The Project Gutenberg eBook ofTrack's EndThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Track's EndAuthor: Hayden CarruthIllustrator: Clifford CarletonRelease date: May 19, 2009 [eBook #28873]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRACK'S END ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Track's EndAuthor: Hayden CarruthIllustrator: Clifford CarletonRelease date: May 19, 2009 [eBook #28873]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Title: Track's End
Author: Hayden CarruthIllustrator: Clifford Carleton
Author: Hayden Carruth
Illustrator: Clifford Carleton
Release date: May 19, 2009 [eBook #28873]
Language: English
Credits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRACK'S END ***
E-text prepared by Roger Frankand the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team(http://www.pgdp.net)
KAISER AND I FIGHTING THE TIMBER-WOLVES–see page 63
KAISER AND I FIGHTING THE TIMBER-WOLVES–see page 63
TRACK’SEND
BEING THE NARRATIVE OF JUDSON PITCHER’SSTRANGE WINTER SPENT THEREAS TOLD BY HIMSELFAND EDITED
BYHAYDEN CARRUTH
INCLUDING AN ACCURATE ACCOUNTOF HIS NUMEROUS ADVENTURES, ANDTHE FACTS CONCERNING HIS SEVERALSURPRISING ESCAPES FROM DEATHNOW FIRST PRINTED IN FULL
ILLUSTRATED BYCLIFFORD CARLETONWITH A CORRECT MAP OF TRACK’SEND DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR
HARPER & BROTHERSNEW YORK AND LONDONM-C-M-X-I
COPYRIGHT, 1911. BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAPUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1911
TOE. L. G. C.
NOTICE
Should any reader of this History of my life at Track’s End wish to write to me, to point out an error (if unhappily there shall prove to be errors), or to ask for further facts, or for any other reason, he or she may do so by addressing the letter in the care of my publishers, Messrs. Harper & Brothers, who have kindly agreed promptly to forward all such communications to me wheresoever I may chance to be at the time.
I should add that my hardships during that Winter at Track’s End did not cure me of my roving bent, though you might think the contrary should have been the case. Later, on several occasions, I adventured into wild parts, and had experiences no whit less remarkable than those at Track’s End, notably when with the late Capt. Nathan Archway, master of theBelle of Prairie du Chienpacket, we descended into Frontenac Cave, and, there in the darkness (aided somewhat by Gil Dauphin), disputed possession of that subterranean region with no less a character than the notorious Isaac Liverpool, to the squeaking of a million bats. And I wish hereby to give notice that no one is to put into Print such accounts of that occurrence as I may have been heard to relate from time to time around camp-fires, on shipboard, and so forth, since I mean, with the kind help of Mr. Carruth, to publish forth the facts concerning it in another Book; and that before long.
Judson Pitcher.
Little Drum, Flamingo Key,July, 1911.
1
TRACK’S END
CHAPTER ISomething about my Home and Track’s End: with how I leave the one and get acquainted with Pike at the other.
When I left home to shift for myself I was eighteen years old, and, I suppose, no weakling; though it seems to me now that I was a mere boy. I liked school well enough, but rather preferred horses; and a pen seems to me a small thing for a grown man, which I am now, to be fooling around with, but I mean to tell (with a little help) of some experiences I had the first winter after I struck out for myself.
I was brought up in Ohio, where my father was a country blacksmith and had a small farm. His name was William Pitcher, but, being well liked by all and a square man,2everybody called him Old Bill Pitcher. I was named Judson, which had been my mother’s name before she was married, so I was called Jud Pitcher; and when I was ten years old I knew every horse for a dozen miles around, and most of the dogs.
