THE SPIDER WATER.

II.

On the 30th there was trouble beyond Wild Hat, and all our extra men, put out there under Healey, were fighting to Hold the Rat Valley levels where they hug the river on the west slope. It wasn't really Healey's track. Bucks sent him over there just as the emperor sent Ney, wherever he needed his right arm. Sunday, while Healey was at Wild Hat, rain began falling. Sunday it rained; Monday all through the mountains it rained; Tuesday it was raining from Omaha to Eagle Pass, with the thermometer climbing for breath and the barometer flat as an adder—and the Spider woke. Woke with the April water and the June water and the storm water all at once.

Trackwalkers Tuesday night flagged Number One, and reported the Spider wild, with heavy sheet ice running. A wire from Bucks brought Healey out of the west and into the east, and brought him to reckon for the last time with his ancient enemy.

He was against it Wednesday with dynamite. All the day, all the night, all the next day the sullen roar of the giant powder shook the forming jam above the bridge, and after two days Healey wired, "Ice out," and set back without a minute's sleep for home. Saturday night he slept and Sunday all day and Sunday night. Monday about noon Bucks sent up to ask, but Healey still slept. They asked back by the lad whether they should wake him. Bucks sent word, "No."

It was late Tuesday morning when the tall roadmaster came down, and he was fresh as sunshine. All day he sat with Bucks and the dispatchers watching the line. The Spider raced mad, and the watchers sent in panic messages, but Healey put them in his pipe. "That bridge will go when the mountains go," was all he said.

Nine o'clock that night every star was blinking when Healey looked in for the trackwalkers' reports and the railroad weather bulletins. Bucks, Callahan, and Peeto sat about Martin Duffy, the dispatcher, who in his shirt sleeves threw the stuff off the sounder as it trickled in dot and dash, dot and dash over the wires.

The west wire was good; east everything below Peace River was down. We had to get the eastern reports around by Omaha and the south—a good thousand miles of a loop—but bad news travels even around a Robin Hood loop.

And first came Wild Hat from the west with a stationary river and the Loup Creek falling—clear—good night. And Ed Peeto struck the table heavily and swore it was well in the west. Then from the east came Prairie Portage, all the way round, with a northwest rain, a rising river, and anchor ice running, pounding the piers bad—track in fair shape, and—and——

The wire went wrong. As Duffy knit his eyes and tugged and cussed a little, the wind outside took up the message and whirled a bucket of rain against the windows. But the wires wouldn't right, and stuff that no man could get tumbled in like a dictionary upside down. And Bucks and Callahan and Healey and Peeto smoked, silent, and heard the deepening drum of the rain on the roof.

Then Duffy wrestled mightily yet once more.

"Keep still," he exclaimed, leaning heavily on the key. "Here's something—from the Spider."

He snatched a pen and ran it across a clip; Bucks leaning over read aloud from his shoulder:

"Omaha.

"J. F. Bucks:

"Trainmen from No. 75 stalled west of Rapid City—track afloat in Simpson's Cut—report Spider bridge out—send——"

And the current broke.

Callahan's hand closed rigidly over the hot bowl of his pipe; Peeto sat speechless; Bucks read again at the broken message, but Healey sprang like a man wounded and snatched the clip from his hand.

He stared at the running words till they burned his eyes, and then, with an oath, frightful as the thunder that shook the mountains, he dashed the clip to the floor. His eyes snapped greenish, and he cursed Omaha, cursed its messages, and everything that came out of it. Slow at first, then fast and faster, until all the sting that poisoned his heart in his unjust discharge poured from his lips. It flooded the room like a spilling stream, and none put a word against it, for they knew he stood a wronged man. Out it came—all the rage, all the heart-burning, all the bitterness—and he dropped into a chair and covered his face with his hands. Only the sounder clicking iron jargon and the thunder shaking the wickiup like a reed filled the ears of the men about him. They watched him slowly knot his fingers and loosen them, and saw his face rise dry and hard and old out of his hands.

"Get up an engine!"

"Not—you're not going down there to-night?" stammered Bucks.

"Yes. Now. Right off. Peeto, get out your men!"

