Trucks

HERE were thirteen men on the siding platform. They had been there, more or less, for the last ten evenings when the branch-line train went by. At the beginning they patiently and suavely demanded of the guard, the stoker, and the engine-driver adequate reasons as to why grain-trucks had not come up as ordered. Later, they put the matter differently; but it was after Harry Morel had threatened to tie Sandy, the engineer, to his own cow-catcher, and go gathering trucks himself all up and down the line, that Sandy passed Linnear Siding full steam, and—by popular tradition—skulked in the van with the stoker and the guard.

Harry Morel was working-manager for Jeydon on the great Southern New Zealand wheat plains at this time. For which reason he came to make the fourteenth man on the station, and clattered up the boarding to locate Carre by the light of the pipe on his nose-tip. Carre always smoked a stub.

The life of a new excitement tingled him at touch of the first shadow that he fell over, and he bit off the eternal catchword, “Any trucks yet?” to grab Peters by the elbow.

“What’s up, Pete? Not trucks really?”

“No such luck, I’m afraid.”

Peters ran a farm in his own right, but he took no pride in it just now. His oats were booked to sail per S.S. Ionic in two days, and he saw no possible hope of fulfilling his contract.

He came with Harry, step for step. “No; it’s the Traffic Manager. Going up to the terminus for a constitutional. We’re just waiting to give him a cheer. He’ll be along in about five minutes.”

“Now what does he mean by that?” Harry backed up to the ten-by-six station-house, shouldering Carre and little Denis Morant. “He’s a cheeky old gentleman, I don’t think—comin’ along this line just now. Does he want to know what the gentle and bovine farmer feels like with his grain blocked at every siding, and Government usin’ his legitimate trucks for excursion porterage? All serene. We’ll show him. It’s scandalous, of course. Wish we’d had time to let some more chaps know. Could have given him a ripping surprise-party.”

“We would so,” purred Denis, and Carre said:

“My boss is going off his head over it, I think. Rushes down to Christchurch four days a week, and raises Cain generally. What’s yours do, Harry?”

“Pitches in letters—private, public, and personal—specially personal. I left him at his sixteenth. It’s no earthly good, either. They must get pecks of ’em at the head office every morning.”

The Government laid the blame on the wet season, which had caused farmers to rush their grain precipitately, thereby creating a block at the main, and the consequent clogging of every separate wayside artery. The farmers laid the blame on everybody and everything—very often with justice. And the grain sat in great square masses on each siding that tapped the plain, and got wet owing to a shortage of tarpaulins.

Peters spoke with his teeth clenched on his pipe.

“Faulkner’s inclined to be nasty. Missed three boats already, and he’ll forfeit if he can’t get his stuff away this week. you freeze on to him when she comes by, Harry. We don’t want any stone-throwing or pot-shooting.”

“Don’t we? My Saint Peter, we do! That’s just where you make the mistake. Hillo, Marton. Been slating ’em down at headquarters again?”

Marton worked his thousand acres with his three sons and a brother, and he had grown stooped in the serving of it

“Yes,” he said eagerly. “Told ’em my stuff wuz booked fur shipment on Sat’d’y an’ I must git it off to onest. That wuz right, eh, eh?”

“Quite right We all say that, of course. Blayne will begin to drop to it directly. Hope you didn’t say the Suffolk, Marton. ’Bout forty of us have plunked for her already. She’d be sunk long ago if she’d tried to load the half of it”

“I knowed that,” said Marton, in pride. “So I just mentioned the Wakanui. That wuz right, eh? Nobody’s got her, hev they?”

Hairy spoke softly, for the seven who heard grinned without explanation.

“No, my dear chap. P’r’aps they haven’t. And p’r’aps you’ve forgotten that she went down off the Hen and Chickens about a year ago? Yes; I thought so. One does forget these little things. But I’m afraid you’ve rather bust the show up now, Marton. The Government will begin to think we’re all lying. So we are—the bulk of us, anyway. But they’re not supposed to know it. Jove! there’s the headlight swelling. Close up, you fellows.”

