On the morrow Cleg was up betimes. But not so early as Poet Jock and Auld Chairlie. His own clothes were pretty dry, but Cleg had been so pleased with the freedom and airiness of his "sack suit," as he called it, that, as it was a warm morning and a lonely place, he decided to wear it all day.
Cleg went out, and, starting from the side of the line, he ran light-foot to the top of a little hill, from whence he could look over a vast moorish wilderness—league upon league of purple heather, through which the railway had been cut and levelled with infinite but unremunerative art.
From horizon to horizon not a living thing could Cleg see except the moorbirds and the sheep. But over the woods to the east he could catch one glimpse of Loch Spellanderie, basking blue in the sunlight. He could not, however, see the farmhouse. But he rubbed his [276]hands with satisfaction as he thought of swimming away from them all into the darkness the night before.
"I showed her wha was the man, I'm thinkin'!" he said. And there upon the heather-blooms Cleg Kelly flapped his thin arms against his sack and crowed like a chanticleer. Then in a few moments there came back from over the moor and loch a phantom cock-crow reduced to the airiest diminuendo. It was the tyrant of the Loch Spellanderie dung-hill which spoke back to him.
"I'm richt glad I'm no there," said Cleg, heartily.
Nevertheless he went down the hill again a little sadly, as though he were not quite sure, when he came to think about it, whether he was glad or not.
But on the whole it was perhaps as well that he was where he was, at least in his present costume.
When Cleg got back to the hut, he looked about for something to do till his friends returned. His active frame did not stand idleness well. He grew distracted with the silence and the wide spaces of air and sunshine about him. He longed to hear the thunderous rattle of the coal-carts coming out of the station of St. Leonards. He missed the long wolf's howl of the seasoned South Side coalman. In the morning, indeed, the whaups had done something to cheer him, wailing and crying to the peewits. But as the forenoon advanced even they went off to the shore-side pools, or dropped into the tufts of heather and were mute.
Cleg grew more and more tired of the silence. It deafened him, so that several times he had to go outside and yell at the top of his voice simply, as it were, to relieve nature.
It happened that on the second occasion, as soon as he had finished yelling—that is, exhausted an entire vocabulary of hideous sounds—a train to Port Andrew broke [277]the monotony. It did not actually stop, because it was a passenger train and had already "watered up" at Netherby. But Cleg was as pleased as if it had brought him a box of apples. He climbed up and sat cross-legged on the top of the hut in his sack, for all the world like an Indian idol; and the engine-driver was so astonished that he forgot to put the brake on till he was thundering headlong half way down the incline on the western side of the Summit cabin.
But the stoker, a young man incapable of astonishment (as many of the very young are), picked up a lump of coal from the tender and threw it at Cleg with excellent aim. However, as the train was going slowly uphill at the time, Cleg caught it and set the piece of coal between his teeth. His aspect on this occasion was such as would fully have warranted Auld Chairlie in setting him down not as a child of the devil, but as the father of all the children of the devil.
The train passed, and Cleg was again in want of something to do. He could not sit there in the sun, and be slowly roasted with a piece of coal between his teeth, all for the benefit of the whaups. He thought with regret how he should like to sit, just as he was, on some towering pinnacle of the Scott monument where the police could not get him, and make faces at all the envious keelies in Edinburgh. To do this through all eternity would have afforded him much more pleasure than any realisation of more contentional presentations of the joys of heaven.
He descended and looked about him.
At the end of the little cabin he found a pitcher of tar, but no brush. He searched further, however, till he found it thrown carelessly away among the heather. Whereupon Cleg forthwith appointed himself house-painter-in-ordinary [278]to the Port Andrew Railway Company, and attacked the Summit cabin. He laid the tar on thick and good, so that when the sun beat upon his handiwork it had the effect of raising a smell which made Cleg's heart beat with the joy of reminiscence. It reminded him of a thousand things—of the brickyard on blistering afternoons, and also (when the perfume came most undiluted to his nose) of that district of Fountainbridge which has the privilege of standing upon the banks of the Forth and Clyde canal, and of containing several highly respectable and well-connected glue factories. Cleg had once gone there to "lag for a boy" who had offended his dignity by "trapping" him at school in the spelling of the word "coffin."
