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The Ends of Justice
by C. Langton Clarke
WHEN the "Blue Racer," pride of the Grand Pacific, by whose comings and goings dwellers on the plains set their clocks, roared into the freight division yards at Shallow Creek the hand of the fireman was on the lever, and the engineer, a limp huddle of blue jeans and grime, lay on the floor of the cab.
Five minutes later strong hands had borne the body into the agent's little parlor, and the white-faced fireman was telling his story to a sympathetic circle.
"There he sat," said the fireman, "with his head outen the winder same as usual, an' as nat'ral as life, an' I never suspicioned anything was wrong till he hit the seven degree on the big trestle at the Forks without checkin' her a notch or shovin' a spoonful of air on the shoes. When I grabbed him he jest went all together like a busted balloon. Heart failure, I guess. He'd been talkin' of layin' off a while with a pain in his side this two weeks."
"He was a good man, was Denis Hagarty," said one of the bystanders.
"He was," said Stevens, the division superintendent. "As good a man as ever poured oil into a cup, but Denis's virtues ain't going to get the Blue Racer into Wylie on schedule. Who've you got can take her through?" he added sharply, turning to the master mechanic, Eben Burt.
"Dick Toft," Burt replied shortly. "Only man I'd trust her to. Pulled in half an hour ago, and up at the roundhouse now, turning in his engine."
"What—'Old Faithful'?" said Stevens. " I reckon you're right. He'll kick at going out again."
"Kick? He wouldn't kick if I told him to shove his head into the fire."
The wipers were busy on his engine when Dick Toft, thick-set, black-bearded and mahogany-visaged, left the roundhouse and butted into Burt, who gave him curt orders to take Number 6 on to Wylie.
To a younger or more ambitious man the opportunity of pulling a lever on the fastest flyer on the continent would have been compensation enough for foregoing bed and board, but Dick was growing old, and ambition had sickened on that dreadful night when the detectives came hunting for his son, now a fugitive and an outcast, and had died outright when, a year later, he laid his daughter, the pride of his heart, beside the wife, who was now little more than a memory. A lonely, self-centered man was Dick, looking the world square in the eye without malice or envy, but without friendliness, and living out his life in boardinghouse and engine-cab, without a grumble and without a hope.
But careless as he was of his own advancement, one compensating virtue, like granite bedrock, underlay the barren levels of his life—a dog-like loyalty to his masters, and a rigid, unswerving adherence to what he held to be his duty. Eben Burt had not exaggerated. Dick Toft had thrust his head into the fire before at the word of his superiors. In the great strike, when every wheel on the system was tied hard and fast by half a dozen words on a slip of yellow paper, he alone stood by the company, ran his engine through a yelling mob without the quiver of an eyelash, went down with her in the ruins of Dry Run trestle and was carried back to be pieced together by the company surgeon, uncomplaining and looking for no reward.
Two years later, when the fires were licking up the grass-lands between South Bend and the Magpie in hundred-acre mouthfuls, Number 24, Special East, two hundred thousand dollars' worth between pilot and tail-lamps, with Dick Toft in the cab, halted abreast of a small slough with two walls of flame arching the track ahead, and another, half a mile wide, galloping like a race-horse to cut off her retreat. The train crew broke for water, but Dick, a spanner in his fist and words of wrath upon his lips, held his fireman to his shovel and brought his train through with the paint curling on the cars and the rails fairly buckling under the drivers.
He went into hospital, looking like a singed cat, and came out a wreek later, to turn down the hand of his recreant conductor, who had thought more of saving his own skin than the property of the company.
"Old Faithful" he was called from one end of the division to the other, and the men, while they respected him for his devotion, regarded it tolerantly, as a mild form of mania.
SO DICK trudged back by the side his superior and swung himself up the side of the huge shining machine, which throbbed with impatience at the delay, like a thing animate.
"Be careful, Dick," said Stevens, as he hung on the engine step, " but not too——careful, you know."
The old man grunted, and the flyer swept through the packed freight-yards and out into the gathering dusk on the plains. With twenty minutes to wipe off and a forty-mile tangent ahead of him, Old Faithful opened her out and let her hum. Even to his seasoned experience there was a sense of exhilaration in the swift movement and the smooth following of that string of dark-blue cars, an agreeable variation from the rattle and bump of the freights he had been hauling over the same track so many years.