It was September 16th, in the late eighteen-seventies, that I first clapped eyes on Track’s End, in the Territory of Dakota. The name of the place has since been changed. I remember the date well, for on that day the great Sisseton prairie fire burned up the town of Lone Tree. I saw the smoke as our train lay at Siding No. 13 while the conductor and the other railroad men nailed down snake’s-heads on the track. One had come up through the floor of the caboose and smashed the stove and half killed a passenger. Poor man, he had a game leg as long as I knew him, which was only natural, since when the rail burst through the floor it struck him fair.
I was traveling free, as the friend of one of the brakemen whom I had got to know in St. Paul. He was a queer fellow, named Burrdock. The railroad company set great store by Burrdock on account of his dealings with3some Sioux Indians. They had tried to ride on top of the cars of his train without paying fare, and he had thrown them all off, one by one, while the train was going. The fireman told me about it.
Burrdock was taking me out to Track’s End because he said it was a live town, and a good place for a boy to grow up in. He had first wanted me to join him in braking on the railroad, but I judged the work too hard for me. If I had known what I was coming to at Track’s End I’d have stuck to the road.
Perhaps I ought to say that I left home in June, not because I wasn’t welcome to stay, but because I thought it was time I saw something of the world. Mother was sure I should be killed on the cars, but at last she gave her consent. I went to Galena, from there up the Mississippi on a packet to St. Paul, and then out to Dakota with Burrdock.
The snake’s-heads delayed us so that it was eleven o’clock at night before we reached Track’s End. Ours was the only train that ran on the road then, and it came up Mondays and Thursdays, and went back Tuesdays and Fridays. It was a freight-train, with a4caboose on the end for passengers, “and the snake’s-heads,” as the fireman said. A snake’s-head on the old railroads was where a rail got loose from the fish-plate at one end and came upoverthe wheel instead of staying downunderit.
Track’s End was a new town just built at the end of the railroad. The next town back toward the east was Lone Tree; but that day it burned up and was no more. It was about fifty miles from Track’s End to Lone Tree, with three sidings between, and a water-tank at No. 14. After the fire the people all went to Lac-qui-Parle, sixty miles farther back; so that at the time of which I write there was nothing between Track’s End and Lac-qui-Parle except sidings and the ashes of Lone Tree; but these soon blew away. There were no people living in the country at this time, and the reason the road had been built was to hold a grant of land made to the company by the government, which was a foolish thing for the government to do, since a road would have been built when needed, anyhow; but my experience has been that the government is always putting its foot in it.5
When I dropped off the train at Track’s End I saw by the moonlight that the railroad property consisted of a small coal-shed, a turntable, a roundhouse with two locomotive stalls, a water-tank and windmill, and a rather long and narrow passenger and freight depot. The town lay a little apart, and I could not make out its size. There were a hundred or more men waiting for the train, and one of them took the two mail-sacks in a wheelbarrow and went away toward the lights of the houses. There were a lot of mules and wagons and scrapers and other tools of a gang of railroad graders near the station; also some tents in which the men lived; these men were waiting for the train with the others, and talked so loud and made such a disturbance that it drowned out all other noises.
The train was left right on the track, and the engine put in the roundhouse, after which Burrdock took me over town to the hotel. It was called the Headquarters House, and the proprietor’s name was Sours. After I got a cold supper he showed me to my room. The second story was divided into about twenty rooms, the partitions being lathed but6not yet plastered. It made walls very easy to talk through, and, where the cracks happened to match, as they seemed to mostly, they weren’t hard to look through. I thought it was a good deal like sleeping in a squirrel-cage.
The railroad men that I had seen at the station had been working on an extension of the grade to the west, on which the rails were to be laid the next spring. They had pushed on ten miles, but, as the government had stopped making a fuss, the company had decided to do no more that season, and the train I came up on brought the paymaster with the money to pay the graders for their summer’s work; so they all got drunk. There were some men from Billings in town, too. They were on their way east with a band of four hundred Montana ponies, which they had rounded up for the night just south of town. Two of them stayed to hold the drove, and the rest came into town, also to get drunk. They had good luck in doing this, and fought with the graders. I heard two or three shots soon after I went to bed, and thought of my mother.7
Some time late in the night I was awakened by a great rumpus in the hotel, and made out from what I heard through the laths that some men were looking for somebody. They were going from room to room, and soon came into mine, tearing down the sheet which was hung up for a door. They crowded in and came straight to the bed, and the leader, a big man with a crooked nose, seized me by the ear as if he were taking hold of a bootstrap. I sat up, and another poked a lantern in my face.
