The Cowpuncher

by Bradford Scott

  Silence followed for a space. Then a match scratched and a tiny flame flickered. It was succeeded by the warm, steady glow of a lantern in whose light Huck could distinguish three grinning faces crowned by unbelievably tattered hats. A scrub of beard covered each face; but the eyes of all were unanimously good-humored and friendly.

  One man was wondrously obese, the other two as magnificently scrawny. The fat man waved a hand to the straw heaps.

  “Draw up, brothers, and set,” he invited them.

  Grinning, Huck and the old man obeyed, settling themselves comfortably in the straw. The click of the wheels over the rail joints was quickening its tempo, the car was beginning to lurch and sway.

  “Name’s Mason—Lank Mason,” the fat man offered. “This here scantlin’ on my right is Fatty Bromes; one on the left is Bad-eye Wilson: they’re headin’ for Californy. Colorado’s my stop—Apishapa River country in Las Animas County.”

  Huck saw his friend give a slight start and bend shrewd eyes on Mason. But he said nothing beyond announcing his own name.

  “Gaylord,” he said, “Tom Gaylord. Most folks call me Old Tom, which is short and easy and saves wear and tear on the tongue.”

  The others nodded and Huck introduced himself.

  “Now everybody knows everybody else, we jest might as well take it easy,” said Mason. “Stretch out and be comf’table, only watch out for the lantern. Don’t wanta start a fire in this straw. Car of blastin’ powder right ahead of us and that stuff goes off mighty sudden and mighty hard if you fetch a light to it. So be keerful of yore smokes, too.”

  He began tamping a blackened pipe with stubby paws. Huck noticed how powerful the fingers were that manipulated the tobacco. “Thought you said you were a gent of leisure?” he remarked, offhand.

  The fat man chuckled. “How do you know I ain’t?” he countered.

  Huck gestured at the roughened, calloused fingers. “Your hands never got that way from settin’ on ‘em,” he replied.

  The other nodded. “You got sharp eyes, son, the kind what don’t miss much. Nope, I don’t do overmuch loafin’, even though I am takin’ it easy right now. Fact is, the reason I’m on this rattler is ‘cause I’m headin’ for what oughta be a new job, and money comes too hard to spend on railroad tickets when you can be jest as comf’table in a side-door Pullman for free. I’m headin’ for the new Esmeralda gold diggin’s. I’m a hard-rock man mostly, but I know somethin’ ‘bout hydraulic minin’, and that’s what they’re usin’ over there. They’re knockin’ down a hull mountainside of gravel and doin’ purty well at it, I hear tell. Payin’ good wages, anyhow.”

  Again Huck saw old Tom Gaylord’s eyes gleam with interest, but again the oldster held his tongue. Huck wondered exactly what cards the old man was playing so close to his skinny chest.

  All night long the freight roared across the plains of Kansas. Lulled by the steadily clicking wheels and the monotonous rumble of the cars, Huck Brannon slept the profound sleep of untroubled youth. But still it was a catlike sleep. Each time the train slowed to a stop at lonely pumping stations for water or fuel, the cowboy drifted awake to the changing tempo of sound and movement. He’d never law-dodged before, and it made him jumpy.

  It was the grunting and stirring of fat Lank Mason which fully and finally aroused him in the gray dawn. He sat up, brushing the straw from his rumpled black hair, and grinned sleepily at the fat man. Lank grinned back, shook himself like a big dog coming out of the water, and began burrowing under the straw heaped along the wall. He drew forth a gunny sack that clanked as he shook it. From the sack he took an array of tin cans that had not yet known the ravaging touch of a can opener.

  “Breakfast in the dining car—right here—in fifteen minutes,” Lank observed, hauling out a flat slab of sheet iron from beneath another straw heap.

  He laid the slab of tin near the partly open car door, cupped up the edges and criss-crossed some splinters of wood on its surface. Then he went after the cans with a huge jacknife, ripping them open, flattening some of them after pouring out the contents, which he carefully heaped on the flattened sheets when they were ready. Then he struck a match to the splinters of wood, which burned with a brisk and almost smokeless flame.

