Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad LifeSpearman, Frank H. (Frank Hamilton)
General
Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life
Spearman, Frank H. (Frank Hamilton)
Fiction; Railroad stories; Short stories, American
The doughty engineer lifted and dragged and hauled Delaroo home with
him. If there was no hospital, Martie had said, no pest-house, no
nothing, just bring him home. They had all had the smallpox up at
Sampson's except the baby, and the doctor had said lately the baby
appeared to need something. They had really everything up at Sampson's
sooner or later: measles, diphtheria, croup, everything on earth except
money. And Martie Sampson, with the washing and mending and scrubbing
and cooking, nursed the outcast wiper through his smallpox. The baby
took it, of course, and Martie nursed the baby through and went on just
the same as before--washing, mending, cooking, scrubbing. Delaroo when
he got well went to firing; Neighbor offered the job as a kind of
consolation prize; and he went to firing on the 264 for Maje Sampson.
It was then that Maje took Delaroo fairly in hand and showed him the
unspeakable folly of trying to get through the world without the
comradeship and benefits of the B. S. L.'s of U., and the fraters of the
order of the double-barrelled star of MacDuff. Delaroo caught a good
deal of it on the sidings, where they lay most of their time dodging
first-class trains; and evenings when they got in from their runs
Delaroo, having nowhere else to go, used to wander, after supper, up to
Sampson's. At Sampson's he would sit in the shade of the lamp and smoke
while Maje, in his shirt-sleeves, held forth on the benevolent orders,
and one boy crawled through the bowels of the organ and another pulled
off the tablecloth--Delaroo always saving the lamp--and a third harassed
the dog, and a fourth stuck pins in a fifth--and Martie, sitting on the
dim side of the shade, so the operation would not appear too glaring,
mended at Maje's mammoth trousers.
Delaroo would sit and listen to Maje and watch the heave of the organ
with the boy, and the current of the tablecloth with the lamp, and the
quarter in which the dog was chewing the baby, and watch Martie's
perpetual-motion fingers for a whole evening, and go back to the
boarding-house without passing a word with anybody on earth, he was that
silent.
In this way the big, bluffing engineer gradually worked Delaroo into all
the secret benevolent orders in Medicine Bend--that meant pretty much
every one on earth. There arose always, however, in connection with the
initiations of Delaroo one hitch: he never seemed quite to know whom he
wanted to leave his insurance money to. He could go the most complicated
catechism without a hitch every time, for Maje spent weeks on the
sidings drilling him, until it came to naming the beneficiary; there he
stuck. Nobody could get out of him to whom he wanted his money to go.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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