The foreman jumped for the door. Little Duffy, snatching the train sheet, began clearing track for a bridge special. In twenty minutes twenty men were running as many ways through the storm, and a live engine boomed under the wickiup window.

"I want you to be careful, Phil," Bucks spoke anxiously as he looked with Healey out into the storm. "It's a bad night." Healey made no answer.

The lightning shot the yards in a blaze and a crash split the gorge. "A wicked night," muttered Bucks.

Evans, conductor of the special, ran in.

"Here's your orders," said Duffy. "You've got forty miles an hour."

"Don't stretch it," warned Bucks. "Good-by, Phil," he added to Healey, "I'll see you in the morning."

"In the morning," echoed Healey. "Good-by."

The switch engine had puffed up with a caboose; ahead of it Peeto had coupled in the pile driver. At the last minute Callahan concluded to go, and with the bridge gang tumbling into the caboose, the assistant superintendent, Ed Peeto, and Healey climbed into the engine, and they pulled out, five in the cab, for the Spider Water.

Healey, moody at first, began joking and laughing the minute they got away. He sat behind Denis Mullenix, the engineer, and poked his ribs and taunted him with his heavy heels. At last he covered Denis' big hands on the throttle with his own bigger fingers, good-naturedly coaxed them loose, and pushing him away got the reins and the whip into his own keeping. He drew the bar out a notch and settled himself for the run across the flat country.

As they sped from the shelter of the hills, the storm shook them with a freshening fury, and drove the flanges into the south rail with a grinding screech. The rain fell in a sheet, and the right-of-way ran a river. The wind, whipping the water off the ballast, dashed it like hail against the cab glass; the segment of desert caught in the yellow of the headlight rippled and danced and swam in the storm water, and Healey pulled again at the straining throttle and latched it wider.

Notch after notch he drew; heedless of lurch and jump; heedless of bed or curve; heedless of track or storm; and with every spur at her cylinders the engine shook like a frantic horse. Men and monster alike lost thought of caution and drunk a frenzy in the whirl that Healey opened across the swimming plain.

The Peace River hills loomed suddenly in front like moving pictures; before they could think it the desert was behind.

"Phil, man, you must steady up!" yelled Callahan, getting his mouth to Healey's ear. The roadmaster nodded and checked a notch, but the fire was in his blood, and he slewed into the hills with a speed unslackened. The wind blew them, and the track pulled them, and a frenzied man sat at the throttle.

Just where the line crosses the Peace River the track bends sharply through the Needles to take the bridge. The curve is a ten degree. As they struck it, the headlight shot far out upon the river—and they in the cab knew they sat dead men. Instead of lighting the box of the truss, the lamp lit a black and snaky flood with yellow foam sweeping over the abutment, for the Peace had licked up Agnew's thirty-foot piles—and his bridge was not.

There were two things to do; Healey knew them both, and both meant death to the cab, but the caboose sheltered twenty of Healey's faithful men. He instantly threw the air, and with a scream from the tires, the special, shaking in the brake shoes, swung the curve. Again the roadmaster checked heavily, and the pile driver, taking the elevation like a hurdle, bolted into the Needles, dragging the caboose after it. But engine and tender and five in the cab plunged head on into the river.

Not a man in the caboose was killed. They scrambled out of the splinters and on their feet, men and ready to do. One voice came through the storm from the river, and they answered its calling. It was Callahan, but Durden, Mullenix, Peeto, and Healey never called again.

At daybreak, wreckers of the West End, swarming from mountain and plain, were heading for the Peace, and the McCloud gang—up—crossed the Spider on Healey's bridge—on the bridge the coward trainmen had reported out, quaking as they did in the storm at the Spider foaming over its approaches. But Healey's bridge stood—stands to-day.

Yet three days the Spider raged, and knew then its master, while he, three whole days, sat at the bottom of the Peace, clutching the engine levers, in the ruins of Agnew's mistake.

And when the divers got them up, Callahan and Bucks tore big Peeto's arms from his master's body and shut his staring eye and laid him at his master's side. And only the Spider, ravening at Healey's caissons, raged. But Healey slept.

THE END.