Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/253



was a little gray-haired hostler, wiper, sweeper, assistant night man in the roundhouse at Big Cloud, anything you like, and this is the story he told me one night, leaning against the blackened jamb of one of the big doors, wiping his hands occasionally upon a hunk of greasy waste.

They were a rough lot out in the mountains in the days when the Hill Division was shaking her steel into something like a permanent right of way—a pretty rough lot. The railroaders because they had to be; the rest because they were just that way naturally. Miners and Indians made up the citizenship mostly, and there's no worse mixture. They've got the redskins corralled on reserves now; but they hadn't then, and it didn't take more than one bad word and one drop of bad whisky to set things in lively motion.

There's a few highfaluting poems, and some other things, about the noble red man that works you up so when you read them that you get to wishing the Almighty had seen fit to let you be a red man, too. Well, that's all right in its way because, after you've rubbed elbows with some of the real thing, you realize that the world owes the poets a living just as much