The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, October 18, 1903, Page 12

& " s & for any : averick eddi- e foot of the grade, loaded it truck, hitched on ide the struc- gh the : before Soe was photo- and afterward used g judgment against s bill e wouldn't be likely of & run mor very He had the 26f, an stack like a tepee an accom- t Anderson. There freq tly on the n everybody ram first Sampson; he al- e and Thirty west ack. A pettifogging, with no rights to against respectable things Maje Samp- ¢ to dodge were tramps, telegraph poles; tracked Twenty-nine Sampson. Almost ugh trains must at » Maje Sampson puf- as Moore or Mullen e or Number Two. d his cab was so lit- got his head through w you couldn’t see very much cab for shoulders' and whiskers ent orders he belonged rd, Martie. showe De wa De years to become but wiped for ir wa nstead, he b with um with Delaroo’s brevity, he boarding-house keep- t bodily and at place to go, Delaroo end one ical vesicles, once. w- e gun at him and g away immediatelw of it. Delaroo wer t roundhouse with hy~ ed Neighbor what llpox ought to do witn eig! dn’t run, not even from the smallpox—but he told Delaroo what it meant to get the smallpox started in the roundhouse, and Délaroo wandered away from the depot grounds, a k man then, staggered up the awled stupid into a boxcar ssing anybody. 3y some hook or crook, nobody to this knows how, that car was switched je Sampson’s train when it was made up that day for the West. Maybe it was done as a trick to scare the wind- bzg engineer. If so, the idea was suc- cessful When the hind .end brakeman at the second stop came forward and re- ported a tramp with the smallpox in the boxcar, Maje was angry. But his sity adually got the upper hand. man might be, by some distant chance, he reflected, a P. Q. W. of A., or or a fellow or a knight or g like—and when they stopped to throw off crackers and beer and p, Maje went back and entered the cted car like a lion tamer to try lodge Is on him. Maje advanced and gave the countersign. It was not cordially re- ceived. He tried another and another— and another; his passes were lost in the alr. The smallpox man appeared totally unable to come back at Maje with any- thing. He was not only delirious, but by this time so frightfully broken out that Maje couldn’t have touched a sound spot with a Masonic signal of distress. Finally the venturesome engineer walked closer into the dark corner where the sick man lay—and, by heaven! it was the Indian wiper, Delaroo. en Maje Sampson got back into the cab he could not speak—at least not for publication. He was tearing mad and sputtering like a safety. He gathered up his cushion and a water bottle and a bottle that would explode if water touched it, and crawled with his plunder into the boxcar. He straightened Delaroo up and out and gave him a drink and by way of sanitary precaution took one per- sonally, for he himself had never had the smallpox—but once. When he had done this little for Delaroo he finished his run and came back to the Bend hauling his pesthouse boxcar. The fireman quit the cab immediately after Maje exposed him- self; the nductor communicated with him only by signals. The Anderson op- erator wired ahead that Maje Sampson was bringing back a man with smallpox on Thirty, and when Maje, bulging out of the 261 cab, pulled into the division yard nobody would come within a mffe of him. He set out the boxcar below the stock pens, cross lots from his house up on the hill, and, not being able to get ad- vice from anybody elss, went home to consult Martle. Though there were a great many women in Medicine Bend, Maje Sampson looked to but one, Martle, the little washed-out woman up at Sampson’s—wife, mother, nurse, cook, slave—Martie. No particular color hair; no particular color eyes; no particular color gown; no particular cut to it. A plain bit of a ‘woman, mother of six boys, large and small, and wife of a great big windbag engineer, blg as three of her by actual measurement. By the time Maje had taken counsel and walked downtown prominent business men were fending off his approach with shotguns. The city marshal from behind a bomb-proof asked Wwhat he was going to do with his patient, and Maje retorted he was golng to take A BIG FELLOW , PALLID AND SCAR LAY THE DEAD THE SUNDAY CALL. FHE MASTER PTAN" DOYN. him home. He wasn't a M. R. W. of T. nor a P. 8. G. of W E.,, but he was a roundhouse man, and between Maje and & rallroad man, a wiper even, there was @& bond stronger than grip