Greet slouched across to Denis Morant. He knew that Denis and his brother had about five thousand bushels on that platform.

“I sneaked four tarpaulins out o’ them trucks as went up ter Gatefield larst night,” he said. “I’d’ a’ sneaked the trucks too, on’y Sandy didn’t more’n slow down ter let a swaggie off. There’s a big josser at Gatefield—Hunt, I s’pose. He gits what he wants. Yer kin have two o’ them tarpaulins, sir, ef yer like. your grain’s bin out longer than mine.”

“Thanks awfully.” Two tarpaulins would have been about as useful as a handerkchief [sic] to Denis. “I expect the top bags are wet already, though. I’ll have to let it slide. Right, Harry. What’s the word? What?”

The Traffic Manager was an easy man and not overbold. He'd come from his city office, where rude letters were put in the waste-paper basket, to find out—comfortably, and from the cushioned seat of a railway carriage—what possible reason men could have for writing such letters. And that night was to him one of pure terror.

Seven branch-line stations out of nine seethed with shouting maniacs, half-seen and horrible in the frail light, fierce-voiced, and demanding trucks—trucks—trucks. He showed his mild-whiskered head at one siding and said:

“My good men, do you suppose I carry trucks in my portmanteau?” But he had all the shutters up before Sandy whistled the next warning.

So it was that Harry, leading vituperation in the forefront, drew blank, and swore earnestly as without pause the tail-lights wriggled out in the night.

“Gone to earth right enough, the old fox. Well?”

It was presumably Faulkner going mad with celerity. He waved a scrap of paper tossed from a rear carriage.

“He chucked it—Jim Frost as was aboard. He says as how they’ve left trucks—scores of trucks—at Maranui. For Swayne, of course. Swayne’s selling to Flout.”

Flout was in the Government secrets. So rumor said.

“There’s something rotten in the State of Denmark.” Carre shrugged his shoulders. “No good waiting here any longer. I’ll make home and get asked if I’ve nabbed any trucks. Boss is given to repetition. Coming along, Harry?”

“Will you dry up?” Harry’s eyes were contracted, and he whistled softly behind shut teeth—both war-signals to those who knew. “Maranui’s a bare three miles, isn’t it? And only Hollis and Swayne cart there. Swayne won’t bother to set a watch. What’s the grade? One in sixty? Ah! How many of you fellows can bring up your cart-horses to Maranui in less’n half an hour?”

There was one minute of deep-breathed silence. Then young Pat Freer flung himself across his saddle and bolted off, shouting:

“I’ll bring four—and hauling tackle.”

“And I can get six,” said Carre. “Thank Heaven we’re plowing at this end.”

“Leadin’ chains—with hooks. Carre, you are a worthy man.

But Greet had gone, and Smith had gone. The rest lived too far away.

Peters hesitated.

“I suppose Swayne will be all right. Plout’s backing him.

“Don’t care whether Swayne’s all right or not.” Harry was tightening his girths with precision. “We’re going to be all right. That’s the main point. I say, you chaps! Get a move on. We’ll need to do some shunting ’fore the others come along.”

It was a gloomy, low-clouded night, with a slight scud to chill the body; and the dying column rode down to the attack with a few qualms and a great deal of joy. Swayne—being a creature of Plout’s—was an outcast, and deserved evil. Therefore there was a moral lesson attached to this thing also. Harry explained it all to Peters, whose strenuous desire could not blind him to the ethics of the matter.

A splatter of mud chased them between the bank-up line and the straight gorse fence, and in the drizzle that blew up out of the dark south one slip on the greasy going would have been sufficient to pile horses and men very promptly. But it was only Sheehan who thought of this, and he was too utterly scared to say so.

“Steady on, there,” shouted Harry, wrenching at his mare’s head; and a blacker bank rose out of the blackness to rightward.

A sudden ripple of matchlight washed weakly against the sides of the great galleons that curved like a beautiful new moon from end to end of the shunt-line and gave back a steely twinkle. Denis ran nosing among them, and flung about the truth that each man was discovering for himself.

