Saratoga Trunk

by Edna Ferber

  A moment the two stared at one another. Then Maroon turned and walked quickly away.

  He knew where he must go. He was late, and cursed his lateness and the cause of it, but his heart was not in it. You’ll be hitting children next, he said to himself, and women too, likely. What’s come over you! He strode along in his high-heeled boots, his great white sombrero, his fine cloth suit with its full-skirted coat, but he felt a diminished man.

  The light cart and the bays would be cared for. That had been carefully arranged days ago. Everything had been arranged. Al that money could insure had been carefully planned and carried out by men of millions. Only physical courage and devil-may-care love of adventure had been lacking. And these he, Clint Maroon, had provided.

  Into the hot, dusty office of the stationmaster. Sparse, taciturn, Gid Fish looked up under his green eyeshade at the dashing figure in the doorway. His voice was as dry, his gaze as detached as though sombreroed figures in high-heeled Texas boots were daily visitors in the Abany depot office. The physical contrast between the two men was ludicrous—the one so full-blooded, so virile, so dramatic, the other so dry, dusty and sallow. Yet the two seemed to like and respect one another; their speech had the terseness of mutual understanding.

  “Howdy, Gid!”

  “Howdy, Clint!”

  “Came in my rig like I said.”

  “Seen you.”

  “Boys in?”

  “Yep.”

  “Steam up?”

  “Yep.”

  “Road clear?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, adios!”

  Maroon turned to go, his coat-tails flirting about his legs with the vigor of his movements. Gid Fish’s rasping voice suddenly stopped him, held him with its note of urgency. “Somebody must of blabbed.”

  Maroon whirled. “Who says so?”

  “Just come over the wire. They got wind.”

  Maroon’s right hand went to his hip. “Who blabbed?”

  “Gould’s a smart fella.”

  Even as he said this there came the clack-clack-clack of the telegraph instrument on Gid Fish’s desk. A moment of silence broken only by the clacking sound. “Says there’s hell to pay in Binghamton,” said Fish, laconically. “Git.”

  Clint Maroon’s high heels clattered on the bare boards as he dashed from the room. Across the tracks, down the yards to where an engine waited, steam up.

  The head that now thrust itself out of the engine-cab window was surmounted by the customary long-visored striped linen cap, the body was garbed in engineer’s overalls, but the face that looked down at the hurrying figure of Clint Maroon was not an engineer’s face as one usually sees it—the keen-eyed, quizzical and curiously benevolent countenance of the born mechanic. It was a hard-bitten ruthless face, but the eyes redeemed it. Devil-may-care, they were merry now with amusement and andcipation.

  “You’re going to get them nice clothes mussed up, Clint.”

  Maroon ignored this. His eye traveled the engine, end to end. “Sure enough big.”

  Pride irradiated the face framed in the engine cab. “She’s the heaviest engine in the East.”

  “Better had be. Gid Fish says they got wind of us down in Binghamton. No telling what they’ll do. Of course they don’t know about the boys. Can’t. They all back in there?” He nodded in the direction of the two coaches attached to the puffing engine.

  “Yep. Rärin’.”

  “Get going, Les. I’ll go talk to the boys. After the first stop I’ll come up there in the engine with you. I want to see what’s ahead. Where at’s Tracy?”

  Like a figure in a Punch and Judy show a smoke grimed face bobbed up in the window beside that of Les, the engineer. His teeth gleamed white against their sooty background. “Feeding the critter,” he said. “She eats like a hungry maverick.” Les, the engineer; Tracy, the fireman; Clint Maroon, the leader. Al three had the Western flavor in their speech—laconic, gentle, almost drawling. Les surveyed Clint with a kind of amused admiration.

  “You come up here you’re liable to ruin them pretty pants, Clint.”

  Maroon grinned back at him good-naturedly. “Got any coffee up there, left over?”

  “Sure have. Wait a minute.”

  “Can’t stop for it now. When I climb up in there I’ll take it, and welcome. Get her going. We got to lick the whey out of the Binghamton outfit before noon and clean up all along the line to boot.”

  The two heads stuck out of the cab window turned to gaze after him a moment; they saw him leap into the doorway of the first car with a flirting whisk of his coat-tails.

