They made Bozeman by daybreak and in the rail yard of the cow town there were a hundred people waiting, cheering as the Commonwealers stood on each other’s shoulders and climbed stiff-legged over the sides of the coal cars and cheered back, throats raw from singing, and there they commandeered a fresh engine and loaded up with coal from the NP stockpile and coupled ten beautiful spacious boxcars behind it.
“There’s law coming,” the telegraph operator told them. “Marshal McDer-mott just left Butte with an engine and two cabooses. Got him some eighty deputies.”
There were jeers from the Commonweal soldiers and from the crowd and much speculation as to the character of anyone who would throw in with the Czars of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
“Must not be a pimp left in Venus Alley,” said Jim Harmon as he jumped behind the throttle. “Who wants to go to Washington?”
The boxcars were rolling palaces after the open coal-haulers, and the folks in Bozeman had thrown meat and bread and cheese and even a few pies in with them as the wild train resumed its journey.
“This is still hot,” said Curly Armstrong, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Some lady woke up before the sun and baked us a damn pie.”
They had barely settled in, filling themselves with the donated food and bragging about what they would do if the Marshal and his deputies should have the misfortune of catching up with them, when the train stopped in the middle of the Bozeman Tunnel.
The men piled out and walked in the dark along the other boxcars and the coughing, dripping engine to find half of Bozeman Hill slid down over the track ahead of them.
“The NP done this,” decided Hack Tuttle, though the station agent had said there’d been a hard rain the day before and to watch out. “They called their agents out ahead of us.”
“It doesn’t matter how it happened,” said General Hogan. “We have to clear the track or give up.”
It was Hod who found the tools, half-hidden on the downside of the slope, the section gang who abandoned them probably still within shouting distance. There were fifteen shovels and they worked in relays, digging furiously till their arms gave out and then handing it over to the next man. Nobody was singing now, with that deputy train running up behind, and just when the track looked ready to roll on there was another cave-in.
“Damn if I aint doin the railroad’s work for free,” said one of the men, and that led to joking about the bill for services rendered they should hand over and finally Jim Harmon said the hell with it, jumped up behind the throttle again and got up a little steam and plowed right through the whole mess and out the other side of the tunnel. There were cheers and they loaded up with the shovels in hand in case there were more accidents or company mischief up ahead and Hod had the sudden thrilling idea—This is ours now.
Hod’s old man always said it was the railroad advertising lured him out West, too many years of making scratch in Kentucky and those handbills looked awfully good. It was the railroad brought him out cheap when he signed on to settle and the railroad dumped him off in Topeka with some hints about where any smart fella ought to stake his claim. The old man listened and went in with a crowd who guessed on the area around old Fort Zarah, which they got a charter for and called Zarah City and commenced to build while the old man bought a quarter section between there and Pawnee Rock and put a crop of sod corn in and waited for the railroad to make his town land worth something.
But that was the year the hoppers flew down and ate everything so he went hunting buffalo along with all the other busted farmers, and when he managed to bring a stinking, tick-infested roll of them in without getting scalped the agents were paying less than a dollar a hide. On account, they said, of the railroad charging so much to ship them back east.
The next season it was hailstorms did the crop, and then somebody paid somebody more than somebody else did so Great Falls got the railhead instead of Zarah City and the town dried up when the drought came in and settled, more or less permanent, for the next ten years. Hod, third of eight, would run to find the old man wherever he was whenever the sky broke, eager-eyed, but the old man would barely look up and say “Hope it don’t rot the beans.” Then the year him and everybody else around went over to the winter wheat that the Mennonites brought to the country he made forty bushels an acre, but the price dropped out when the railroad upped its rates.
“Everywhere there’s a river in this country, there’s a railroad alongside it,” the old man would intone when the oil lamps were lit and the day’s work had bested him again. “A river feeds a man — a railroad bleeds him.” In what was left of Zarah City and in Pawnee Rock the other busted men who used to talk of Dull Knife and Little Wolf or the murderous Dalton boys or the wide-open days of Dodge could speak only of the depredations of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, spitting bitterly into the Kansas dust and elaborating on the many tentacles of the conspiracy. It wasn’t the fellas who worked on the road, no, they were just poor stiffs who risked getting scalded or run over or crushed in a pile-up for their two dollars a day, and it wasn’t the trains themselves, which made your heart race every time they came smoking past across the prairie. It was something big and dark and far off that was crushing them down, something that sent orders out that fixed the prices against you, and his father railed on about men in top hats whispering, passing bribes in the halls of power to keep the poor farmer down.
There was the cyclone one year, then that killer frost, then the Great Snow where he lost most of the livestock and always the cornworms and the chinch bugs and the birds eating your seed and the sinking recognition that this land you’d bought would bury you before it would feed you. And Mother falling into a mood the winter where the sun never come out once, barely talking, till they found her one day, Hod and his brother Zeb, or found her from the neck down, and the long stain on the rail it took a month for the passing trains to polish away.
And then the bank called in the note and the Unruhs, who were Men-nonites, bought it all at auction for half of what they’d offered their father the year before.
Rupe Heizer, who’d been in that original Kentucky colony, was with the railroad office then and offered Hod’s father a section house and a foreman job. Just supervising.
“I slit my own throat fore I work for any railroad,” the old man said at the time. They told him he was too old for the salt mine in Hutchinson and he was too proud to work for any of the farmers who would offer him a job, so he signed on at the granary and dried up and died.
The Railroad was out there somewhere, big and dark and not so far off, crushing down on them, but this, this engine, this train, this stretch of track, belonged to Hogan’s Army. It was owed to them.
Dynamite Johnny O’Brien finds Hod by the stern rail, staring out into the fog.
“You’re well clear of that Yukon mess,” says the captain. “It’s a suckers’ game.”
“You let the folks you carry up there in on that?”
O’Brien laughs. “People start thinking gold,” he says, “they don’t listen to nobody. You got plans?”
Hod shakes his head. “Just enjoying the boat ride.”
“Cause I got a little sideline, running guns to them that’s willing to pay dear for em. This deal in Cuba is heating up, and you seem like a capable young fella—”
“Not my fight.” The captain is a friendly old coot and a hell of a poker player, but not likely to be particular about which side he sells to.
“Well, keep it in mind. Always got room for a boy who don’t stall at breakin a few rules.”
Wild train from copper country.