“That’s him,” said one of them.
“No, he was older,” said another.
“He looks like hewouldsteal a dog, anyhow,” said the man with the lantern. “Bring him along, Pike.”
“No,” said the man who had hold of my ear, “he ain’t much more’n a boy–we’re looking for grown men to-night.”
Then they went out, and I could feel my ear drawing back into place as if it were made of rubber. But it never got quite back, and has always been a game ear to this day, with a kind of a lop to it.
Sours told me in the morning that they8were looking for the man that stole their dog, though he said he didn’t think they had ever had a dog. Pike, he said, had come out as a grader, but it had been a long time since he had done any work.
I took a look around town after breakfast and found forty or fifty houses, most of them stores or other places of business, on one street running north and south. There were a few, but not many, houses scattered about beyond the street. Some of the buildings had canvas roofs, and there were a good many tents and covered wagons in which people lived. The whole town had been built since the railroad came through two months before. There was a low hill called Frenchman’s Butte a quarter of a mile north of town. I climbed it to get a view of the country, but could see only about a dozen settlers’ houses, also just built.
The country was a vast level prairie except to the north, where there were a few small lakes, with a little timber around them, and some coteaux, or low hills, beyond. The grass was dried up and gray. I thought I could make out a low range of hills to the9west, where I supposed the Missouri River was. On my way back to town a man told me that a big colony of settlers were expected to arrive soon, and that Track’s End had been built partly on the strength of the business these people would bring. I never saw the colony.
When I got back to the hotel Sours said to me:
“Young man, don’t you want a job?”
I told him I should be glad of something to do.
“The man that has been taking care of my barn has just gone on the train,” continued Sours. “He got homesick for the States, and lit out and never said boo till half an hour before train-time. If you want the job I’ll give you twenty-five dollars a month and your board.”
“I’ll try it a month,” I said; “but I’ll probably be going back myself before winter.”
“That’s it,” exclaimed Sours. “Everybody’s going back before winter. I guess there won’t be nothing left here next winter but jack-rabbits and snowbirds.”
I had hoped for something better than10working in a stable, but my money was so near gone that I did not think it a good time to stand around and act particular. Besides, I liked horses so much that the job rather pleased me, after all.
Toward evening Sours came to me and said he wished I would spend the night in the barn and keep awake most of the time, as he was afraid it might be broken into by some of the graders. They were acting worse than ever. There was no town government, but a man named Allenham had some time before been elected city marshal at a mass-meeting. During the day he appointed some deputies to help him maintain order.
At about ten o’clock I shut up the barn, put out my lantern, and sat down in a little room in one corner which was used for an office. The town was noisy, but nobody came near the barn, which was back of the hotel and out of sight from the street. Some time after midnight I heard low voices outside and crept to a small open window. I could make out the forms of some men under a shed back of a store across a narrow alley. Soon I heard two shots in the street, and then a man came11running through the alley with another right after him. As the first passed, a man stepped out from under the shed. The man in pursuit stopped and said:
“Now, I want Jim, and there’s no use of you fellows trying to protect him.” It was Allenham’s voice.
There was a report of a revolver so close that it made me wink. The man who had come from under the shed had fired pointblank at Allenham. By the flash I saw that the man was Pike.
12CHAPTER IIThe rest of my second Night at Track’s End, and part of another: with some Things which happen between.