  “Son-of-a-gun!” said Tracy, affectionately. In another moment the big engine moved.

  Passing swiftly from car to car, Clint Maroon faced three hundred men; he stood swaying at the head of each car, he repeated his brief speech, they made laconic answer.

  “Howdy, boys!”

  “Howdy, Clint!”

  They strangely resembled one another, these silent men. Lean, tall, wiry; their faces weather-beaten, their eyes had the look of those accustomed to far horizons. Yet they were ruined faces, the faces of men who, though fearless, had known defeat and succumbed to it. Hard times had searched them out with her bony fingers and sent them wandering, drink-scarred and jobless, into the inhospitable East. Danger meant nothing to them. Risk was their daily ration. Violence flavored their food. Life they held lightiy. Guns were merely part of their wardrobe.

  “Like I said, no guns—only maybe the butts in a pinch. You got your clubs and spades and axes and your fists, and you’ll likely need ‘em. No shooting. Every station between here and Binghamton we’re out quick before they can telegraph word ahead. We throw ‘em out, take the books, and leave a bunch behind to hold the fort. Where we’re in we stay in, and we’ve got to be in every station between here and there before nightfall, sure. Whenever you hear three screeches from the engine ahead—no matter where we’re at or what you’re doing—that means out, pronto. We’re going. Hold on to your hats.”

  It was child’s play to these men. They treated it as though it were a roundup; they felt that they lacked only the horses under them to make their day perfect. Town followed town, station followed station. The procedure never varied; it even took on a sort of monotony after the first hour. The train would come to a grinding, jolting halt that shook the marrow of even these hard-boned Westerners. Three shrill screeches from the engine. Out the men swarmed armed with bludgeons, spades, shovels; their guns handy in their holsters in spite of Clint’s warning. Quick as they were, Maroon was quicker. The crew was, for the most part, sombreroed as he, but it was the figure in the great white sombrero and the flying coat-tails that led the charge into the station. A rush into the ticket office, bursting into the stationmaster’s room; a scuffle, oaths, yells.

  “Come on, you son-a-kabitchee!”

  “Stay with him, cowboy!”

  “Heel that booger, Red. Heel him!”

  “Hot iron! Hot iron!”

  The old language of the range and the branding pen and the corral returned joyously to their lips. The West they had known was vanishing—had vanished, indeed, for them. Resentful, fearless, they were blurred copies of Clint Maroon. The thing they had been hired to do was absurd—was almost touching in its childlike simplicity and crudeness. But then, so, too, were they.

  In each town they left behind them the bewildered buzz and chatter of the townspeople. Long-suffering as these were, and accustomed to the violence and destruction with which the now-notorious railroad fight had been carried on in the past year, the lightning sortie of these Westerners was a new and melodramatic experience. There was, in the first place, a kind of grim enjoyment in their faces, a sardonic humor in their speech, as they poured out of their modern Trojan horse. Booted, sombreroed like the dashing figure that led them, they seemed, in the eyes of the staid York State burghers, to be creatures from another world. Binghamton was their goal, Binghamton was to be the final test, for there the enemy was forti
fied in numbers probably equal to theirs, if not greater. Meanwhile their zest was tremendous, their purpose grim, their spirits rollicking. Strange wild yells, bred of the plains, the range, the Indian country, issued from their leather throats. Yip-ee! Eee-yow! And always, bringing up the rear, though the white-hatted leader never knew it, was a grotesque little figure rolling on stumpy legs. In wine-colored livery and top hat and glittering diminutive boots he was, the staring onlookers assumed, a creature strayed from a circus. The whole effect was, in fact, that of a circus minus its tent and tigers and elephants. This litde figure followed an erratic pattern of its own, dodging, hiding, mingling whenever possible where the melee was thickest, darting back to the refuge of the train coaches before the white-hatted leader strode back to his eyrie in the engine cab. Evidently there was some sort of understanding between him and the tall rangey fellows who made up the company. Almost absentmindedly they seemed to protect him; they shielded him in little clusters when it appeared that Maroon’s eye might fall upon him. Here was a mascot. Here was a good-luck piece. Look at the little runt, they said. Says he’s Maroon’s bodyguard. Reckon he’s lying.

