ORRIN SMITH gave Tom a little fatherly advice that night on the proper costume and deportment of a jerry. As a consequence of it, Tom appeared next day clad in blue overalls and brogans. When the gang arrived at the place where the day's work was to be done, Tom left his gun on the handcar with the jerries' dinner pails. Smith said he had no objection to any of his men wearing guns coming and going to work, but he didn't want them encumbered by weapons out on the track. A man's enemies were not likely to seek him there, in the presence of so much company, said Smith.
Tom accepted the boss's view of the case cheerfully. There was not much of a Texas look about him that day, except his old dingy-white Stetson, which bobbed around among the jerries' miscellaneous headgear as prominently as a white duck in a flock of gray ones. Mike Quinn, Tom's working partner, wore a narrowbrimmed little dicer, with holes cut in the sides of it to let the air in to his brain, he said. He advised Tom gravely to lay aside that fine costly sombrero for festive occasions, and get himself one that would not represent such a big investment, or be so subject to damage from contact with black oil and the hard knocks of a trackman's life.
Tom was respectful toward Mike Quinn and his advice, as he was toward all suggestions, serious and jocose, offered by his fellow toilers. This readiness to listen, his polite bearing and soft speech, quickly made a way for Tom where a flippant smart fellow would have found it hard going. The gang adopted him, very much in the way that a household adopts a strange animal, and took a vast pride in the distinction of having the only cowboy jerry that ever was known.
The jerries were proud of Tom's refined and deferential manners, at least refined in comparison with any manners they came in daily contact with; proud of the pistol that he wore to and from work and hung on the lever of the handcar; proud of his big sombrero, which he retained against all argument to get him out of it at first. After a week they would have felt hurt and affronted if Tom had appeared in any other hat.
Section gangs in those times were made up mainly of old-timers who had followed the steel from the Lackawanna to the Santa Fé, grizzled men with thick arms and mighty chests, "good dhrinkin' men" as they described themselves with pride. Nearly all of them were Irish, who had come to America young and stepped from the ship to the ties. They were a craft to themselves, as distinctive as sailors, with a speech full of terms applying to their trade, mystifying and foreign to the ears of the uninitiated. A careless, spendthrift, hardy set of rovers, veterans of the army that pushed the rails across desert and mountains, not insensible of the romance of their past, or the sacrifice of their service to their kind.
They are gone, long ago. The last old jerry is dragging out his slow dim years in some Little Sisters' home, mumbling of the days that were worth a man's while to live, when he was lead spiker on the Pas-i-fic back in the times of Jay Gould. But there were plenty of them to man the handcars of the middle-western sections in the time when Tom Laylander came to serve on the section at McPacken.
They were single men, with old home ties broken long ago and forgotten, many of them illiterate, signing their pay checks with a mark, so accustomed to hardship that the word scarcely had any meaning to them. There was nothing they had that a man in distress could not have for the asking, and nothing they wanted when out of a job and "starvin' wit' th' hoonger" that somebody did not appear at length to supply. What came in by this hand went out through that, with never a thought for winter, when the gangs were cut, nothing put by for the evil day of old age. They always looked forward to the "Nittle Sisters", as they called them, to take care of them when they could no longer handle shovel, tamping-pick and bar.
Few of them ever rose to be bosses, or more than straw-bosses, at the best, owing to their illiteracy. They never learned any more about railroad building and maintenance than the routine of their daily toil, nor cared to learn. They were land sailors who had learned the ropes; it was not for them to be captains, and they knew it very well.
Once in a while there was one to be met like Mike Quinn. Mike was a reading man, although as good a drinkin' man as ever breasted the bar. He could discourse about the Pyramids and the Missouri River; about Napoleon and Brigham Young. He followed politics, and read the prize-fight news to the jerries under the cottonwood trees at Mrs. Ryan's boarding house beside the track. It took a crafty man at an argument to get ahead of Mike, who would come around with unexpected quips and turns, sharper than Plato ever was in his life.
Trainmen were greatly amused by the sight of Tom Laylander in his big hat, humping over a tamping-pick; infinitely diverted by his pistol swinging on the handcar lever at the side of the track. They called him the "cow jerry"; the news of his presence on the section at McPacken went up and down the line.
Firemen stood in the cab doors to look at him as they passed, some of them making facetious gestures of drawing a gun or swinging a rope. Brakemen on the tops of freight trains varied these, to Tom, questionably comical antics, by whooping, and prancing around in imitation of a bronco.
All of these cracks at him on the part of the intellectuals, taken in addition to the general run of mockery and derision thrown at the jerries in passing, began to nettle Tom after a while. All railroaders were alike to him, these on the trains only fellow-servants of the same master served by the section men. It seemed small business to Tom, this imitating the pumping of a handcar, driving spikes, lining track, which so amused brakemen and firemen. Conductors and engineers, to their everlasting credit and respect in Tom Laylander's memory, never stooped to these mocking frivolities.