It was late Fall, and the sting of coming Winter was in the wind that whipped the cab windows; Dick thrust out his head and let it beat upon his forehead. It was full twenty hours since he last kicked the sheet off, and he was tired—dog-tired, but the company wanted him, and there was no protest, even in his mind.
Presently the stars popped out, clear and unwinking, and the moon lifted herself, full-faced, above a ridge of scrub poplar, making the twin lines of steel shine like silver ribbons.
At the long curve which sweeps the base of Dead Squaw Hill, Dick checked her up a notch and looked at his watch. Five minutes of the deficit wiped off. He held out the dial to the fireman.
"Good business!" roared the other. "We'll do it all right, all right." And he bent again over his shovel.
But alas for man's calculations! As the Blue Racer leaped out upon the long tangent, a red light zigzagged frantically across the track a hundred yards ahead, and with something very like an oath Dick shut her off and threw the air hard.
"What's up?" he asked sharply as the man with the lantern came running up. He did not notice two figures which rose up from the right of way and closed in on his train.
The man sprang swiftly up the steps into the gangway and a pair of forty-fives covered engineer and fireman.
"Hands up!" he said with a coarse laugh. "That's what!"
Under certain circumstances the interior of a forty-five revolver looks as big as the inside of a tomato-can, and the bravest realizes that he had best obey orders, so two pairs of hands were promptly raised aloft. The fireman was white with fear, but on the face of Old Faithful was a black scowl of wrath.
The intruder was short of stature and strongly built. The upper part of his face was hidden by a mask, and the lower covered by a coarse black beard and mustache. From the angle of the right nostril to the lobe of the ear a puckered white scar cut the cheek horizontally.
As he faced the engineer he uttered a slight exclamation and his arm dropped half way to his side, but with an oath he steadied the muzzle back on the breast of the blue jumper.
"No monkey business with me!" he said roughly.
The eyes of Old Faithful were glued on the unsightly scar.
"A brave sight, this, for the eyes of the man that begot you, James Toft!" he said. "When Black Murphy split your face with the ax in Daly's, I would to God he had struck six inches higher!"
The other laughed uneasily.
"I wasn't reckoning on meeting you, an' that's the naked truth," he said. "I haven't been keepin' tab on the comp'ny's circulars this while back, an' didn't know my daddy'd got promotion. Where's Denis?"
"Denis Hagarty died in this cab two hours ago," the old man said sternly.
"Well, don't you be a ——— fool an' do the same thing!" the son replied meaningly.
For full five minutes father and son looked into each other's eyes, while the fireman stared helplessly from one to the other. Then from back of the tender came the sound of a pistol-shot and a cry of agony.
"You murderous dogs!" said the engineer fiercely. "What was that?"
"Reckon somebody's got hurt," the other responded. "You keep still."
The brutal laugh which accompanied the words, the insolent note of command, pricked the old man's courage like a spur. The half-veiled face, with its sneering lip and unsightly brand of evil painted clear against the night by the light streaming from the half-opened door of the furnace, filled him with a loathing unspeakable. With a swift indrawing of breath and a gritting of teeth he ducked down and sideways and leaped in on his son.
A bullet starred the plating between the gauges, but before the graceless villain could draw trigger again a knotted fist went fairly home among the black bristles on his chin, and James Toft dropped in a heap, striking his head against the tender and knocking out what little sense his father's blow had left in him.
"The bell-rope—quick!" Dick snarled, and, snatching the spare hank from the fireman he bent over the prostrate form. In another minute the arms and legs of the unconscious train-robber were held in a close-embracing hempen spiral.
With swift, untrembling fingers the engineer stripped off his jumper and, plucking the mask from the white face at his feet, bound it about his own eyes. The broad-brimmed hat and heavy guns lay in the gangway where his son had fallen, and he picked them up. His eyes shone strangely through the holes in the black crape, and the fireman trembled.
"What are you going to do?" he asked in a voice scarcely audible above the drumming of the imprisoned steam.
"My duty," replied Old Faithful. "Bide you here."
He said no more, but dropped down the side of his engine and crunched his way back along the ballast.