  In the engine cab Clint Maroon, incredibly neat in spite of the heat, the dust, the soot that belched from the smokestack, leaned far out of the window to peer up the track. Each time he withdrew his head from this watchtower he heaved a sigh of relief.

  “No sign of them, hide nor hair,” he remarked to Les, the engineer. “D’you reckon Gid Fish was just throwin’ off on me, saying he’d heard somebody’d blabbed up in Binghamton!”

  “Nope,” said Les, cheerfully, above the roar and jolt of the massive engine.

  “We’ve only got a matter of fifteen miles to go,” Clint argued.

  Tracy, the fireman, his red-rimmed eyes rolling grotesquely in his sooty face, turned his head away from the fire to throw a terse reminder over his shoulder.

  “Long tunnel between here and Binghamton. Keep your head stuck out going through there. You’re liable to get kind of specked, but you sure might see something at the end of it.”

  Maroon’s hand went to his hip. “You keeping back something you know!”

  A grin gashed the black face. “My, my, ain’t you touchy, Clint, since you come East and got to going with New York millionaires!”

  With an oath Maroon lunged forward, but the drawling voice of Les with a sharp overtone in it now served to stop him short.

  “Something down the line,” he yelled. “I can feel it. On our track. God A’mighty, they wouldn’t mix it in the tunnel!”

  For an instant the three men stared, each seeing in the other’s eyes confirmation of his own worst dread. “Open her up!” yelled Clint. “Wide! We’ve got to get out of here.” For they had slowed down going through the tunnel. From his window Clint could now see the blue sky through the tunnel mouth a hundred yards ahead.

  “They can’t jump if I speed her up.”

  “They’ve jumped off wild bucking horses, they can clear a greasy train, you got to get us the hell out of here. We’ll be caught like rats in a—” His head was far out of the window, he was peering through the curtain of smoke and soot and cinders that belched from the smokestack. The heat in the tunnel was insufferable, the blazing temperature in the engine cab was indescribable, Maroon’s face was ludicrously streaked now with sweat and grime, his white hat was polka-dotted with black, his diamond scarfpin sparkled bravely in the sullied nest of the satin necktie. He leaned perilously out, he turned his head now to peer back at the laden cars and he could dimly discern the heads and shoulders of the men thrust far out of the train windows and hanging from the car steps. Theirs had been perilous paths; instinctively they sensed danger; they were ready to jump. Now by straddling the car window Clint could see ahead. There it was, down the track, down their own track and headed straight for them. He could see the locomotive, it was sending out a column of smoke like a fiery monster breathing defiance.

  “Give ‘em the whistle!” yelled Maroon. “They’re on the track!”

  Three shrill blasts seemed to rend the roof of the tunnel. Three more. The figures in the cars behind now leaped, tumbled from the train, shouting, cursing, running.

  “Jump!” howled Les above the turmoil. “Jump, you crazy sons-of-bitches, I’m letting her out.”

  Poised for the leap, with Tracy behind him, Maroon clung by one hand. “Come on! God damn it, come on, Les.”

  They had cleared the tunnel. “Coming. Jump! I’m letting her out. They didn’t get us in the tunnel, the stinkin’ yellow-bellies.”

  Neatly and without fluster, as though he were sliding out of a saddle onto the ground, Clint Maroon stepped to the ground, swung round like a dancer, caught his balance magically and started to run as Tracy landed just behind him. He had had, as he leaped, a last glimpse of Les’s face as he bent forward to give the powerful engine its last notch of speed before he, too, leaped for his life.

  Bells were ringing, whistles tooting, sparks pouring from the two engines, men were leaping from doors and windows, they ran wide of the track, they yelled like Comanches as the two engines, like something out of a crazy dream, met in the terrible impact of a head-on collision. The heavy engine crumpled the lighter, pushed it aside like a toy. Above the crash and the splintering of wood and the smashing of glass sounded the wild shouts of the men in the blood-curdling yells of the Western plains. Yip-eeee! Eeeeeee-yow! Clubs in their hands, axes, guns, shovels. Swarming along the tracks they came toward each other, the two bands of men. It was plain that Maroon’s crew outnumbered the Binghamton crowd, but on these you saw the flash of deputies’ badges glindng in the sun. But the faces above these were the flabby drink-sodden faces of such Bowery toughs and slum riffraff as the opposition had been hastily able to press into service when news of the Albany foray reached their ears.

