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
"True as God's word. You might as well know it now. There's the man that
stood between me and the loss of my job. It's been coming on me for two
year. He knew it, that's why he stayed in my cab. He stayed because I
was color blind. He knowed I'd git ketched the minute a new fireman come
in, Neighbor. He watched the signals--Delaroo. I'm color blind, God help
me." Maje Sampson sat down by the coffin. Martie hushed her crying; the
three sat in the darkness.
"It wouldn't worry me so much if it wasn't f'r the family, Neighbor. The
woman--and the boys. I ain't much a-savin'; you know that. If you can
gi' me a job I can get bread an' butter out of, give it to me. I can't
pull a train; my eyes went out with this man here. I wish to God it was
me, and him standing over. A man that's color blind, and don't know a
thing on God's earth but runnin' an engine, is worse 'n' a dead man."
Neighbor went home thinking.
They buried Delaroo. But even then they were not through with him.
Delaroo had insurance in every order in the Bend, which meant almost
every one on earth. There was no end to his benefit certificates, and no
known beneficiaries. But when they overhauled his trunk they found every
last certificate filed away up to the last paid assessment and the last
quarter's dues. Then came a shock. People found out there was a
beneficiary. While the fraters were busy making their passes Delaroo had
quietly been directing the right honorable recording secretaries to make
the benefits run to Neighbor, and so every dollar of his insurance ran.
Nobody was more thunderstruck at the discovery than the master mechanic
himself.
Yet Delaroo meant something by it. After Neighbor had studied over it
nights the best of a month; after Maje Sampson had tried to take the
color test and failed, as he persistently said he would; after he had
gone to tinkering in the roundhouse, and from tinkering respectably,
and by degrees down the hill to wiping at a dollar and forty cents a day
with time and a half for overtime--Neighbor bethought himself all of a
sudden one day of a paper Delaroo had once given him and asked him to
keep.
He had put it away in the storekeeper's safe with his own papers and the
drawings of his extension front end patent--and safely forgotten all
about it. It was the day they had to go into the county court about the
will that was not, when he recollected Delaroo's paper and pulled it out
of its envelope. There was only a half sheet of paper, inside, with this
writing from Delaroo to Neighbor:
R. B. A.--What is coming to me on ensurance give to Marty
Sampson, wife of Maje. Give my trunk to P. McGraw.
Rispk.,
P. DE LA ROUX.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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