or password or jolly business of any kind. The other things Maje, without realizing it, merely played at; but as to the raflroad lay—if a rallroad man was the right sort he could borrow anything the big fellow had, money, plug tobacco, pipe, water bottle, strong bottle, it made no odds what. And, on the other hand, Maje wouldn't hesitate to borrow any or all of these things in return; the rallroad man who got ahead of Maje Sampson in this respect had claims to be considered & past grand in the business. The doughty engineer lifted and dragged and hauled Delarco home with him. If there was no hospital, Martle had sald, no pest house, no nothing, just bring him home. They had all had the smallpox up at Sampson’s, except the 2UED, TOT TLEREL 17 WAS AFTER THES? baby, and the doctor had said lately the baby appeared to need something. They had really everything up at SBampson's sooner or later; measles, diphtheria, croup, everything ®n earth except money. And Martle Sampson, with the washing and mending and scrubbing and cooking, nursed the outcast wiper through his smallpox. The baby took it, of course, and Martie nursed the baby through and went on just the same as before—washing, mending, cooking, scrubbing. Delaroo when he got well went to firing; Neighbor offered the job as a kind of consolation prize; and he went to firing on the 264 for Maje Sampson, It was then that Maje took Delaroo fair- ly In hand and showed him the unspeak- able folly of trylng to get through the ‘world without the comradeship and bene- fits of the B. 8. L.’s of U., and the fraters of the order of the double-barreled star of MacDuff. Delaroo caught a good deal of it on the sidings, where they lay most BOLD, THRILLING, DARING TO A WONDERFUL DEGREE. . THE DISPATCHER'S STORY—NEXT SUNDAY.... FRANK H. SPEARMAN HAS QUITE QUTDONE HIMSELF IN THIS. WHEN TrmEey AL JAITPS ON. of their time, dodging first-class trains; and evenings when they got in from their runs Delaroo, having nowhere to go, used to wander, after supper, to Sampson’s. At Bampson’s he would sit in the shade of the lamp and smoke, while Maje, In his shirtsleeves, held forth on the benevolent orders, and one boy crawled through the bowels of the organ and another pulled off the table-cjoth—Delaroo always sav- ing the lamp—and a third harassed the dog, and a fourth stuck pins in a fAfth— and Martie, sitting on the dim side of the shade, s0 the operation would not appear too glaring, mended at Maje's mammoth trousers, Delaroo would sit and listen to Maje and watch the heave of the organ with the boy, and the current of the table- cloth with the lamp, and the quarter in which the dog was chewing the baby, and watch Martie's perpetual motion fingers for a whole evening, and go back to the boarding-house without passing a word with anybody en earth, he was that si- lent, In this way the big, bluffing engineer gradually worked Delaroo into all the se- cret benevolent orders in Medicine Bend— that meant pretty much every one on earth. There arose always, however, In connection with the Initiations of Delaroo one hitch; he never seemed quite to know whom he wanted to leave his insurance money to. He could go the most compil- cated catechism without a hitch every time, for Maje spent weeks on the sidings drilling him, until it came to naming the beneficlary; there he stuck. Nobody could get out of him to whom he wanted his money to go. Had he no relations back in the moun- tains? Nobody up in the Spider country? No wives or daughters or fathers or mothers or friends or anything? Delaroo always shook his head. If they persisted he sheok his head. Maje Sampson, sitting after supper, would ask, and Martie, when the dishes were sidetracked, would begin® to sew and listen, and Delaroo, of course, would listen, but never by any chance would he answer; not even when Maje tried to explain how it bore on 18 to 1 He declined to discuss any ratio or to name any beneflefary whatsoever. The right honorable recording secretaries fumed and denounced it as irregular, and Maje Sampson wore holes in his elbowa gesticulating, but in tne matter of dis- tributing his personal share of the un- earned increment Delaroo expressed no preference whatsoever. He paid his dues; he made his passes: he sat in his place, what more could be required? If they put him in a post of honor he filled it with a stlent dignity. If they set him to guard the outer portal he guarded well; it was perilous rather for a visiting frater or even a local brother to try getting past