  “Allus pick yore wood for fire and no smoke,” he observed to the interested cowboy.

  Over the flame and glowing embers he whisked the homemade “skillets,” deftly turning the contents with the blade of the jackknife.

  In almost no time at all smoking hot sausages, savory strips of fried bacon and slabs of steaming corned beef were ready for eating.

  One of the hoboes came lugging a can of water from a corner of the car. More wood was placed on the glowing sheet iron and coffee brewed swiftly in the can.

  “I’ve seen some mighty smart cooking out on the range,” Huck observed, “but this beats anything I ever ran into.”

  After they’d eaten all their belts could hold comfortably, they lit up pipes and cigarettes and smoked in dreamy comfort, staring out of the open door at the corn and wheat fields, the stretches of rolling grassland that flew past in endless panorama of sun-drenched peace.

  “We’ll hit the Washoe yards in a hour or so now,” Old Tom observed.

  “Yeah,” nodded Lank. “Hafta unload then. There’s an alley ‘longside the yard lead, jest ‘fóre they stop to change engines. We’ll duck inter that and lie low until she’s ready to pull out again. Think they’ll be lookin’ for you two fellers?”

  “Don’t think so,” Gaylord replied. “Got a notion this quick-thinkin’ young hellion fooled ‘em proper. Chances are they’re still beatin’ up the brush or combin’ the town for us.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” admitted Lank. “I got a notion it’ll work out jest as you figger.”

  It did. They passed the Washoe yards without incident, leaving the train in case of an inspection by the bulls, lying in the long grass of the alley until the wheels began to turn again and then making a quick dash for the open car.

  All day the train boomed across endless plains, the grade climbing steadily; and as the dusk began to turn the hollows into mystic blue lakes of shadow, the skyline changed. Ahead were vast, nebulous shapes rising into the sun-washed vault. Shadowy and unreal at first, they swiftly took on solidity and form.

  “Mountains,” Old Tom grunted. “We’re in Colorado, now, shootin’ through Baco County. Las Animas next, and my stop.”

  “Mine, too,” Lank Mason remarked, “over near the Huerfano line.”

  The train roared into a cut, crashed through between steeply restraining walls, and then thundered along in the deepening shadow of towering cliffs.

  Huck leaned against the jamb of the boxcar door and rested his eyes wonderingly on the wild grandeur of the mountain scenery looming against the angry red of a stormy sunset sky. It was Huck who—even before the engineer of the manifest—first saw the avalanche of earth and stone roaring down toward the track over which the train would have to pass.

  Under the beat of winter hail and summer rain, that gaunt cliff had stood throughout the ages—had staunchly resisted the onslaught of the elements. But the patient, never resting, never despairing fingers of frost and water probed deeper and deeper, prying strata from strata, cracking with quiet, persistent strength the heart of eternal rock itself.

  And now, the air waves disturbed by the pounding exhaust of the giant locomotive provided the final kinetic push necessary to disturb the delicate balance of the hesitating granite.

  Outward and downward, slowly, majestically at first, as if reluctant to leave its bed of the eons, the mighty mass answered the resistless pull of gravity. With appalling swiftness it gathered speed, rolling, tumbling, with individual segments the size of a house leaping high into the air and hurtling through space for hundreds of yards.

  Like the raised lip of an angry dog, the grinding flood upreared at the edge of the towering battlement that flanked the right-of-way. It seemed to poise for a moment, straining for greater he
ight in its upward sweep; then the curling lip broke raggedly and hurtled downward toward the slim wisps of the tracks half a thousand feet below.

  IV

  Roaring Death

  In the locomotive cab, the grizzled engineer, a veteran of half a dozen wrecks in the wild mountain country, fought with every trick he knew to save his train from that mighty surge. His fireman’s warning yell had been his first inkling of disaster ahead as the engine lurched around a curve. He slammed the throttle shut and threw on every ounce of pressure in his brake cylinders.

  The screech of air through the port, the clanging of brake rigging and the grind of the shoes against the wheels added their pandemonium to the tumult of the avalanche. Back came the reverse lever, the old hogger jerked the throttle wide open.