Cleg had spelled it, simply and severely, "kofn."
The boy from Fountainbridge, however, had spelled it correctly. Not only so, but he had been elated about the matter—very foolishly and rashly so, indeed.
"For," said Cleg, "it's easy for him. His faither is a joiner, and makes coffins to his trade. Besides, he had a half-brither that died last week. He micht easy be able to spell 'coffin'!"
To prevent the pride which so surely comes before a fall, Cleg waited for the "coffin" boy and administered the fall in person—indeed, several of them, and mostly in puddles.
He was therefore agreeably reminded of his visit to Fountainbridge whenever he stirred up the pitch from the bottom and the smell rose to his nostrils particularly solid and emulous. He shut his eyes and coughed. He dreamed that he was back and happily employed in "downing" the orthographist of Fountainbridge upon the flowery banks of the Union Canal.
It was after ten o'clock in the evening before Poet [279]Jock came in sight. He had been on a heavy job with a break-down gang on the Muckle Fleet incline. All day long he had been rhyming verses to the rasp of pick and the scrape of shovel. Sometimes so busy was he that he had barely time to take his mate's warning and leap to the side before the engine came leaping round the curve scarcely thirty lengths of rail away. But Poet Jock was entirely happy. Probably he might have travelled far and never known greater exhilaration than now, when he heard the engine surge along the irons, while he tingled with the thought that it was his strong arms which kept the track by which man was joined to man and city linked to city.
A fine, free, broad-browed, open-eyed man was Poet Jock. And his hand was as heavy as his heart was tender. As, indeed, many a rascal had found to his cost. Those who know railwaymen best, are surest that there does not exist in the world so fine a set of workers as the men whose care is the rails and the road, the engines and the guard vans, the platforms, goods sheds, and offices of our common railways.
A railway never sleeps. A thousand watchful eyes are at this moment glancing through the bull's-eyes of the driver's cab. A thousand strong hands are on the driving lever. Aloft, in wind-beaten, rain-battered signal boxes, stand the solitary men who, with every faculty on the alert, keep ten thousand from instant destruction. How tense their muscles, how clear their brains must be as they pull the signal and open the points! That brown hand gripping lever number seventeen, instead of number eighteen within six inches of it, is all that preserves three hundred people from instant and terrible death. That pound or two of pressure on the signal chain which sent abroad the red flash of danger, stopped the express in [280]which sat our wives and children, and kept it from dashing at full speed into that over-shunted truck which a minute ago toppled over and lay squarely across the racer's path.
And the surfacemen, of whom are Auld Chairlie and Poet Jock? Have you thought of how, night and day, they patrol every rod of iron path—how with clink of hammer and swing of arm they test every length of rail—how they dash the rain out of their eyes that they may discern whether the sidelong pressure of the swift express, or the lumbering thunder of the overladen goods, have not bent outwards the steel rail, forced it from its "chair," or caused the end of the length to spring upward like a fixed bayonet after the weight has passed over it?
A few men standing by the line side as the train speeds by. What of them? Heroes? They look by no means like it. Lazy fellows, rather, leaning on their picks and shovels when they should be working. Or a solitary man far up among the hills, idly clinking the metals with his hammer as he saunters along through the stillness.
These are the surfacemen—and that is all most know of them. But wait. When the night is blackest, the storm grimmest, there is a bridge out yonder which has been weakened—a culvert strained where a stream from the hillside has undermined the track. The trains are passing every quarter of an hour in each direction. Nevertheless, a length of rail must be lifted and laid during that time. A watch must be kept. The destructiveness of nature must be fought in the face of wetness and weariness. And, in spite of all, the train may come too quick round the curve. Then there follows the usual paragraph in the corner of the local paper if the accident has happened in the country, a bare announcement of the coroner's inquest if it be in the town.
