The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, October 11, 1903, Page 12

12 THE SUNDAY CALL. —— N have given thelr Monsoon's jence, after no end its pres- ERY able men ds in heory dead; whether ving or stopped, some other raliroad if I had to, which I it looked as if Marti f it on the road, the re thinking Bob of it over the road a kid of a fellow vinced the detectly & gs was simple probably was, and him out of the ser that Martin reached out s elder er. There were the two brothers; and back there is, somewhere, back r a mother. No just a mother little woman in a shawl net of no special shape or size awl and & bonnet, that's all e Duffy hgys' mother was and there's a lot more lke t know what gets the fathers; often, the scrap But always, somewhere, & ter Martin began to make 1p his mother and his spoke for Bob. Cal- t hesitate or jolly him as he A ly; most se ¢ a good many. He thous couldn’t have too ma f kind; ®so he said, And Bob Duffy was put thing exactly: carrying r-destroyers and ple. r. Sometimes it makes #olid and his heart big; it makes a man's head big solid. I'm not saying any- w except that ple certainly sa on was taller than Martin and would repeat, handsomer; but I can’t, t had absolutely no basis start with. He was parch- lish from sitting night 1 t after ht over a r a sick day in his life; s over the sounder until, sleep. ing or working, the d purred through his ¢ a familiarity taking could guess more off men could catch after ty t He han most ole thing had tumbled in. nd ladder he went. Mes- )perator—up to assistant dispatch- regular trick dispatcher, Up rs and signing the J. M. C., stood for our superintend- honor. Up to the trains their movements, up to the lives CHIEF !—with the honor of the divi- Martin Duffy's three q rig fingers on the key and his ree quick left fingers on the pen at the sams instant scratching orders across The © the clip. Talk about ambidexterity—Mar- aidn’t know what it would be like se one hand at a If Martin Duffy sald right, trains went right., If he sald wrong, trains went wrong. But Martin never said the wrong: he sald only the right. Giddings knows; he cop- fed for him long enough. Giddings and plenty more of them can tell all about Martin Duffy. Bob didn’t rise in the service quite 80 fast as Martin. He did more of the so- cial act, and that pleased his mother, who, on account of her bonnet-and-shawl complexion, didn’t achieve ~much that way. Martin, too, was proud of his ther, and as soon as Bob could handle wire, which was very soon (for he learned things in no time) Martin got Callahan to put him up at Grant as ope- rator. Bob got the place because he was Martin's brother, nothing else. He held it about two months, then he resigned nd-went to San 'Frisco. He was a rest- it was Bob up and Bob down. ar he wandered around out there, legraphing, then he bobbed up again Medicine Bend out of a job. He wanted g0 to work, and—well, Callahan—Mat- »'s brother, you kmow—sent him up to ontalr as night operator. Three months he worked steady as a clock. Then one chers at the Bend couldn’t get Montal two hours. It laid out No. 6 and a special with the general man- ager and made no end of a row. Martin said right off he ought to gn. E was the little mother up home, “There’s the 326 special,” yelled the brakeman, and lighted out the gangway. sflent, I expect, but ading-like. It m Buffalo, and the Pullmans were was left largely to Martin, for the young gay with bunting. The Medicine Bend fellow was already ch 8 was crowd gave them an Indian yell, and in the trouble—he hate too two minutes the Knights, with their hard; so he comprom his scalps in their hands as a token of sur- superintendent not to fire Bob. , set Te r, were tumbling o6ut of their sléep- him back. They sent him up as night ers o the crisp dawn. They were just mean to Rat River, the m st place on like schoolboys, and when Shorty Love- the whole system. That was the summer lace—the local curiosity who had both of the Templars' conclave at San feet and hands frozen off the night he *Frisco. got drunk with Matt Cassidy at Goose We worked the whole spring getting River Junction—struck up on his mouth things up along the line, from Omaha to the Slerras, for that con: were overhauled, rolling stock touched up, roadbed put in shape, everything shaken from to end. Not only were the pas- senger records to be smashed, but be- yond that a lot of our big general officers were way-up Masons and meant that our line should get not merely the cream of the business but the cream of the ad- vertising out of the thing. The general tenor of the instructions was to nickel- plate everything, from the catalpas to the target