Where it hit Tom was its intentional insult and malignancy, or perhaps insolent exultation over men placed by chance or misfortune, or choice, and proud enough in their selection, in this lowly way of earning their daily chuck. He resented this attitude strongly, often speaking his mind on it to Mike Quinn, who as regularly came forward with his philosophy to calm Tom's indignation.
"Consither the source," said Mike, "as the man said whin the jackass kicked him, and let it pass."
It took all of Mike's philosophy, as well as such of his own as he could command, to hold Tom from pitching a rock at Windy Moore when he went by, prancing and making derisive pantomime, leaning over and shouting "Cow jerry! Ya-a-a! Ya-a-a!"
This happened every second day when Windy passed. Windy was not a very high man in the aristocracy of trainmen, being nothing more than brakeman on the local freight, which was the very beginning, in fact, of the long and bumpy road to the conductor's seat in the cupola of a caboose. Windy had a long way to go before arriving among the great, but he was ages in the evolution of labor above the lowly state of section hand.
"Let ye stand on your dignity, lad, and lave 'em pass," Mike advised. "If the poor crathurs get any pleasure out of their prancin' and dancin' and posthurin' around, let 'em have it. They're a lot of poor ignorant fellys that never read a book of histhory in their lives. Savages, they are, lad. The nagur savages in the wilds of Africa make faces at strangers, and prance and mock and posthure in insultin' capers, the same as these poor brakeys do, tryin' to provoke the first blow.
"These boxcyar lads think they're the important men in railroadin'. They are not. Take away the section boss and his gang for tin days and lave the thrack go: where would these fine lads land? In the ditch, with the freight cyars on top of them, and not one among the lot with sinse enough in the head of 'im to dhrive a spike.
"It's the lads on the thrack that count in railroadin'; nobody else. Take you and me, spikin' these ties. What would happen if we spread the rails, or dhrawed 'em, three or four inches out o' gauge aither way? Where would Windy Moore be when the ingin sthrook the spot? Sailin' through the wind like a mateor, rammin' the head iv 'im in the ditch. Let 'em go, I tell ye, lad; let 'em pass."
This argument, aside from Mike's prejudice in favor of his own calling, had considerable truth to enforce it, Tom realized, but it did not excuse the offense nor palliate the sting. He studied the worst offenders, Windy Moore among them, marking each man well. As the days passed they became familiar figures, both on the road and in the streets of McPacken. He waited for them to try some of their funny business with him when they stood man to man on the ground.
This never happened. While the cow jerry was an object of great entertainment and ribald mockery to brakemen and firemen going by at thirty or fifty miles an hour, he was no funnier than any other man when met on the streets in town. Trainmen passed him there without a word or wink, as oblivious to his presence on earth, it appeared, as one of the myriad leaves on Mrs. Cowgill's cottonwood trees. If there was no spoken insult in this passing him over as if he did not exist, there was no aggression. Tom was satisfied to have it that way in town; he would have been happy and comfortable if they would have given him the same peace out on the road.
Let them have their joke, said Tom, even at his expense, though what there was so diverting and comical in the aspect of a man who had ridden the range all his life coming down to railroading, he could not see. For it was a come-down on his part; it would have been just as much of a come-down to Laylander shovelling coal into an engine firebox, or trotting the tops of boxcars, as tamping ties on the section. Railroading was all railroading to him, one job as respectable as another, all of it far below the freedom and independence of the range.
It was a comfort to Tom that he was not to be a regular railroader, that he was using the job as a temporary bridge to cross the few weeks which lay between him and the recovery of his cattle. It might be well, he considered, if he could enter into the spirit of the thing with the trainmen, and show them that he, also, looked on his present occupation as a joke.
This notion pleased him. He went grinning around at his work while he turned over certain schemes for expressing his appreciation of their humorous banter to the passing brakemen, Windy Moore in particular. The more he thought of it the better it pleased him. Mike Quinn asked him if he had found a purse.
Tom's opportunity to put his plan of responsive appreciation into practice came when he had been a little more than a month on the gang. The jerries were going home from their day's work of picking up joints when overtaken by the local freight, which came pounding toward McPacken with a long train of empties gathered at way stations during the day. The local was late, the engineer in a great sweat to make it in to McPacken, out of humor with the dispatcher for laying him out everywhere for the numerous stock extras which had kept the rails hot that day.
This thing of overtaking a handcar and forcing the jerries to look lively for a spot to drag it off; their excited flinging of shovels and bars to lighten it if they had time; their shouts and agile jumping about, always amused trainmen as no other bit of comedy in the day's work. There were always two or three old jerries in every gang who went to pieces in a pinch of that kind, invoking the protection of the saints, laying hold of coats, dinner pails, tools; flinging them without regard of direction, the assistance or impediment of the urgent work in hand.
Orrin Smith's crew was no exception in this regard. There were three handcar-loads of terriers in his gang, proceeding that evening in close order toward the tool house, most of them smoking comfortably, pumping with leisurely stroke, standing so thick that few could get more than one hand on the levers.