I was too frightened at first to move, and stood at the window staring into the darkness like a fool. I heard the men scramble over a fence and run off. Then I ran out to where Allenham lay. He made no answer when I spoke to him. I went on and met two of the deputies coming into the alley. I told them what I had seen.
“Wake up folks in the hotel,” said one of the men; then they hurried along. I soon had everybody in the hotel down-stairs with my shouting. In a minute or two they brought in Allenham, and the doctor began to work over him. The whole town was soon on hand, and it was decided to descend on the graders’ camp in force. Twenty or thirty men volunteered. One of the deputies named Dawson was selected as leader.13
“Are you certain you can pick out the man who fired the shot?” said Dawson to me.
“Yes,” I answered. “It was Pike.”
“If you just came, how do you happen to know Pike?” he asked.
“He pulled me up last night by the ear and looked at me with a lantern,” I said.
“Well,” replied the man, “we’ll take you down and you can look at him with a lantern.”
They formed into a solid body, four abreast, with Dawson ahead holding me by the arm, as if he were afraid I would get away. To tell the truth, I should have been glad enough to have got out of the thing, but there seemed to be no chance of it. I was glad my mother could not know about me.
We soon came up to the camp, and the men lined out and held their guns ready for use. Not a sound was to be heard except the loud snoring of the men in the nearest tent, which seemed to me almosttooloud. There was a dying camp-fire, and the stars were bright and twinkling in a deep-blue sky; but I didn’t look at them much.
“Come, you fellows, get up!” called Dawson. This brought no answer.14
“Come!” he called louder, “roust up there, every one of you. There’s fifty of us, and we’ve got our boots on!”
A man put his head sleepily out of a tent and wanted to know what was the trouble. Dawson repeated his commands. One of our men tossed some wood on the fire, and it blazed up and threw the long shadows of the tents out across the prairie. One by one the men came out, as if they were just roused from sleep. There was a great amount of loud talk and profanity, but at last they were all out. Pike was one of the last. Dawson made them stand up in a row.
“Now, young man,” said he to me, “pick out the man you saw fire the shot that killed Allenham.”
At the word killed Pike started and shut his jaws tightly together in the middle of an oath. I looked along the line, but saw that I could not be mistaken. Then I took a step forward, pointed to Pike, and said:
“That’s the man.”
He shot a look at me of the most deadly hatred; then he laughed; but it didn’t sound to me like a good, cheerful laugh.15
“Come on,” said Dawson to him. Then he ordered the others back into their tents, left half the men to guard them, and with the rest of our party went a little ways down the track to where an empty box-car was standing on the siding. “Get in there!” he said to Pike, and the man did it, and the door was locked. Three men were left to guard this queer jail, and the rest of us went back to the Headquarters House. Here we found that the doctor’s report was that Allenham would probably pull through.
The next morning a mass-meeting was held in the square beside the railroad station. After some talk, most of it pretty vigorous, it was decided to order all of the graders to leave town without delay, except Pike, who was to be kept in the car until the outcome of Allenham’s wound was known. It wasn’t necessary even for me to guess twice to hit on what would be the fate of Pike if Allenham should die.
In two hours the graders left. They made a long line of covered wagons and filed away to the east beside the railroad track. They were pretty free with their threats, but that was all it amounted to.16
For a week Track’s End was very quiet. Allenham kept on getting better, and by that time was out of danger. There was a good deal of talk about what ought to be done with Pike. A few wanted to hang him, notwithstanding that Allenham was alive.
“When you get hold of a fellow like him,” said one man, “you can’t go far wrong if you hang him up high by the neck and then sort o’ go off and forget him.”
Others proposed to let him go and warn him to leave the country. It happened on the day the question was being argued that the wind was blowing from the southwest as hard a gale as I ever saw. It swept up great clouds of dust and blew down all of the tents and endangered many of the buildings. In the afternoon we heard a shout from the direction of the railroad. We all ran out and met the guards. They pointed down the track to the car containing Pike rolling off before the wind.
