“Go back to Butte and starve to death, you yellow sonsabitches!”
“Dogs know when they’re whipped, all right!”
“Tell the NP they can pick up their train in Washington!”
But the posse’s engine just sat there blowing steam like the boss bull in a pasture, headlight glaring in their faces.
“Better load up, fellas,” said Bill Hogan. “This aint over.”
They piled back into the boxcars and called roll and set out, at a snail’s pace to conserve on water, followed at a not-so-respectful distance by the deputy train.
“If I known we be going this slow,” said Hack Tuttle, glumly watching the moonlit hills crawl by, “I’d of mailed myself to Washington.”
Hod isn’t sure how long the little man has been by his elbow, standing at the back rail of the ship, the little man whose face is a worse sight than his own.
“It was the dogs what done it,” says the little man, though Hod hasn’t asked. “There was a team carrying us up to Dawson. You seen how they run em—”
“I’ve seen a bit,” says Hod. “But I never traveled with them.”
“There’s a lead dog and he’s the boss. Run em all day for a scrap of salt fish that look like shoe leather. Only what they do is just throw it one piece at a time into the pack after they’ve unhitched em, and that boss dog he got to bully all the others off it, scarf it down quick without the others getting any, or else he’s not the boss dog no more. ‘Keeps em keen,’ says this English fella that runs the teams.”
“Dogs’ll fight over food,” says Hod.
“But it aint just the food,” says the little man. Deep scars pucker the side of his face, his lip split in two at the corner, one eye milky white. “It’s that they hate that sumbitch boss dog. Got the whip behind em and this dog they want to kill, that they’re all afraid of, in front where all they can think about is takin a bite outta his hind end.”
“But they run as a pack.”
The little man shakes his head. “It’s just red murder tied into traces. We was asleep by the fire when these two younger dogs went after the boss — they gang up like that sometimes, kill the old boss and then fight each other — and the scrap brung em right on top of us. I tried to push em away and one turned on me, like to chewed half my face off before I rolled him into the fire.”
Hod lets it sit for a long moment.
“Hard life up there,” he says finally. There are plenty other guys the little man could have picked to talk to. Like the bunch who brought their whiskey aboard and have stayed below dosing themselves with it ever since the steamer pulled out from Skaguay, the ones you figure in a year will be living from drink to drink. But no, he picked Hod, smelled something on him.
“Them gold fields run me good,” muses the little man, his dead eye toward Hod. “But didn’t nobody throw me a scrap of nothing at the end of it.”
The mayor was there with the crowd to greet the Wild Train steaming alone into the yard the next morning. The people had flags and food and there were Kodak bugs taking photographs of the historic moment, the Commonweal soldiers waiting for the mayor to finish his welcome speech. But when he got to the part about how Billings had been named for a fella that was President of the Northern Pacific Railroad somebody started shooting, and a couple deputies who’d snuck forward jumped onto the engine to grab Hogan and Jim Harmon. There were townspeople screaming and running and a couple hit who fell down and it was Hod, not thinking about what might happen, who led the counterattack. There was plenty lying around to throw — rocks and bricks and iron coupling pins — and with half the men from the town joining them it wasn’t long before the deputies give up their hostages and made a run to hole up in the NP roundhouse. The mayor had his sheriff arrest the couple of them that had been snatched by the crowd to keep them from being tore apart and then there was a rush to find another engine, as their last one was a sorry sight from the fusillade. It was like the whole town was in with them, men running home to get their rifles to make sure nobody else chanced in from the deputy train and women bringing a stew and the baker cleaning his shop out of loaves and this was a town that lived off the railroad, a town built by the railroad, and when it was discovered the water tanks here had been emptied too didn’t they ring the fire bell and set their pumper company to filling the new engine’s empty tender.
“If there were boxcars available,” called Bill Hogan just before they pulled out in the early afternoon, “I believe this whole town of Billings would throw in and ride to Washington with us!”
The people cheered and little boys ran alongside the train as long as they could, then flung handfuls of ballast gravel at the deputy train when it skulked after a few minutes later.
They’d lifted some rubber hose from one of the shops in the yard and twice stopped for the men to run out and siphon water, once from the Bighorn River and once from Sarpy Creek, their pursuers stopping back just within sight, going so slow now and carrying such a light load compared to the Liberty Train that their engine was barely thirsty.
“Either they’ve been ordered to escort us out of the state or they’ve got somebody waiting ahead,” said General Hogan. “You boys be ready for anything.”
The engine hauling them now had been waiting to be serviced, its metal parts screaming as they ground together ungreased, and they limped into Forsyth to find another. But the only engine waiting there had the throttle taken out of it and the couple mechanics in their ranks had to work in lantern light to pull the one out of their present ride and switch it over. There was no cheering crowd in the yard.
“Word come through they’s government troops on their way from Miles City,” said the station agent, watching the mechanics with his hands stuck in his back pockets. “If I was you fellas, I’d make scarce.”
But they had stuck together this far and weren’t about to be scattered. So when the Federal soldiers shown up and surrounded them, not one man among them tried to run.
“We commandeered this equipment in the name of the American working man,” Curly Armstrong announced to the major who stepped forward to demand their surrender. “And we’d appreciate it if you’d peel that mess of scabs and reprobates that’s lurking behind off our backs.”
But the major only put them under arrest and crowded them back into the boxcars to wait for the engine to be ready to haul them to Fort Keough. Coxey would have to do without them in the nation’s capital. Hod sat in the crush of silent, sullen men on the board floor and imagined his name being scribed on a blacklist by every mine super from Butte to Bisbee, and figured to be among those picked to draw a month or two in the Helena slammer. He didn’t figure on the three more years of jacking rock and half-dozen borrowed names it took him to put a decent prospector’s stake together.
Bill Hogan, feeling betrayed by the flag that hung from the bulkhead wall, attempted to reason with the sergeant guarding the boxcar he’d been locked in with Hod and eighty fellow Commonwealers. “You are aware,” he said, “that you are bound to serve the United States government and its citizens, not the Railroad Trust.”
“That’s an interesting theory,” the sergeant replied, picking his nose. “You ought to write a book about it.”
Hod waits until all the gold and the body of Fritz Stammerjohn has been unloaded before leaving the steamer. Nobody is waiting for him on the Alaska Dock. He hurries up the steep hill and away from the Utopia in the light rain, carrying nothing, trying to mix in with the crowd on the streets. Everything south of the Deadline has been rebuilt in brick since the ’89 fire, the box-houses moved into basements, with barkers and brass bands trying to lure stampeders in for one last blowout before they can escape Seattle. Yesler Way, the old skid road, has had cobblestones laid in since he left, but there are still tramps loitering outside the Occidental Hotel, hanging a story on whoever passes by. Hod has a ten-dollar bill in his pocket, his parting gift from Jeff Smith, and both sides of his face are still discolored from the fight.