  The exhaust boomed again and the great drive wheels, working in reverse, howled their protest and ground flakes and ribbons of steel from the shivering rails. Back along the train clattered a prodigious banging of couplers and clanging of outraged steel.

  But it was useless. The terrific shove of ten million pounds of freight traveling at sixty miles an hour hurled the train forward despite the grip of the brakes and the backward surge of the giant engine. With a prodigious crash the locomotive hit the towering wall of earth and stone, burrowing deep into the mass, thrown over on its side. Down upon the hissing monster thundered tons of rock from the wavering crest.

  The engineer died with one hand on the throttle, the other on the brake-valve lever. The fireman, jumping through the window an instant before the crash, was crushed to a pulp under the roaring mass of the avalanche. The head brakeman met death in the crushed cab, pinned against the hot boilerhead, screaming his agony as life was baked out of him. Jets of smoke and steam spurted through the crevices of the ghastly mound and wavered above the sullen funeral pyre like uncertain ghosts in the fading light.

  The wreck was appallingly complete. Car after car left the iron to slide and roll down the steep slope on the off side of the right-of-way. Others piled up in a jumbled mass of splintered wood and twisted steel. Still others were turned sideways or lay with tangled brake rigging in the air. Everywhere were trucks torn loose from the bodies, beams, sills, scattered freight.

  And hardly had the last screech of disrupted steel and the final grumble of the avalanche ceased to quiver on the air when, back toward the middle of the shattered train, an ominous glow began to redden the deepening dusk.

  Huck Brannon had hardly time to yell a warning to his companions when he was thrown to the floor by the bucking of the car as the engineer slammed the automatic brake lever into the “big hole” and “dynamited” his train. He was still rolling about in the straw when the engine hit the slide.

  Gripping, clawing, vainly trying to gain his feet, he was hurled against the side of the car with terrific force. Over and about him rained the heavy firebrick. One grazed his forehead and for a crawling moment or two, everything went black.

  He was dimly conscious of a mighty crashing and splintering and the horrible grinding groan of the overturned cars slithering down the slope. Vaguely aware, also, of yells and screams close at hand.

  It was Mason’s booming voice that shook Huck back into full consciousness. His voice and the pound and scuffle of his brogans. Sick and dizzy, Huck reeled to a stance on a slanting surface. He coughed as something acrid and penetrating struck his throat and nostrils. Shaking the redstreaked blackness from his eyes he glared about.

  The boxcar was ripped apart, unroofed, splintered. Overhead Huck saw the glint of stars in the darkening sky. All about him was swirling smoke through which beat a rising glow. Against the glow leaped and danced a huge figure.

  The figure whirled suddenly and Huck saw it was Lank Mason. The big miner saw him at the same instant.

  “Didn’t get you either, eh?” he shouted. “ ‘Fraid the rest of the boys are done for. Here’s Badeye with his head bashed in and Fatty’s damn nigh tore in two. Where’s the old man? We gotta get outa here pronto—that lantern smashed and set the straw afire. These splinters have caught, too. I tried to beat it out, but ain’t no use.”

  At mention of Old Tom, Huck recollected the queer gasping sound which could still be heard. It seemed to come from beneath what remained of one side of the smashed car. With Lank at his heels, he crawled over the wreckage in the direction of the sound.

  Ripping the shattered planks away, they found Old Tom. He lay buried deep in the wreckage; a heavy beam, resting across his chest, pinned him down. One end of the beam was securely bolted to the long double timbers of a side sill. Upon the other end lay the huge steel center sill, a dead weight of more than a ton.

  Gaylord was conscious and, it seemed to Huck, not fatally injured. The weight upon his chest made breathing very nearly impossible, and he was in pain, but the beam was so supported by the wreckage that it did not badly crush him.

  Old Tom recognized them and gasped out words of satisfaction on their escape.

  “We’ll get you out, oldtimer,” Huck assured him. “Is it hurting bad? Can you hold out while we get that damned sill off or until the wreck-train gets here?”

  “Ain’t hurt bad,” panted Gaylord. “Weight don’t seem to be settlin’ no more. I can wait.”

