CHAPTER XXI A CALL FOR AID

Allan had learned as much of the science of train-dispatching as it is possible to do without actual experience, and he was duly appointed operator at headquarters and extra dispatcher. He had a desk in the dispatchers’ office, where he worked ten and sometimes twelve hours a day receiving and sending the multitudinous messages which passed between the various officials of the road. This work was in one way not such good training for a future dispatcher as a trick out on the road, for here he had nothing whatever to do with the movement of trains; but on the other hand he was constantly in touch with the dispatchers, he could listen to their conversation and pick up matters of detail which no one would have thought to tell him; in such leisure moments as he had, he could sit down before the train-sheet and watch the actual business of dispatching trains; he could see how unusual problems were solved and unusual difficulties met; and all the information picked up thus, as it were, at haphazard, he stored away for future use, certain that it would some day be needed.

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Not infrequently one of the dispatchers would relinquish his chair to him, and, for an hour or so, look after the operator’s duties, while Allan did the actual work of dispatching. But he knew that this was not a real test, for, in case of emergency, help was always at hand. It was with him much as it is with those amateur sociologists who assume the garb and habits of the poor, and imagine that they are tasting all the misery of life in the slums; forgetting that its greatest misery, its utter hopelessness, they can never taste, since they have only to walk out and away from the life whenever they choose, and be rid of it for ever. So Allan, in case of need, had only to lift his finger, and aid was at hand.

But at last the time came around when one of the dispatchers was to take his vacation; and one night, Allan reported for duty, to take the third trick on the east end. It was not without a certain tingling of the nerves that he sat down in the chair, looked over the sheet, and carefully read the written explanation of train-orders in force which the second-trick man had prepared for him.

“Understand?” the latter asked, when Allan had finished.

“Yes, I think so,” said the boy, and the dispatcher, nodding, took up his lunch-basket and left the office.

The weight of responsibility weighed on the boy for a time, and it was with no little nervousness ? 239 ? that he transmitted his first order; but this feeling gradually wore away and was replaced by one of confidence. After all, there was no cause to worry. The position of every train was marked there on the sheet before him; there was no excuse for mistake. And yet, as he thought of those mighty engines rushing through the night with their precious burdens, obedient to his orders, his pulses quickened with a sense of power.

Fortunately business was light and the trains were running on time, so he really had little to do; and when, at last, his relief came at seven o’clock, he arose from the desk with a sense of work well done, without mistake or accident. For two weeks, night after night, he sat at that desk, ordering the traffic over that hundred miles of track, and with every night he felt his confidence increase. Problems arose, of course, but his training had been of the very best; he never lost his head or his nerve, and when, at last, the dispatcher came back from his vacation, Allan returned to the operator’s desk conscious that he had “made good,” and that he would be strong enough to climb the ladder of promotion for some rounds, at least.

He had been kept at the office rather later than usual the evening after he had resumed his work as operator, for there happened to be a sudden rush of business to be attended to, and it was after six o’clock when he finally put on his coat and started home to supper. As he entered the dining-room, ? 240 ? he saw that supper had not yet been served, and from the kitchen he heard Jack’s voice raised excitedly.

“That you, Allan?” called Jack. “Come on out here.”

The boy entered the kitchen and saw Jack standing near the lamp, the evening paper in his hand.

“Did ye see this?” he asked, holding out the paper, and pointing to some flaring headlines on the first page. They read:

DARING ESCAPE!

Four Convicts Scale the Wall of the
State Prison!

GUARD WHO TRIED TO STOP THEM
SERIOUSLY INJURED!

Had Made a Rope of Their Bedclothing and Carefully
Arranged the Details of Their Plan!

No Present Trace of Their Whereabouts—Had Been Sent
from Ross County under Ten-year Sentence
for Train-wrecking!

Not until he read the last line did Allan understand why Jack appeared so interested.

“Them’s our men,” said Jack; “but read the article.”

