get offand sleep in the towns at night while the train waited for daylight. Andeach train carried a guard of Ecuadoriano soldiers which was the mostdangerous of all. They were supposed to protect the train crews, butwhenever trouble started they unlimbered their rifles and joined the mob.You see, whenever a train wreck occurred, the first cry of the spiggotieswas ‘Kill the Gringos!’ They always did that, and proceeded to kill thetrain crew and whatever chance Gringo passengers that’d escaped beingkilled in the accident. Which is their kind of arithmetic, which I toldyou a while back as being different from ours.
“Shucks! Before the day was out I was to find out for myself that thatex-conductor wasn’t lying. It was over at Duran. I was to take my runon the first division out to Quito, for which place I was to start nextmorning—only one through train running every twenty-four hours. It wasthe afternoon of my first day, along about four o’clock, when the boilersof the _Governor Hancock_ exploded and she sank in sixty feet of wateralongside the dock. She was the big ferry boat that carried the railroadpassengers across the river to Guayaquil. It was a bad accident, but itwas the cause of worse that followed. By half-past four, big trainloadsbegan to arrive. It was a feast day and they’d run an excursion upcountry but of Guayaquil, and this was the crowd coming back.
“And the crowd—there was five thousand of them—wanted to get ferriedacross, and the ferry was at the bottom of the river, which wasn’t ourfault. But by the Spiggoty arithmetic, it was. ‘Kill the Gringos!’shouts one of them. And right there the beans were spilled. Most of usgot away by the skin of our teeth. I raced on the heels of the MasterMechanic, carrying one of his babies for him, for the locomotives thatwas just pulling out. You see, way down there away from everywhere theyjust got to save their locomotives in times of trouble, because, withoutthem, a railroad can’t be run. Half a dozen American wives and as manychildren were crouching on the cab floors along with the rest of us whenwe pulled out; and the Ecuadoriano soldiers, who should have beenprotecting our lives and property, turned loose with their rifles andmust have given us all of a thousand rounds before we got out of range.
“We camped up country and didn’t come back to clean up until next day.It was some cleaning. Every flat-car, box-car, coach, asthmatic switchengine, and even hand-car that mob of Spiggoties had shoved off the dockinto sixty feet of water on top of the _Governor Hancock_. They’d burntthe round house, set fire to the coal bunkers, and made a scandal of therepair shops. Oh, yes, and there were three of our fellows they’d gotthat we had to bury mighty quick. It’s hot weather all the time downthere.”
Julian Jones came to a full pause and over his shoulder studied thestraight-before-her gaze and forbidding expression of his wife’s face.
“I ain’t forgotten the nugget,” he assured me.
“Nor the hussy,” the little woman snapped, apparently at the mud-henspaddling on the surface of the lagoon.
“I’ve been travelling toward the nugget right along—”
“There was never no reason for you to stay in that dangerous country,”his wife snapped in on him.
“Now, Sarah,” he appealed. “I was working for you right along.” And tome he explained: “The risk was big, but so was the pay. Some months Iearned as high as five hundred gold. And here was Sarah waiting for meback in Nebraska—”
“An’ us engaged two years,” she complained to the Tower of Jewels.
“—What of the strike, and me being blacklisted, and getting typhoid downin Australia, and everything,” he went on. “And luck was with me on thatrailroad. Why, I saw fellows fresh from the States pass out, some ofthem not a week on their first run. If the diseases and the railroaddidn’t get them, then it was the Spiggoties got them. But it just wasn’tmy fate, even that time I rode my engine down to the bottom of aforty-foot washout. I lost my fireman; and the conductor and theSuperintendent of Rolling Stock (who happened to be running down to Duranto meet his bride) had their heads knifed off by the Spiggoties andparaded around on poles. But I lay snug as a bug under a couple of feetof tender coal, and they thought I’d headed for tall timber—lay there aday and a night till the excitement cooled down. Yes, I was lucky. Theworst that happened to me was I caught a cold once, and another time hada carbuncle. But the other fellows! They died like flies, what ofYellow Jack, pneumonia, the Spiggoties, and the railroad. The troublewas I didn’t have much chance to pal with them. No sooner’d I get someintimate with one of them he’d up and die—all but a fireman namedAndrews, and he went loco for keeps.