  “Heel them! Catch them! Brand them! Go get ‘em! Go get ‘em! Hot iron! Hot iron!”

  At the head of the throng ran Clint Maroon. He was smiling, happily. His men were at his heels, and in another moment the two sides had met with an impact of blows, oaths, shouts. It was a glorious free-for-all, a primitive batde of fists and clubs and feet. The thud of knuckles on flesh; grunts; the scuffle of leather on cinders; the screams of men in pain; howls of rage.

  “No guns!” Clint shouted. “Ear ‘em down, slug ‘em, kick them in the guts! Hammer ‘em! No guns.”

  Here was a strange new rule of the game to these men accustomed to fair gun play in a fight, but they cheerfully made the best of it. Fists, boots, axes, clubs. The early training of their cowboy days stood them in good stead now. Five hundred men writhed and pushed, stamped and cursed, punched and hammered and wrestled in a gargantuan bloody welter.

  Suddenly, out of a corner of his eye, Clint Maroon glimpsed a familiar figure, diminutive, implike, in a wine-red coat and a shiny top hat, a grin of dreadful joy on his face. Busily, methodically, he was running between men’s legs, he was butting them behind, tipping them over neatly and jumping on them, a look of immense happiness and satisfaction irradiating him as he did so.

  Beset though he was, Clint stopped to stare, open-mouthed, then he burst into laughter, and even as he roared with mirth he waved the dwarf back and shouted at him above the din. “Get out of here, you son-of-a-gun! . . . Get out of here, run away from here! Drag it, or I’ll bust every—”

  The little man came running toward him, dodging this way and that. He was making frantic motions, he pointed with one tiny hand at something behind Maroon and mouthed as he ran. Instinctively Maroon whirled to look behind him. There stood a stubble-bearded ruffian, arms upraised to bring down a shovel on his head. He had only time to duck, an instinctive gesture, and to raise one arm to shield his head. The flat of the shovel crashed down on his elbow and came to a rest against his ribs. Maroon stumbled, sank to one knee, and saw with horror that the fellow again held the shovel high, poised for a finishing blow. Into Clint’s mind flashed the thought, here’s a Maroon being killed with a s
hovel and disgracing the family. Then Cupide leaped, not like a human being but like a monkey; he used his head as a projectile and landed squarely in the man’s stomach as he stood arms upraised. There was a grunt, the shovel flew from his hands, and, falling, nicked Maroon smartly just above the eye. Then shovel-wielder, Cupide, Maroon, and the shovel itself mingled in a welter of legs, arms, curses, pain. But Maroon’s shattered arm was doubled under his shattered rib and both felt the weight of his own body and that of the fantastic combatants. He was conscious of a wave of unbearable nausea before the kindly curtain of unconsciousness blacked out the daylight.

  XVII

  In a society which dined in the middle of the day and had supper at halfest six, the hour set for the grand ball of the United States Hotel season did not seem at all unsophisticated. But then, Saratoga, which considered itself very worldly and delightfully wicked, still had a Cinderella attitude toward the midnight hour. Eight-thirty to midnight the announcement had said.

  Supper had been rushed through in the dining room or ignored completely by the belles of the evening. From behind bedroom doors and up and down the hotel corridors could be heard the sounds of gala preparation—excited squeals, the splashing of water, the tinkle of supper trays, the ringing of bells, the hurried steps of waiters and bellboys and chambermaids, the tuning of fiddle and horn. Every gas jet in the great brass chandeliers was flaring; even the crystal chandelier in the parlor, which was lighted only on special occasions. In the garden the daytime geraniums and petunias and alyssum and pansies had vanished in the dusk. In their place bloomed the gaudy orange and scarlet and rose color of the paper lanterns glowing between the trees.

  Grudgingly, yet with a certain elation, the United States Hotel had permitted a very few choice guests of their rival, the Grand Union Hotel, to attend this crowning event of the hotel’s summer season: the Jefferson De Forests, the Deckers of Rittenhouse Square, Mrs. Blood of Boston, the Rhinelanders, the Willoughby Kilps, General Roscoe E. Flower.