“Don’t read it now,” protested Mary; “supper’s about spoiled as it is.” And then an odour ? 241 ? from the stove caused her to fly to it. “Look a-there, now,” she added, “th’ p’taties nearly burned up! Come along, both o’ ye,” and taking the paper inexorably from Allan, she pushed them all in toward the table. “They’s no use in lettin’ th’ supper spile, even if all th’ convicts in th’ pen. got loose!”

Which, indeed, was true. And Allan did not fully understand the cause of Jack’s excitement until, near the end of the meal, a single remark fell from him.

“Well, all I’ve got t’ say,” he remarked, “is that I certainly pity Dan Nolan if them fellys git hold o’ him!”

Allan looked up with sudden interest.

“You haven’t heard anything from Nolan?” he asked.

“No,” said Jack; “but I’d like t’ bet them fellys’ll soon find out where he is. They ain’t a tramp’ll stand by him arter what he did, an’ they’ll pass th’ word along where he’s likely t’ be found. I reckon Nolan went south fer th’ winter, but it wouldn’t surprise me t’ see him show up around here afore th’ summer’s over.”

“Maybe he’s not a tramp,” objected Allan. “Maybe he’s working somewhere.”

“Workin’ nothin’!” exclaimed Jack, disgustedly. “Why, he’s fergot how.”

“Well, anyway,” said Allan, "I don’t believe he’ll ever come around here again. He’s broken ? 242 ? his parole and he knows the minute he sets foot in this State he’s in danger of being clapped back into prison."

“Yes, he knows that,” admitted Jack, “an’ yet I don’t believe even that’ll keep him away. They’s a kind o’ fascination seems t’ draw a man back t’ th’ place where he’s committed a crime. If they wasn’t, lots more’d escape than do.”

“Well,” laughed Allan, “I hope no fascination will draw our friends the train-wreckers back to this neighbourhood. But perhaps they’re safe in jail again before this.”

The morning papers, however, showed that they were anything but safe in jail. They had disappeared completely, and there seemed every reason to believe that confederates had been waiting to assist them, and that they had been able to discard their convict garb as soon as they reached the street. This conjecture became a certainty on the following day, when a labourer, cleaning one of the sewer inlets near the prison, had fished out four suits of convict clothing. All the mechanism of the law was set in motion in the effort to recapture them; descriptions and photographs were sent to every police-station in the middle west, a large reward was offered, the police drag-nets were drawn in, heavy with suspects, but the four fugitives were not among them. At the end of a week, the public, diverted by new sensations, had nearly forgotten ? 243 ? the episode, and Allan himself had long since ceased to think about it.

Allan had just finished up his work for the day. The hook was clear, and with a little sigh of relief, he closed his key after sending the last message. It had been a hard day, for all of the officers were out on the road at various points, and many of the messages that came to headquarters for them had to be repeated to the station where they happened to be at the moment.

The boy glanced at the clock and saw that it was nearly six; then he rose, stretched himself, and was putting on his coat when the door opened and the chief-dispatcher came in. One glance at his worried countenance told the boy that something was wrong.

“I just got a ’phone from the hospital,” he said, “that Roscoe, the night man at Coalville, was hurt awhile ago. He was coming down to catch his train, when a runaway horse knocked him down and broke his leg.”

“Who’s going out?” inquired one of the dispatchers.

“I don’t know yet,” answered the chief, a line of worry between his eyes. “I’ve sent the caller after Hermann. Here he is now,” he added, as the caller hurried into the office. “Well?”

“Hermann can’t come,” the caller announced. “He’s sick in bed with the grip.”

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The chief glanced at the clock.

“We’ve only got ten minutes,” he said. “Whoever goes has got to catch the accommodation.”

“Why can’t I go?” asked Allan, coming forward. “I’ll be glad to, if it’ll be any help.”

“Will you?” said the chief, eagerly. “Good for you! But you’ve had a hard day. I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he added. “I’ll hunt up an extra man at Parkersburg or Athens and send him to Coalville on Number Eleven. That will let you off at midnight.”

“All right,” agreed Allan. “I can stand it that long. But I want something to eat before I start.”

“Get a lunch at the restaurant. They can fix up a basket for you and you can eat it on the train.”