“How did it get away?” everybody asked.
“Well,” said one of the guards, “we don’t just exactly know. We reckon the brake got off somehow. Mebby a dog run agin the car with his nose and started it, or something like17that,” and the man rolled up his eyes. There was a loud laugh at this, as everybody understood that the guards had loosened the brake and given the car a start, and they all saw that it was a good way to get rid of the man inside. Tom Carr, the station agent, said that, if the wind held, the car would not stop short of the grade beyond Siding No. 15.
“My experience with the country,” said Sours, “is that the wind always holds and don’t do much else. It wouldn’t surprise me if it carried him clean through to Chicago.”
I went back to the barn and sat down in the office. To tell the truth, I felt easier that Pike was gone. I well knew that he had no love for me. I sat a long time thinking over what had happened since I had come to Track’s End. It seemed, as if things had crowded one another so much that I had scarcely had time to think at all. I little guessed all the time for thinking that I was going to have before I got away from the place.
While I was sitting there on the bench an old gentleman came in and asked something about getting a team with which to drive into the country. There was a livery stable in18town kept by a man named Munger and a partner whose name I have forgotten; but their horses were all out. The Headquarters barn was mainly for the teams of people who put up at the hotel, but Sours had two horses which we sometimes let folks have. After the old gentleman had finished his business he asked me my name, and then said:
“Well, Judson, you did the right thing in pointing out that desperado the other night. I’m pleased to know you.”
My reply was that I couldn’t very well have done otherwise than I did after what I saw.
“But there’s many that wouldn’t have done it, just the same,” answered the old gentleman. “Knowing the kind of a man he is, it was very brave of you. My name is Clerkinwell. I run the Bank of Track’s End, opposite the Headquarters House. I hope to hear further good reports of you.”
He was a very courtly old gentleman, and waved his hand with a flourish as he went out. You may be sure I was tickled at getting such words of praise from no less a man than a banker. I hurried and took the team around to the bank, and had a good look at it. It19was a small, square, two-story wooden building, like many of the others, with large glass windows in the front, through which I could see a counter, and behind it a big iron safe.
I had given up sleeping in the house, with its squirrel-cage rooms, preferring the soft prairie hay of the barn. But when bedtime came this night Mr. Clerkinwell had not returned, so I sat up to wait for the team. He had told me that he might be late. It was past midnight when he drove up to the barn.
“Good-evening, Judson,” said he. “So you waited for me.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“Do you know if Allenham or any one is on watch about town to-night?”
“I think not, sir,” I said. “I haven’t seen nor heard anybody for over an hour.”
“Very careless, very careless,” muttered the old gentleman. Then he went out, and in a moment I heard his footsteps as he went up the outside stairs to his rooms in the second story of his bank building. I put the horses in their stalls, and fed and watered them, and started up the ladder to the loft. What Mr. Clerkinwell had said was still running in my20mind. I stopped and thought a moment, and concluded that I was not sleepy, and decided to take a turn about town.
I left my lantern and went out to the one street. There was not a sound to be heard except the rush of the wind around the houses. The moon was almost down, and the buildings of the town and Frenchman’s Butte made long shadows on the prairie. There was a dull spot of light on the sky to the southeast which I knew was the reflection of a prairie fire a long ways off; but there was a good, wide fire-brake a quarter of a mile out around the town, so there was no danger from that, even if it should come up.
I went along down toward the railroad, walking in the middle of the street so as not to make any noise. The big windmill on the water-tank swung a little in the wind and creaked; and the last light from the moon gleamed on its tail and then was gone. I turned out across where the graders had had their camp. Here the wind was hissing through the dry grass sharp enough. I stood gaping at the stars with the wind blowing squarely in my face, and wondering how I21ever came so far from home, when all at once I saw straight ahead of me a little blaze of fire.
