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Updated: June 12, 2025
"Clean them out of the Rocky Mountains; that is a pretty good contract," mused the man in McCloud's office on Sunday morning. He sat opposite McCloud in Bucks's old easy chair and held in his hand Bucks's telegram.
Not a word was spoken, hardly a breath drawn, as the lineman felt for his slippery foothold with the deftness of a gorilla, and, pressing Bucks's hand as the signal to take a follow step, he made a slow but steady descent. The roar of the river already sounded in Bucks's ears like a cataract, but the shock of extreme danger had numbed his apprehension.
Indians were first in his mind, and in his alarm he ran all the way to the section-house where the foreman, after a hasty study of the hills, explained that the suspicious-looking objects were buffaloes. This information only added to Bucks's excitement.
Dancing was the first to locate the conflagration, which grew now, even as they looked, by leaps and bounds. The two stood ready to plunge into the river when a fire of musketry echoed up the gorge. The lineman clutched Bucks's arm. "There's fighting going on down there now. What's that smokestack? By Jing, the roundhouse is on fire!" They plunged together into the river.
There was a sheer drop of twenty feet to the crumbling slope of disintegrated stone under the head of the draw itself, but Stanley, without looking back, never hesitated. Urging his panting horse, he made a flying leap down into space, and horse and rider landed knee-deep in the soft, gravelly granite below them. Bucks's mustang shied on the brink.
"No," exclaimed Bucks, his head still swimming, "but everything will be burned." "How in the name of God, boy, have you escaped?" demanded Stanley, as he clenched Bucks's shoulder in his hand. Dancing seized the cumbersome chest and dragged it out of danger.
Bucks hastened upstairs to the despatchers' office and reported to Baxter, who had returned ahead of him and was elated at Bucks's success. Before the young substitute took up his train-sheet, he told the chief despatcher of how strangely the conductor, Dave Hawk, had talked to him. "He has a reason for it," responded Baxter briefly. "What reason?"
He felt that if a shot were fired, whatever else happened, it would mean his own death at Bucks's hand. It was this that restrained him, and the instant saved the operator's life. He heard the clattering of feet down the outside stairway, and the next moment through the open door on the run dashed Bill Dancing, swinging a piece of iron pipe as big as a crowbar.
"What is it, Bob?" he asked hastily. "Indians?" "Indians?" echoed Bob scornfully. "I guess not this time. I've heard of Indians stealing pretty nearly everything on earth but not this. No Indian in this country, not even Turkey Leg, ever stole a locomotive." "What do you mean?" "I mean Dan Baggs's engine is gone." Bucks's face turned blank with amazement. "Gone?" he echoed incredulously.
While much of the time out of the mountains on railroad business, he was known to be closely in Bucks's counsels, and as to the mountains themselves, he was reputed to know them better than Bucks or Glover himself knew them. This was Whispering Smith; but, beyond a low-voiced greeting or an expression of surprise at meeting an old acquaintance, he avoided talk.
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