“Twenty-five, I tell you. Twenty-five galopshus, full-bodied, double chaps. L. A.’s, the whole ging-bang of ’em, I absolutely believe. And won’t there be wigs on the green to-morrow?”

“My word, it’s jest a little bit o’ all right.” This was Craig. And then he growled at a couple of five-ton low-siders.

Silently, and with stern intent, the little army attacked truck after truck. They eased the strain, that the stolid, unwieldy things might be uncoupled. They laid their hands to the wheels, or their shoulders to the hinder parts, or they grappled the fore-chains about their bodies and pulled. Their dug-in heels slipped in the wet gravel, and the chill of the flanged wheels flayed their fingers. But, by inch and inch, by foot and foot, with the gathering way to help, the trucks were forced over the points where Harry commanded, and ranged—properly spaced—for the haulage.

Freer brought his four down at a hand-gallop, with clanking chains and ponderous thunder of hoofs. To the great seven-and-a-half wagon that waited they were joined with a blessing and sent forward. And Smith, with his three full teams, roared up on the wheels of Greet and Carre.

Then began a long procession that trailed, like a hunting snake, through the driving mist of the night. The horses stumbled on the wind-swept sleepers, and—where it was suddenly steep—the men, of necessity, pushed behind. But, for the most part, they attended jealously to the matter in band, and kept the exactitude of a tape-measure between bit and truck-tall.

Harry drove that night a wilder team than ever before, when he harnessed some of the hacks to the rearmost truck by belts and odd chains and fencing-wire. Carre grinned to hear the clatter directly behind him, when the five of them ran pig-headedly amuck, and tangled much of the gear into a hard knot before they lay down and squealed.

But Harry discarded help in a curt and pointed speech at those who would take his pleasure from him, and brought in his truck to the siding triumphant, not a quarter-mile after Carre’s.

Faulkner’s whole line of wheat sacks must go, undoubtedly. That would be—approximately—eight L.A.’s. And Peters’s also— which totaled up to fifteen.

“Thank the Lord, oats is lighter loadin’,” muttered Greet.

Smith had ordered out every man on his place, and Carre’s plowmen were there, and the three odd-jobbere who helped Freer work his little lot. They toiled like fiends, man and master, through the bitterness of the night—loading, eternally loading, in a nightmare that grew more cruel as the strain gripped into them.

Little Denis Morant fell out first, in a condition of wrathful collapse. Then Carre gave way, and after him another. But still the filled trucks were shunted slowly downward, and coupled for Sandy to take on in the morning. The thought of this was a clean and abiding joy and helped them immensely.

Slade put in a word for young Sherriff.

“He’s got no more’n ’ud fill one o’ the big trucks, ’n a single. But it’s prime millin’ wheat booked ter Cotton, an’ he’s goin’ fair ratty over it He’s wantin’ the money, yer know. Wife’s sick. That’s why he ain’t here ter-night. Give him his show ’stead o’ me.”

“And I’ll ante up the low-sider,” said Harry handsomely. “I’ll have to tell the boss I fought you for the lot, you know, or he’ll chuck me out. Don’t leave him one, you chaps. Miserly old beast”

It was not so that Harry spoke of Lane in the Mindoorie days; but he was ever unregenerate.

“Hope Swayne won’t be annoyed,” said Carre, looking down the wet metals in the dull of a gray dawning. “Verily he will make complaint to the gentleman of Traffic, and verily the gentleman will talk to Sandy. I think things are going to be a leetle bit hot for Sandy and Co.”

“P’r’aps it will be as well to bunk before the train comes down,” Peters returned from a gloat over his fat truckfuls. “If Sandy gets into a row we must back ’im up of course. But it’s been a rorty piece of work. Harry, you beggar, you’ve saved my bacon this time, right enough.”

“If you give me away,” said Harry to the assembled company, “I’ll lay information against the whole boiling of you. Remember that. I’ve got my own reputation to consider. So-long.”

He lifted himself stiffly to the saddle and trotted off home.

And the wet, aching knot on the siding melted away with swiftness, so that there remained only the trucks to give explanation to Sandy and his satellites when the morning train came down.