Smith was riding on the first car, watching back for the local, which he knew had not passed and was hours late. It caught them on a straight piece of track, with plenty of time to get the cars off, but the nervous old-timers strewed the right-of-way with shovels, picks and dinner buckets, flinging them as if they jettisoned the cargo of a floundering ship.
This scene of excitement ahead of them, the bright pails flashing, covers flying off, coats sailing with arms outspread, gave a seasoning to the humor of the situation for the trainmen which even the crusty engineer unfixed his face to enjoy. The fireman came to the right-hand side of the cab—the jerries were going off the rails on that side—where he stood grinning. As the engine flashed by he made the sign which commonly passed in such cases: smashing his right fist into his left palm, spreading his hands with an upward motion of dispersion, complete obliteration, illustrative of a burst rocket, nothing left but the smoke. That's what's going to happen to this gang of jerries one of these days. Smart as you are, we'll get you yet. So this sign of collision and dismemberment meant.
Windy Moore was standing on top of a boxcar about midway of the long train, leaning against the wind, his loose overalls flagging around his skinny legs. As he approached the jerries, scattered around their hastily removed handcars, picking up their coats, looking for pipes that had been lost in the wild throwing off, Windy came over to the edge of the car roof, where he leaned, derision wide in his mocking face.
Tom Laylander was standing by, smoking a cigarette. He was in a glow of quickened blood, the little flurry having been quite to his liking, a welcome break in the monotony of a long and grinding day. His pistol was in its scuffed holster against his leg, his big hat threw a slantwise shadow across his face. Jerrying wouldn't be a bad job at all if there was more of this kind of stuff in it, he thought. And there came Windy Moore across his moment of pleasure, leaning out to fling his taunt and jeer.
"Cow jerry! Ya-a-a!" yelled Windy Moore, singling Tom out for his malicious witticism, as always.
Windy passed in a roar and swirl of dust, his long-drawn ya-a-a-a streaming after him as seeds fly out of a milkweed pod when it is held to the wind. Tom pulled out his gun between puffs on his little cigarette and threw a shot over the top of Windy Moore's boxcar, plugging another one after it so fast it followed the same hole through the air.
The bullets must have whispered something new to Windy Moore, something that he could hear above the roar and jangle of the loose-jointed freight. He stooped and dodged, fanning the wind as if fighting a sudden attack of hornets, looking all the time for some place to go. There never was a little brakeman on that division with such urgent business behind him as Windy Moore had for the next few seconds, Tom Laylander standing back at the other end of the quick-stretching distance, emptying his gun over the boxcar that Windy rode.
The train was going fast, but not fast enough for Windy. He was near the end of the car, but it was the wrong end, the ladder was on the side of the shooting cow jerry. Windy even outran the train when he broke for the forward end of the boxcar, where he grabbed the top bracket of the ladder and swung himself to safety on the opposite side.
"Stop shootin' at that man!" Orrin Smith yelled, his face white in the fear for his job that rushed over him at sight of this act of lese majestie.
The caboose jerked by, leaving the jerries in sudden silence.
"What do you mean shootin' at that man?" Smith demanded, his order to hit the grit and look for another job plain to his excited eyes.
"I wasn't shootin' at him," Tom corrected his boss, grinning in the pleasure of recalling Windy Moore fanning the bullets away from his ears. "I was only shootin' to-wards him."
"Dang the difference, dang the difference!" said Smith, who was a notably temperate man.
"When you shoot at a man you hit him," Tom explained. "That's the difference, Mr. Smith."
Smith was a man with thick, sloping shoulders, like a bottle. His voice was in the front of his mouth; his words came out with a blab, like the bleat of a sheep.
"They'll report it, they'll report it the minute they hit town! Well, git them cars on—git them cars on!"
Smith looked mighty glum the rest of the way to the tool house, sitting on the water keg with his foot beside the brake. The jerries were silent, throwing a ham into the little old handcar with unusual vigor. They looked at Tom with slanting glances, rolling their eyes, keeping their faces straight ahead. They acted like a crowd of boys accessory to a disastrous prank by one of their number, anxious to prove by their present conduct that they were in no manner implicated nor to blame.
Smith brought the handcar to a stop before the tool house door. Foot on the brake he looked up with reproachful severity at Tom, who was swinging to the ground.
"You're fired," said Smith.
"I'm sorry if I hurt your feelin's, Mr. Smith," Tom said, rather jolted by this unexpected ending of what he had meant to be nothing more than a pleasant prank.
"You and your dang gun, shootin' around here!"
"Yes sir," said Tom, feeling decidedly foolish.
"I'll give you your time this evenin'. I'm through with gun-toters on my section."
That appeared to close the matter; Tom having no word to add. He went to the Cottonwood Hotel humiliated and downcast, wondering why it was so hard for some people to see through a harmless little joke.