As he came abreast of the tender, two masked men leaped from the express-car and came toward him. Looking past them he could see the conductor standing by the forward sleeper, hands above his head. A thread of smoke hung in the door of the express-car. Little more than an arm's length away one of the men addressed him.
"Why in ——— don't you obey orders, Jim?" he demanded sharply. "What are you here for?"
"This!" said Dick curtly.
He laid the muzzles of his guns against the breasts before him and pulled the triggers. Both men went down, one man limp and silent, the other with a horrid writhe and yell. True to his upbringing, he tried a shot as he fell, and ripped a furrow in Dick's beard, but before he could fire again the engineer's cowhide boot took him square on the jaw, and when he touched ground he was practically a dead man.
From the interior of the express-car came the shattering sound of an explosion. Half a dozen boards cracked and broke outwards and a whirl of pungent smoke bellied out into the frosty air.
Dick tore the mask from his face and yelled at the conductor.
"Come here, you blamed fool!" he cried. "Are you going to stand there all night?"
Bewildered, the other advanced. His hands were still in the air, but he dropped them as he recognized the engineer.
"You?" he gasped, looking helplessly from the sturdy, menacing figure to the sprawling forms on the ballast.
"Pull your wits together, Bill Haney!" Dick cried impatiently. "Are there any others back there?"
Haney shook his head. "Just them two," he said. "They went through the cars first, and put the fear of God on my passengers. Then they brought me forward. And you—how did they pull you up? Is the track blocked?" With a hand to his cap, he leaned outwards and peered ahead.
"Red light," the engineer responded curtly. "But the man that showed it wall never swing lantern again."
"Is he dead?" Haney asked.
"Not yet," was the grim reply. "He lies on the floor of my cab with a good rope about his arms and legs. It will be around his neck before long—God help me!"
A spasm of agony, mastered in a moment, distorted the old man's features.
"Do ye know him?" the conductor inquired, staring hard.
The answer was long in coming. The steel-gray eyes under the penthouse brows stared steadily down the string of lighted coaches.
"He is my own son," the engineer said at last.
"Holy Heaven!" Haney cried, recoiling before a tragedy so much grimmer than he had dreamed of. "And—and what are you going to do?"
"My duty!" answered Old Faithful sternly. "He goes into the hands of the sheriff at South Bend."
Words of sympathy, protest, advice, rose to Haney's lips, but died against the granite wall of the other's resolution, and he followed him meekly as he clambered into the express-car and made a hasty examination.
The explosion had severely wrenched the safe, but the door still held fast. At the farther end of the car the body of the messenger lay stretched. There was a bullethole in the center of his forehead and it needed no expert in gunshot-wounds to tell that he must have died almost on his feet.
When the two dropped out on the ballast again the heads of excited passengers were poking out of the coach windows, and several scared train-hands were making their way forward.
"Get the bodies into the car, Haney, and herd your passengers," Dick said shortly. "I wait for no one. We've lost time enough already."
He turned his back on the scene of his exploit and tramped back to his engine and the company of his doomed son.
THE Blue Racer sped onward through the night. Back in the cars the passengers discussed a testimonial and an address. Forward the engineer sat on his leathern seat and stared grimly ahead. Mile after mile the giant wheels devoured, but his eyes never wandered from track and gauge to the log-like figure beneath him. The fireman, feverishly shoveling coal, glanced furtively at it now and again, but the father not at all.
Presently consciousness returned. James Toft shivered, sighed and opened his eyes. There was a roar like thunder in his ears, a hot blast beat upon him from the open door of the furnace, and a yard away a coalgrimed, sweaty face shone in the white radiance. Had he awakened in hell?
He uttered a faint cry and strove to move his cramped limbs, but the coils were wound and the knots tied by a cunning hand, and he was powerless. Then memory came, and he knew what had happened and where he lay. He had played his cards badly and the game had gone against him, but he might yet save his own stake.
"Father!" he cried.
There was no response, and he repeated the cry twice, with a sort of whining insistence.
The fireman timidly touched the old man's elbow.
"He's speakin' to you," he said.