My first thought was that it was the camp-fire of some mover on the fire-brake. It blazed up higher, and lapped to the right and left. It was the grass that was afire. Through the flames I caught a glimpse of a man. A gust of wind beat down the blaze, and I saw the man, bent over and moving along with a great torch of grass in his hand, leaving a trail of fire. Then I saw that he was inside the fire-brake.
In another moment I was running up the middle of the street yelling “Fire!” so that to this day it is a wonder to me that I did not burst both of my lungs.
22CHAPTER IIIA Fire and a Blizzard: with how a great many People go away from Track’s End and how some others come.
It was an even two hours’ fight between the town of Track’s End and the fire; and they came out about even–that is, most of the scattering dwelling-houses were burned, but the business part of the town was saved. There was no water to be had, nor time to plow a furrow, so we fought the fire mainly with brooms, shovels, old blankets, and such-like things with which we could pound it out. But it got up to the dwellings in spite of us. As soon as the danger seemed to be past, I said to Allenham, who had had charge of the fire brigade:
“I saw a man set that fire out there. Don’t you suppose we could find him?”
“Pike, I’ll bet a dollar!” exclaimed Allenham. “We’ll try it, anyhow, whoever it is.”23
He ordered everybody that could to get a horse, and soon we all rode off into the darkness. But though we were divided into small parties and searched all that night and half the next day, nothing came of it. I kept with Allenham, and as we came in he said:
“There’s no use looking for him any longer. If he didn’t have a horse and ride away out of the country ahead of all of us, then he’s down a badger-hole and intends to stay there till we quit looking. I’ll wager he’ll know better’n to show himself around Track’s End again, anyhow.”
Toward night the train came in pushing Pike’s box-car ahead of it. Burrdock, who had now been promoted to conductor, said he had bumped against it about six miles down the track. The little end door had been broken open from the inside with a coupling-pin, which Pike must have found in the car and kept concealed. With the window open it was no trick at all to crawl out, set the brake, and stop the car. Nobody doubted any longer that he was the one who had started the fire.
I may as well pass over the next month without making much fuss about it here.24Nothing happened except that folks kept going away. After the fire nearly all of those burned out left, and about the same time all of the settlers who had taken up claims in the neighborhood also went back east for the winter, some of them on the train, but most of them in white-topped covered wagons. There was almost no business in town, and if you wanted to get into a store you would generally first have to hunt up the owner and ask him to open it for you. I saw Mr. Clerkinwell occasionally. He always spoke kindly and wished me success. Then the great October blizzard came.
Folks in that country still talk about the October blizzard, and well they may do so, because the like of it has never been known since. It came on the twenty-sixth day of October, and lasted three days. It was as bad as it ought to have been in January, and the people at Track’s End, being new to the country, judged that the winter had come to stay, and were discouraged; and so most of the rest of them went away.
It began to snow on the morning of the twenty-fifth, with an east and northeast wind.25The snow came down all day in big flakes, and by evening it was a foot deep. It turned colder in the night, and the wind shifted to the northwest. In the morning it was blizzarding. The air was full of fine snow blown before the wind, and before noon you could not see across the street. Some of the smaller houses were almost drifted under. This kept up for three days. Of course the train could not get through, and the one telegraph wire went down and left the town like an island alone in the middle of the ocean.
The next day after the blizzard stopped it grew warmer and the snow began to melt a little, but it was another four days before the train came. By the time it did come it seemed as if everybody in town was disgusted or frightened enough to leave. When the second train after the blizzard had gone back, there were but thirty-two persons, all told, at Track’s End. Only one of these was a woman, and she it was that was the cause of making me a hotel-keeper on a small scale.
The woman was Mrs. Sours, wife of my employer. One morning, after every one had26left the breakfast-table except her husband and myself, she said to me:
“Jud, couldn’t you run the hotel this winter, now that there are only three or four boarders left, and them not important nor particular, only so they get enough to eat?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” I said. “I can run the barn, but I’m afraid I don’t know much about a hotel.”