Allan nodded and went down the steps three at a time. It was raining heavily, but he dodged around the corner of the building into the restaurant without getting very wet, and six minutes later, basket in hand, he jumped aboard the accommodation, waving his hand to the chief-dispatcher, who stood looking anxiously from the window of his office to be sure that the boy made the train.

He was genuinely hungry, and he devoted the first fifteen minutes to a consumption of the lunch which the restaurant-keeper had put up for him. Then the conductor, who had glanced at his pass, nodded, and gone on to collect the tickets, came back and sat down beside him.

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“I thought you had a trick in the dispatchers’ office?” he said.

“I have,” answered Allan, “but I’m going out to Coalville on an emergency call. The night man there had his leg broken, awhile ago, and the chief couldn’t get anybody in a hurry to take his place. So I volunteered.”

“Yes,” said the conductor, “I saw Roscoe hurt, and it was the queerest accident I ever heard of. I was coming down Main Street to report for duty, and I saw Roscoe coming down Bridge, with his lunch-basket in his hand. There was a horse hitched to a buggy standing at the corner, and a man who seemed to be fixing something about the harness. Well, sir, just as Roscoe stepped in front of it, that horse gave a leap forward, went right over him, and galloped lickety-split up the street. It was stopped up near the canal, not much hurt. But I couldn’t understand what started it. There wasn’t a thing to scare it, and it had been standing quiet as a lamb the minute before.”

“It was queer,” agreed Allan, thoughtfully. “Whose horse was it?”

“It was a livery-stable rig. A stranger had hired it for the afternoon. The livery-stable people said the horse had never run away before.”

“Did you find out who the stranger was?”

“No; but he was rather a nice-looking fellow. It was him who was fixing the harness. He helped pick Roscoe up and carry him into Steele’s drugstore, ? 246 ? and seemed to be mighty sorry for what had happened. He stayed till the doctor came and found Roscoe’s right leg broken, and helped lift him into the ambulance which took him to the hospital. Then he went up to pay the damages at the livery-stable. He was a drummer, I reckon. There’s a fellow in the smoker looks a good deal like him. I thought it was him, at first, and spoke to him, but he didn’t seem to know me.”

The train slowed up for a station and the conductor hurried away to attend to his duties. But nobody got aboard and he soon came back and sat down again by Allan.

“Business light to-night,” he remarked, and, indeed, there was not more than six or eight people on the train. “Though I’ve got two passengers,” he added, “riding in the baggage-car.”

“In the baggage-car?”

“Yes; they’re taking out the money to pay off the miners at Coalville, to-morrow morning. They’ve got a big, iron-bound chest, about all that four men can lift, and they’re sitting on it, armed to the teeth. There’s probably fifty or sixty thousand dollars in it. They take it out that way every month.”

“Isn’t there a bank at Coalville?”

“A bank? Bless your heart, no! The coal company runs a sort of little savings institution for its employees; but they don’t pay any interest, and I’ve heard it said they don’t encourage their men ? 247 ? to save anything. You see, as long as they can keep the men living from hand to mouth, there’s less danger of a strike; and if they do strike, it don’t take very long to starve ’em out. Oh, the company’s wise! It don’t want any bank at Coalville. Besides, I don’t imagine anybody’d be especially anxious to start a bank there. They’d be afraid the miners ’d get drunk some night and clean it out.”

“Are they so bad as all that?”

“They’re a tough gang, especially when they get liquor in them. The company doesn’t take any chances with them. It banks its money at Wadsworth and brings out just enough every month to pay them off. There’s always a wagon and half a dozen armed men ready to take it over to the company’s office, which is fitted up like a fort, and by noon next day, it’s all paid out and a big slice of it’s spent.”

“Why don’t they pay by check?”

“They tried it, but the saloon-keepers at Coalville charged five per cent. for cashing them and the men kicked.”

“Well, it strikes me it’s pretty dangerous,” remarked Allan.

“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing’s ever happened yet. Robbers, I don’t care how desperate they are, ain’t fond of running up against a gang of men armed with Winchesters,” and he went off to make another tour of the train.