"D'ye think I didn't hear him?" the engineer answered in a hard voice. "He is no son of mine. Tell him that I will have no truck with him. Tell him that at South Bend he goes into the hands of the sheriff, to deal with as the law says. Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh he may be—more shame for me—but I do my duty."
"Duty!" sneered the son. "Maybe if you'd thought less of what you call your duty, I'd 'a' been different."
Dick answered no word, and the other twisted his head round to the fireman.
"Here, you," he gasped. "You seem a decent kind. Feel in my vest pocket and take out what you find there."
The fireman glanced at his superior, and, reading neither protest nor consent on the graven mask, complied, and took out a small oblong case of cheap frayed leather.
"Open it!" said the bound man, and the fireman again obeyed. Inside was the tintype of a girl, barely in her teens, a round-faced lass, with curly hair hanging on her shoulders.
"Give it to him!" James Toft cried fiercely. "Hold it up before his eyes if he won't take it. Let him look at the picture of his dead girl, that I've carried about with me, good days and bad days, for ten years, and wouldn't part with it for all the gold in the safe back yonder. She cared about me if no one else ever did. Let her speak for me!"
The fireman held out the portrait, and the engineer took it mechanically from his hand. As he gazed on the features of his dead child a mist gathered before his eyes, and on the face of the mist moved the shadows of the past. A heavy tear cut the grime on the lined face, and the fireman, a sympathetic man, with children of his own, saw, and swept a blue sleeve across his eyes.
Dick snapped the case shut and handed it back to Ins subordinate.
"Put it where you found it," he said. "Let him have something good about him for the time he has to live."
"D'ye mean to say you're goin' to give me up? " the son cried brokenly.
The father made no reply, and the other, searching his face with the half-pitiful, half-defiant look of a trapped animal, saw no softening of the grim lines, no relenting in the steady, steely eyes. Only the knuckles of the hand upon the lever were white with the strength of its grip
"——you!" the son cried fiercely, "——you for an unnatural father! May every curse——"
The fireman laid a heavy hand upon his mouth, and he groaned and fell silent, dully staring at the squat image of fate perched above him, and counting the rhythmical hammering of the great drivers on the rail-joints as they swept him onward to the scaffold.
THREE miles from the Horseshoe Dick thrust into his pocket, pulled out knife and tobacco, and carefully shredded a pipeful, while the fireman watched him, wondering. He filled the old briar which lay on the sill of the cab window, laid the plug and the knife, still open, on the seat behind him, and looked at his watch.
"Thirty-five minutes to make up," he said, "and we'll have to lose a couple more in the cut."
"In the Horseshoe?" the fireman queried. He looked at the shining blade on the seat, then back at the engineer, and the eyes of the two men met in a long, steady stare. "In the Horseshoe," Dick repeated, raising his voice. "There was half a ton of rock on the track last week, and I can't take no chances with a trainload of passengers. I'll have to slow her down."
He turned away his face, and the fireman bent to his shovel again.
"The cut ain't more'n half a mile away," he said with great distinctness.
Dick nodded, shut off steam and, with his hand on the air-lever, thrust head and shoulders out of the window. The fireman leaned across the prostrate figure and picked up the knife. When he replaced it, two newly severed ends of plaited rope lay on the floor.
"Lively now!" he said. "You won't get another chance. This is the Horseshoe."
The air hissed like a serpent, and the flyer trembled throughout her length as the shoes closed on the wheels. James Toft shook himself free from the coils, slipped past the fireman, swung around the edge of the cab and was gone.
With a well-simulated yell of surprise the fireman beat his fist on Dick's leg.
"He's away!" he cried. "He's escaped!"
"Escaped? " repeated the engineer, avoiding the other's eyes.
"Got clean off!" continued the fireman, speaking with great rapidity of utterance. "He must have worked them ropes loose, and lay there watching his chance. It come when you slowed, an' he took it. Slipped past me like a ghost, afore I could ketch him."
"Thank God!" said Dick in his beard.
He looked at the rope on the floor, and his gaze dwelt on the severed ends. With a sudden impulse he held out his hand, and the fireman gripped it hard.
"Reckon he may do better for this lesson," the latter said with a half sob. Then he, too, looked at the tell-tale rope.
"Guess this ain't much good to nobody now," he said, and kicked it out into the darkness.