“Do you hear the boy say he can do it, Henry?” says she, turning to her husband. “Of course he can do it, and do it well, too. He always said his mother taught him how to cook. That means I’m a-going down on the train to-morrow, and not coming back to this wretched country till spring has melted off the snow and made it fit for a decent body to live in.”
“Well, all right,” said Sours. “You may go; Jud and me are good for it.”
“Mercy sakes!” cried Mrs. Sours, “do you suppose I’m going to leave you here to be frozen to death, and starved to death, and killed by the wolves that we already hear howling every night, and murdered by Indians, and shot by Pike and that wretched27band of horse-thieves that the Billings sheriffs who stopped here the other night was looking for? No, Henry; when I go I am going to take you with me.”
Sours tried to argue with her a little, but it did no sort of good, and the next day they both went off and I was left in charge of the hotel for the winter with three boarders–Tom Carr, the station agent and telegraph operator; Frank Valentine, the postmaster; and a Norwegian named Andrew, who was to take my place in the barn. Allenham had gone before the blizzard. Some others went on the same train with Mr. Sours and his wife. We were twenty-six, all told, that night.
The weather remained bad, and the train was often late or did not come at all. On the last day of November there were an even fourteen of us left. On the morning of that day week Tom Carr came over from the station and brought word that he had just got a telegram from headquarters saying that for the rest of the winter the train would run to Track’s End but once a week, coming up Wednesday and going back Thursday.
“Well, that settles it withme,” said Harvey28Tucker. “I shall go back with it the first Thursday it goes.”
“Same with me,” said a man named West. “I know when I’ve got enough, and I’ve got enough of Track’s End.”
Mr. Clerkinwell, who happened to be present, laughed cheerfully. He was by far the oldest man left, but he always seemed the least discouraged.
“Oh,” he said to the others, “that’s nothing. The train does us no good except to bring the mail, and it can bring it just as well once a week as twice. We were really pampered with that train coming to us twice a week,” and he laughed again and went out.
It was just another week and a day that poor Mr. Clerkinwell was taken sick. He had begun boarding at the hotel, and that night did not come to supper. I went over to his rooms to see what the trouble was. I found him on the bed in a high fever. His talk was rambling and flighty. It was a good deal about his daughter Florence, whom he had told me of before. Then he wandered to other matters.
“It’s locked, Judson, it’s locked, and29nobody knows the combination; and there aren’t any burglars here,” he said. I knew he was talking about the safe in the room below.
We all did what we could for him, which was little enough. The doctor had gone away weeks before. He grew worse during the night. The train had come in that day, and I asked Burrdock if he did not think it would be best to send him away on it in the morning to his friends at St. Paul, where he could get proper care. Burrdock agreed to this plan. Toward morning the old gentleman fell asleep, and we covered him very carefully and carried him over to the train on his bed. He roused up a little in the car and seemed to realize where he was.
“Take care of the bank, Judson, take good care of it,” he said in a sort of a feeble way. “You must be banker as well as hotel-keeper now.”
I told him I would do the best I could, and he closed his eyes again.
It was cold and blizzardy when the train left at nine o’clock. Tucker and West were not the only ones of our little colony who took the train; there were five others, making, with30Mr. Clerkinwell, eight, and leaving us six, to wit: Tom Carr, the agent; Frank Valentine, the postmaster; Jim Stackhouse; Cy Baker; Andrew, the Norwegian, and myself, Judson Pitcher.
After the train had gone away down the track in a cloud of white smoke, we held a mock mass-meeting around the depot stove, and elected Tom Carr mayor, Jim Stackhouse treasurer, and Andrew street commissioner, with instructions to “clear the streets of snow without delay so that the city’s system of horse-cars may be operated to the advantage of our large and growing population.” The Norwegian grinned and said:
“Aye tank he be a pretty big yob to put all that snow away.”