rods. For three months be- fore the conclave date we were busy get- ting ready for it, and when the big day drew near on which we were to under- take the moving and the feeding of six thousand people one way on one track through the mountains, the cartinks smoked cross-cut and the Russian sec- tion men began to oil their hair. Callaban was superintendent under Bucks, then general manager, and Martin Duffy, chief dispatcher; Neighbor, super- intendent «of motive power, and Double- day, division master mechanic, and with everything buttoned up on the West \End we went that Sunday morning on the fir- ing line to take the first of the Templar spectals. Medicine Bend had the alkall pretty well washed out of its eyes and never be- fore in its history had it appeared really gay. The old Wickiup was decorated till it looked like a buck rigged for a ghost dance. Right after daybreak the tralns began rolling in on Harold Davis' trick. Duffy had annulled all local freights and all through odds and evens, all stock tramps east and all west-bound empties —everything that could be had been sus- pended for that Sunday, and with it all there were still by five times more trains than ever before rolled through Medicine Bend in twenty-four hours. It was like a festival day in the moun- tains. Even the Indlans and the squaw men turned out to see the fun. There was a crowd at the depot by 5 o'clock, when the first train rolled up the lower gorge with St. John’s Commandery No. “Put Me Off at Buffalo” they d seven dollars odd and three bag- gage checks into his hat while the crew were changing engines. It appeared to affect them uncommon to see a fellow without any hands or feet play the mouth organ, and before sundown Shorty made the killing of his life. 'With what he raked in that day he kept the City Mar- shal guessing for three months—which was also pretty good for a man without any hands or feet. All day it was that way; train and ovation after ovation. organ drapp train after The day was cool as a watermelon—August—and bright as a baby's face all through the mountal and the Templars went up into th gh passes with all the swing and nolse we could raise. Harold Davis took it all morning steady from 4 a. m. at the dispatcher's key. He was used up long before noon; but he stayed, and just at 12 o'clock, while a big Templar train from Baltimore was loading its command- ery in front of the Wickiup after an early dinner the big Templar band played a tingling twostep, Martin Duffy stuck his dry, parchment face into the' platform crowd, elbowed his way unnoticed through it, climbed the Wicklup stairs, walked Into the dispatcher's room and, throwing off his hat and coat, leaned over Harold Davis’ shoulder and took a trans- fer. Young Giddings had been sitting there in a perspiration half an hour then; he copled for Martin Duffy that day. At noon they figured to get the last Templar over the Eagle Pass with the sét of the sun. When Duffy took the key he never looked his force cleaner, only he was tired; Giddings could see that. The reg- ular man had been sick a week and Mar- tin had been filllng in. Besides that, all Saturday, the day before, he had been splking the line—figuring what could be annulled and what couldn’t; what could be run extra and what could be put into regulars. Callahan had just got married and was going out to the coast on his wedding tour in Bucks' car. He had re- fused to look at an order after Saturday night. Sunday morning, and from Sun- day morning on, it was all against Dufty. When the chief took the middle trick there were fourteen Templar specials still to come with the last gne just pulling out of McCloud on the plains. They were orllered to run with right of track over all eastbound trains thirty minutes apart all the way through. A minute after Martin Duffy sat in the conductor of the train below registered out. There was a yell pretty soon and away went the Baltimore crowd—and they were corkers, too, those Baltimore fellows, and traveled like lords. At b o'clock in the evening the trains in the west division were moving ‘just Ifkke clocks on the hour and half—thirty minutes, thirty minutes, thirty minutes— and, as far as young Giddings could see, Dufty, after five booming hours, was fresher than when he took the chair. The little dispatcher's capacity for work was something enormous; it wasn't till after supper time, with the worst of the figur- ing behind him, and In the letting down of anxiety, that Martin began to look older and his dry Indian hair to crawl over his forehead. By that time his eyes had lost their snap, and when he mo- tioned Giddings to the key and got up to walk up and down the hall in