The Mountain Divide - Frank H. Spearman (english reading book .txt) 📗

The foray of the Indians at the Spider Water Bridge proved, as Bob Scott had feared, only a forerunner of active hostilities. Casement had already taken all necessary measures of defence. His construction camp was moved steadily westward, though sometimes inside the picket lines of troops, despite the warring Indians and the difficulties of his situation. Alarms, however, were continual and the graders, many of whom were old soldiers, worked at all times with their muskets stacked on the dump beside them. In the construction camp Bucks saw also many negroes, and at night the camp-fires of their quarters were alive with the singing and dancing of the old plantation life in the South.

While waiting for Stanley’s inspection of the grading and track-laying, Bucks relieved at times the camp operator, whose principal business was 117 the rushing of emphatic demands to Omaha for material and supplies.

During other intervals Bucks found a chance to study the system that underlay the seemingly hopeless confusion of the construction work. The engineers moving far in advance had located the line, and following these came the graders and bridge- and culvert-builders, cutting through the hills, levelling the fills, and spanning the streams and water-ways with trestles and wooden bridges, miles in advance of the main army. Behind these came Casement’s own big camp with the tiemen, the track-layers, and the ballast gangs.

Every Eastern market was drawn upon for materials, and when these reached Omaha, trains loaded with them were constantly pushed to the front. The chief spiker of the rail gang, taking a fancy to Bucks, invited him to go out with the rail-layers one day, and Bucks took a temporary commission as spike-dropper.

To do this, he followed Dancing up the track past a long construction train in which the men lived. The big box-cars contained sleeping-bunks, 118 and those men who preferred more air and seclusion had swung sleeping-hammocks under the cars; others had spread their beds on top of the cars. Climbing a little embankment, Bucks watched the sturdy, broad-shouldered pioneers. A light car drawn by a single, galloping horse was rushed to the extreme end of the laid rails. Before it had fairly stopped, two men waiting on either side seized the end of a rail with their trap and started forward. Ten more men, following in twos, at a run, lifted the two rails clear of the car and dropped them in place on the ties. The foreman instantly gauged them, the horse moved ahead, and thirty spikers armed with heavy mauls drove the spikes furiously and regularly, three strokes to the spike, into the new-laid ties. The bolters followed with the fish-plates, and while Bucks looked the railroad was made before his eyes.

The excitement of the scene was unforgettable. In less than sixty seconds four rails had gone down. The moment a horse-car was emptied it was dumped off one side of the track, and a loaded car with its horse galloping to the front 119 had passed it. The next instant the “empty” was lifted back on the rails, and at the end of a sixty-foot rope the horse, ridden by a hustling boy, was being urged back to where the rails were transferred from the regular flat cars. The clang of the heavy iron, the continuous ring of the spike mauls, the shouting of the orders, the throwing of each empty horse-car from the track to make way for a loaded one, these things were all new and stimulating to Bucks. The chief spiker laughed when the young operator told him how fine it was. He asked Bucks to look at his watch and time the work. In half an hour Bucks looked at his watch again. In the interval the gang had laid eight hundred feet of track.

“I don’t see how you can work so fast,” declared Bucks.

“Do you know how many times,” demanded the spiker, “those sledges have to swing? There are eighteen ties and thirty-six spikes to every rail, three hundred and fifty-two rails to every mile, and eighteen hundred miles from Omaha 120 to San Francisco––those sledges will swing sixty-eight million times before the rails are full-spiked––they have to go fast.”

The words were hardly out of the chief spiker’s mouth when a cry of alarm rang from the front. Bucks, looking eagerly, saw in the west a cloud of dust. At the same time he saw the tie gang running in dozens for their lives from the divide where they were working toward the camp. The men beyond them on the grade had scrambled into the wagons, dumped any ties they might contain helter-skelter to the ground, and were clinging to the wagon boxes. In these, the drivers standing up, lashed their horses with whip and line for life, and death, while everywhere beside and behind them other men on foot were racing back to safety.

New clouds of dust rose along the grade from the flying wagon wheels, the horses tore madly on, and as the heavy wagons jolted over the loose stones, the fugitives, yelling with excitement and alarm and clinging to one another as they bounced up and down, looked anxiously behind.

There was no uncertainty as to the cause of the panic. “Indians!” was the cry everywhere. Every man in camp had dropped his working implement and was moving somewhere on the double-quick. Every one, it seemed to Bucks, was shouting and running. But above the confusion of the surprise and the babel of voices, Bucks heard the sharp tones of Jack Casement giving orders.

The old soldiers in the working gang needed no further discipline. The timid and the skulkers scurried for the box-cars and the dugouts. On the other hand, the soldiers ran for the dumps where the arms were stacked, and seizing their muskets hurried back and, trained for the emergency, fell into line under their foremen.

Casement, musket in hand, taking the largest company of men as they formed in fours behind him, started forward at the double-quick, yelling now for the moral effect, to protect the retreat of the wagons. The men, scattering as they reached the edge of the camp, dropped into every spot of shelter, and at the same moment Stanley, mounted 122 and alive with the vim and fire of the soldier, led a smaller body of men rapidly back to guard the rear of the camp, deploying his little force about the box-cars and flat cars as they hastened on. In an instant the construction camp had become a fortress defended by a thousand men.

It was none too soon. Stirring the yellow plain with the fury of a whirlwind, a band of Sioux warriors rode the fleeing railroaders furiously down. They appeared phantom-like out of every slip and canyon, and rode full-panoplied from behind every hill. The horizon that had shown five minutes before only the burning sunshine and the dull glare of the alkali sinks, danced now with the flying ponies of the Indians, and the hills echoed with ominous cries.

Without a word of warning, the few fleeing men who had been working too far from camp to reach it in safety were mercilessly cut down. Their comrades under arms, with an answering cry of defiance poured a volley of cartridge balls into the thin, black circle that rode ever closer and closer to the muzzles of the muskets. Jack Casement and his brother Dan recklessly urged their men 123 to the most advanced posts of defence, and from behind scrapers, wagons, flat cars, and friendly hillocks the railroad men poured a galling fire into their active foe.

The Indians, seeking with unerring instinct the weakest point in the defence, converged in hundreds upon the long string of box-cars that made up the construction train at the rear of the camp, where Stanley, extending his few men in a resolute skirmish line, endeavored to prevent the savages from scalping the non-combatant cooks and burning the sleeping-cars. Bucks saw, conspicuous in the attack, a slender Sioux chief riding a strong-limbed, fleet pony with a coat of burnished gold and as much filled with the fire of the fight as his master was. Riding hither and thither and swinging a long, heavy musket like a marshal’s baton, the Sioux warrior, almost everywhere at once, urged his men to the fighting, and the fate of the few white men they were able to cut down or scalp before Stanley could cover the line of box-cars seemed to add vigor to their onslaught.

Stanley himself, attacked by ten braves for 124 every man he could muster at that point with a gun, dashed up and down the old wagon roads along the right of way, a conspicuous target for the Indians. His hat, in the mêlée, had disappeared, and, swinging a heavy Colt’s revolver, which the Indians shrank from with a healthy instinct of danger, he pressed back the hungry red line again and again, supported only by such musketry fire as the men crouching under, within, and between the box-cars could offer.

Wherever he rode his wily foes retreated, but they closed in constantly behind him, and one brave, more daring than his fellows, succeeded in setting fire to a box-car. A shout of triumph rose from the circling horsemen, but it was short-lived. Stanley, wheeling like a flash, gave chase to the incendiary. The Sioux