes through like they say, there’ll be a-plenty fo’ all us. Why, ah cu’d fill that dinky buggy out o’ this heah sack an’ hardly miss me a lump. How perty she look tho’—My!”
Cass had never, heretofore, seen such beauty in a child.
And when the train came toiling painfully around the base of the mountain three miles distant, Cass saw her step back just an inch. He saw that she was already afraid. Then the cars were lumbering past, someone cried, “Carbón! Carbón!”—and the first of the coal cars was going by. Rolling slow.
What a bustling about there was now! Nobody stomped cold feet or swung his arms now. Nobody stood slapping his palms together just because a couple of thumbs were cold—there was something better to do with cold fingers now. Cass and Johnny Portugal were among the first to get into the coal car, but a dozen others followed, like so many buccaneers swarming over the sides. Johnny held the sack while Cass filled it; they filled it between them, right there and then, laughing and swearing all the while. Everyone laughed and swore, working frantically.
Only Luther Gulliday worked slowly.
Luther Gulliday loved order and system in his work. He too climbed into the car, but he did not, like the others, begin an unmethodical hurling of coal into a sack or over the side of the car. Luther did all things differently from other men. He went about now picking out the largest lumps he could lay hands on, placing them carefully, one by one, along the iron shelf that runs the length of a car on the outside above the wheels, all the while counting: “One! Two! Three!”—until the iron shelf was lined to its full length. Then he hopped down, held the pole like a lance against the first lump and stood stiff as a statue, his gunny-sack open and waiting. Should anyone have presumed to take one of his lumps before the car began moving, Luther would have cracked him smartly with the pole. And as the car started rolling again the lumps fell neatly, one by one as they met the pole, into the open sack. He counted aloud as they fell in the resounding accents of a man counting votes for his closest friend, “One! Two! Three!”
When their own sack was almost full the boys heaved together and got it over the side—and someone shouted “Jump!” The brakie was coming. Cass saw him running toward them far down the spine of the train. He saw too that there was plenty of time, so he threw one more lump over just for good measure; then he felt the car moving faster under his feet, and jumped. Johnny followed, and stood grinning and pointing at Cass because a thick coat of coal dust filmed Cass’s face. Cass heaved impatiently at his end of the sack. He did not like anyone to laugh at him, especially a half-breed.
“Nancy’ll sho’ feel good to see this,” Cass assured himself as they toiled along under the heavy sack. She couldn’t tell him this time he was sinning—not after they had been without coal for so long;—even his father would have to smile! Why—here was almost enough to last through till March! Think!—Were it filled with potatoes instead, would his sack be then one jot the more precious? Well, could one burn potatoes and keep a house warm with them? And how heavy it was! But how warm they would be! No more going to bed after freezing at supper now! And all because of himself; that was the main thing. In the pride of his exploit the boy’s heart exulted. Why couldn’t every day be just like this one? Why couldn’t something like this happen every day? Johnny Portugal shifted his end of the sack and paused to look down at his feet; a doll buggy lay in a deep rut there, turned upside down with its wheels in the air, wobbly tin wheels turning this way and that like toy windmills in the wind. Beside it lay the Mexican child, her bare arms outspread. The long black shawl was drenched scarlet now, and one finger clutched one dark crumb of coal. She lay on her back, and her head had been severed from her body. The kewpie doll lay in a dark pool beside her, and people began running up to see. “She must of got anxious an’ got up too close,” Luther Gulliday said, “she must of just slipped a little.”
That coal was the last that Cass ever brought home. Before it was gone Stubby had lost his job on the Santa Fe, and this time there was no other job to be found. Stubby had come to be known throughout the county as a “bad hat,” and jobs for “bad hats” were not plentiful in a place where even tame men would work for a pittance. To make matters no easier for Stuart, the man who was taken on in his