the breeze he looked llke a wilted potato vine. His last batch of orders was only a little one compared with those that had gone be- fore. But with the changes to the dif- ferent crews they read about like this: Telegraphic Train Order Number 8. Mountain Division. Superintendent’'s Office, August 8, 1892. For Medicine Bend to C. and E. of En- gines 664, 738, 810, 326 and 82. Engines 664, 738, 810 and 326 will run as four specials, Medicine Bend to Bear Dance. Engine 826 will double-head spe- cial 328 to summit of Eagle Pass. First No. 80, engine 179, will run two hours thirty minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend. Second No. 80, engine 264, will run three hours and fifteen minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend. * -Third No. 80, engine 210, will run four hours and thirty minutes late Bear Dance to Medicine Bend. J. M. C D. When young Giddings sat in the suh was dropping between the Tetons. In the yard the car cleaners were polishing the plates on Bucks' private car and the darky cook was pulling chickens out of the refrigerator. Duffy had thirteen con- claves moving smoothly on the middle trick. The final one was due and the hostlers we! steaming down with the double-header to pull it over the pass. This, the last of the commandery trains, was to bring De Molay Commandery No. 4 of Pittsburg, and the orders were to couple Bucks’ car on to it for the run west. De Molay—and everybody had no- tlce—was Bucks' old commandery back in Pennsylvania, and he was going to the epd of the division that night with the cronies of his youth. Little fellows they were in rallroading when he rode the goat Wwith them. but now mostly, like him, big fellows. Half a dozen old salts had been pounding ahead of him all day over the wire, They were to join him and Mr. and Mrs. Callahan for supper in the private car, and the yellow cider lay on the thin- shaven ice and the mountaln grouse curled on the grill irons when De Molay Four, Pittsburg, pulled into Medicine Bend. ‘We had seen a good many swell trains that day, the swellest that ever pounded our fishplates, Pullmans solid, and the finest kind of people. Boston, Washing- ton, New York, Philadelphia sent some pretty gorgeous trains. But with at least half the town on the platform, when De Molay Four rolled in it took thelr breath so they couldn't yell till the Sir Knights began pouring from the vestibules and gave Medicine Bend their own lordly cheer. Mahogany vestibules they and extension platforms; salon lamps and nickeled handrails; buffet smoker and private diner; a royal train and a royal company; olive green from tender to tall lights—De Molay Four, Bucks' old gang spled him. back under the portico, he stood near the tieket window, and they through at him solld. They pu and hauled him from hand to han stood him on his head and on and on his feet again, and t something they wanted and w. off. Bucks looked the least bit uncer as he considered the opening r It wasn't much In some way: asked; In other ways it was He laughed and bantered them as long as they would stan then he called up to Martin Duff the dispatche: was leaning out dow, “We'll see how he talk: Bucks In his great big way. “B it's up to the Chief. I'm not the orders, you know. Mart called, as Duffy bent his head want fifteen minutes here to stretch t legs. Say they’ve been roasted the alkall all day. Can you do an for the boys?” THe bo Big fellows In fezes style, and sliim fellows in & K, style, and bow-legged fellows in cheviot, any old style. Chaps in white flannel and chaps in gray and chaps fn blu ish whiskers and Key West cigars an crusaders’ togs—and, between them, Bucks, his head most of the time In chancery. It was the first time they had seen him since he had made our Jim Crow line into & system known from the Boston and Maine to the Mexican Cen- tral, and, bar none, run cleaner or better. The first time they had seen him since he had made a name for himself and his roa from Newport News to Frisco, and they meant now to kill him, dead. You know about what it meant and about how It went, how it had to go. What could Martin say to n who had made him all he w stood now a boy again amon; of his boyhood, and asked if inutes—a quarter of an hour for De Molay No. 47 It threw the little chief completely off his schedule; just fifteen minutes was more then enough to do that. All the work was done, the anxiety nearly past— Martin_had risen to rest his thumping head. But fifteen minutes; once in a life- time—Bucks asking it. Pufty turned to big Jack Moore stand- ing at his side ready to pull De Molay over the pass and spoke to him low. Jack nodded; everything went with Jack, even