“I made good on my job from the first, and lived in Quito in a ’dobehouse with whacking big Spanish tiles on the roof that I’d rented. And Inever had much trouble with the Spiggoties, what of letting them sneakfree rides in the tender or on the cowcatcher. Me throw them off?Never! I took notice, when Jack Harris put off a bunch of them, that Iattended his funeral _muy pronto_—”
“Speak English,” the little woman beside him snapped.
“Sarah just can’t bear to tolerate me speaking Spanish,” he apologized.“It gets so on her nerves that I promised not to. Well, as I was saying,the goose hung high and everything was going hunky-dory, and I was pilingup my wages to come north to Nebraska and marry Sarah, when I run on toVahna—”
“The hussy!” Sarah hissed.
“Now, Sarah,” her towering giant of a husband begged, “I just got tomention her or I can’t tell about the nugget.—It was one night when I wastaking a locomotive—no train—down to Amato, about thirty miles fromQuito. Seth Manners was my fireman. I was breaking him in to engineerfor himself, and I was letting him run the locomotive while I sat up inhis seat meditating about Sarah here. I’d just got a letter from her,begging as usual for me to come home and hinting as usual about thedangers of an unmarried man like me running around loose in a countryfull of senoritas and fandangos. Lord! If she could only a-seen them.Positive frights, that’s what they are, their faces painted white ascorpses and their lips red as—as some of the train wrecks I’ve helpedclean up.
“It was a lovely April night, not a breath of wind, and a tremendous bigmoon shining right over the top of Chimborazo.—Some mountain that. Therailroad skirted it twelve thousand feet above sea level, and the top ofit ten thousand feet higher than that.
“Mebbe I was drowsing, with Seth running the engine; but he slammed onthe brakes so sudden hard that I darn near went through the cab window.
“‘What the—’ I started to yell, and ‘Holy hell,’ Seth says, as both of uslooked at what was on the track. And I agreed with Seth entirely in hisremark. It was an Indian girl—and take it from me, Indians ain’tSpiggoties by any manner of means. Seth had managed to fetch a stopwithin twenty feet of her, and us bowling down hill at that! But thegirl. She—”
I saw the form of Mrs. Julian Jones stiffen, although she kept her gazefixed balefully upon two mud-hens that were prowling along the lagoonshallows below us. “The hussy!” she hissed, once and implacably. Joneshad stopped at the sound, but went on immediately.
“She was a tall girl, slim and slender, you know the kind, with blackhair, remarkably long hanging, down loose behind her, as she stood thereno more afraid than nothing, her arms spread out to stop the engine. Shewas wearing a slimpsy sort of garment wrapped around her that wasn’tcloth but ocelot skins, soft and dappled, and silky. It was all she hadon—”
“The hussy!” breathed Mrs. Jones.
But Mr. Jones went on, making believe that he was unaware of theinterruption.
“‘Hell of a way to stop a locomotive,’ I complained at Seth, as I climbeddown on to the right of way. I walked past our engine and up to thegirl, and what do you think? Her eyes were shut tight. She wastrembling that violent that you would see it by the moonlight. And shewas barefoot, too.
“‘What’s the row?’ I said, none too gentle. She gave a start, seemed tocome out of her trance, and opened her eyes. Say! They were big andblack and beautiful. Believe me, she was some looker—”
/> “The hussy!” At which hiss the two mud-hens veered away a few feet. ButJones was getting himself in hand, and didn’t even blink.
“‘What are you stopping this locomotive for?’ I demanded in Spanish.Nary an answer. She stared at me, then at the snorting engine and thenburst into tears, which you’ll admit is uncommon behaviour for an Indianwoman.
“‘If you try to get rides that way,’ I slung at her in Spiggoty Spanish(which they tell me is some different from regular Spanish), ‘you’ll betaking one smeared all over our cowcatcher and headlight, and it’ll be upto my fireman to scrape you off.’
“My Spiggoty Spanish wasn’t much to brag on, but I could see sheunderstood, though she only shook her head and wouldn’t speak. But greatMoses, she was some looker—”
I glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Jones, who must have caught me out ofthe tail of her eye, for she muttered: “If she hadn’t been do you thinkhe’d a-taken her into his house to live?”
“Now hold on, Sarah,” he protested. “That ain’t fair. Besides, I’mtelling