  “You can’t wait long,” growled Lank. “Fire’s eatin’ this way, and there ain’t no way we can put it out. C’mon, young feller, let’s get to work on that sill.”

  They went after it, heaving and tugging. The sill did not budge an inch. Mason swore and mopped his beefy face. Huck ripped free a length of timber for them to use as a pry. Still the sill stubbornly held its ground. Again they put their strength to the effort. The veins stood out on Huck’s forehead large as cords, black as ink. The big muscles of arm and back and shoulder swelled and knotted beneath his shirt. With a slithery sound, one sleeve split from elbow to wrist.

  “Gawd, feller, but you got an arm on you!” panted Lank Mason. “I allus been rated a hoss, but I figger you as liftin’ half again as much as I am.”

  “But not enough, blast it!” Brannon grated behind set teeth. “Mason, we’ve got to do something and damn fast or he’s a goner sure.”

  “Fire won’t reach him for quite a spell,” Lank said. “See—it’s workin’ t’other way. Wind’s blowin’ in that d’rection, and most of the wood’s over there.”

  “Yeah, and something else is over there, too,” Huck told him grimly.

  “Eh?”

  “Uh-huh, that car of blasting powder’s over that way, and the fire’s all over it right now. Any minute, she’s liable to let go.”

  “Good Gawd!” the miner gasped. “When she does she’ll blow this mess clean to Utah!”

  “And Old Tom with it—if we don’t get him out first,” Huck said quietly.

  Growling, Lank leaped to the pry and bent his great shoulder to it. Then he suddenly straightened up, staring back along the wreck; a light was bobbing toward them from that direction.

  “Here comes one of the train crew,” he muttered. “Mebbe he can help.”

  A moment later the conductor of the freight came stumbling over the ties. There was blood on his face and one of his eyes was swelled shut. He paused opposite the burning wreckage and glared at the pair with the one eye remaining open, as if they were responsible for the wreck.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on here?” he demanded.

  Huck told him briefly. Before he had finished, the conductor was slipping and sliding down the embankment. His practiced eye took in the situation at once.

  “Gotta get that feller out in a hurry if he’s to be got out at all,” he declared. “Here, all t’gether now!”

  He bent his back to the pry and the three tugged and strained until their faces were black.

  “No use,” the conductor grunted. “We ain’t got the heft.”

  He coughed spasmodically as acrid smoke swirled about them in thick clouds.

  “Thank God the wind’s changed,” he gulped. “That’ll keep the fire �
�way from that powder a little while longer.”

  “And bring it onto Old Tom a little sooner,” Huck pointed out.

  “What in hell we gonna do?” Lank Mason wailed helplessly.

  Huck Brannon’s gray eyes were roving over the wreckage lighted by the blazing wood. His gaze ran up the embankment, centered on the shining rails still securely spiked to the crossties, came back to the massive steel sill which held Old Tom prisoner. He estimated the distance, a deep furrow of concentration drawing his dark brows together.

  Long-neglected engineering elementals were coming back to him. He groped in his mind, trying to pin down an elusive memory, a memory that dealt with heavy timbers on an incline—timbers that were needed higher up the slope at a time when there was no windlass or hoist available, and insufficient man-power to move them by hand.

  “We got those logs up, though,” he muttered. “Let’s see, now, there was a tree growing on top of the rise. We had—”

  Suddenly he whirled to face the conductor, his eyes blazing with excitement.

  “You got rope in your caboose?” he demanded.

  “Shore,” the railroad man replied, “nigh onto a hundred feet of stout cord in the forward cushion box—chains, too; but what good’ll that do? Can’t pull that sill off with rope.”

  “I’ll show you,” the cowboy barked, and scrambled up the slope.

  “I gotta hustle to the head end and see what happened to the boys there,” the conductor bawled after him. “The rear man’s gone back to flag the Western Flyer. She’ll have telegraph instruments and can cut in on the wire and call the wrecker.”

  V

  Spanish Windlass

  Huck waved a hand to show he understood, and headed for the caboose at a dead run. He found it sagging crazily to one side, the front wheels off the track and its coupling twisted loose. He leaped up the steps, into the aisle and flung back the cushion seat that was hinged to the box.