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A porter is crushed between the platform and the moving carriages; a goods guard killed at the night shunt in the yard. Careless fellow! Serves him right for his recklessness. Did he not know the risk when he engaged? Of course he did—none better. But then he got twenty-two shillings a week to feed wife and bairns with for taking that risk. And if he did not take it, are there not plenty who would be glad of the chance of his empty berth?
And what then? Why, just this: there is one added to the thousands killed upon the railways of our lands—one stroke, a little figure 1 made at the foot of the unfinished column, a grave, a family in black, a widow with six children moved out of the company's house on which grow the roses which he planted about the door that first year, when all the world was young and a pound a week spelled Paradise. The six children have gone into a single room and she takes in washing, and is hoping by and by to get the cleaning of a board school, if she be very fortunate.
To blame? Who said that any one was to blame? Of course not. Are we not all shareholders in the railways, and do we not grumble vastly when our half-yearly dividend is low? So lengthen the hours of these over-paid, lazy fellows in corduroys—lengthen that column over which the Board of Trade's clerk lingers a moment ere he adds a unit. O well, what matter? 'Tis only statistics filed for reference in a Government office.
But while Cleg waited for Poet Jock something else was happening at Netherby.
It was a bitter night there, with a westerly wind sweeping up torrents of slanting rain through the pitchy dark. Netherby Junction was asleep, but it was the sleep which draws near the resurrection. The station-master was enjoying his short after-supper nap in the armchair by the [282]fire. For the down boat-train from Port Andrew and the Duncan Urquhart's goods train would pass each other at Netherby Junction at 10.5 P. M.
The signal box up yonder in the breast of the storm was almost carried away. So tall it rose that the whole fabric bent and shivered in each fierce gust which came hurtling in from the Atlantic. James Cannon, the signalman of Netherby West, was not asleep. His mate was ill, but not ill enough to be quite off duty. James Cannon had applied for a substitute, but headquarters were overtaxed for spare men and had not responded. Netherby was considered a light station to work, and the duty would no doubt be done somehow.
James Cannon had been on duty since six in the morning—sixteen hours already at the levers. Then he had also been up nearly all the night before with a weakly and fretful child. But the company's regulations could not be expected to provide for that.
James Cannon, however, was not asleep. He had his eyes fixed on the distant signal on the high bank, as he caught the gleam of it wavering through the storm. That was the way the boat express would have to come in a few minutes more. The electric needle quivered and clicked behind him. The signalman thought of the light upon the Little Ross, which he used to see from the green Borgue shore when he was a boy. He had always looked out at it every night before he went to sleep. The distant signal on the high bank seemed now to flash and turn like a lighthouse. Was that the Little Ross he was looking at? Surely he could hear the chafing of the Solway tides. Was that not his mother bidding him lie down and sleep? James Cannon saw the distant signal no more. The lights of other days beckoned him, and he attended to their signal.
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Below in the left luggage office stood Muckle Alick. He was taking his mate's place at that night's express. He had asked away in order to visit his sweetheart, Alick knew. Though certainly his mate had not mentioned it in his application to the station-master. Many a time had he done the same for the sake of Mirren Terregles.
Muckle Alick was arranging the parcels—which were to go, and which to be delivered on the morrow. He laid them neatly on long high benches at opposite sides of the room, with the larger ones below on the floor. There was no work of Muckle Alick's doing which was not perfectly done, and as featly and daintily as a girl twitches her crochet needles among the cotton.
So engrossed was Alick in this work that it was five minutes past ten before he looked up at the clock—a cheap one which he had bought from a Jew pedlar, and fixed upon the wall himself—"to see the time to go home by," his mates said. The clock told him it was time to go home already.
He started up and rushed out. The London express was due from the Irish Boat! It passed Netherby without stopping, running on to the other line for thirty miles, which from the Junction was a single one. Duncan Urquhart's heavily-laden goods ought already to have passed. It was James Cannon's duty to keep back the express till he could turn the goods on to a siding, so that the rails might be kept clear for the passage of the express five minutes later.
Muckle Alick started up in instant affright. He had not heard Duncan Urquhart's heavy train go rumbling by.
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