Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online

Chapter 5

2017 1/8/1981 – 2138 1/8/1981:
C&SL Snowplow Extra One

Betty and Kate were manning the office when Bud’s call came. The Albany River fire department had arrived hours before, and while they awaited the next train to Warsaw, they decamped to Rick’s Café.

Rick usually closed his little hole in the wall late in the afternoon, but without being told by anyone he sensed that tonight, of all nights, there was a real need for him to stay open. The lights of the restaurant became a beacon in the storm, a magnet for those whose attention had first been drawn to the railroad office a hundred yards away.

Inside that office, Bud’s surprise announcement turned the place into an instant mass of ordered chaos. Thus it was that the first word of the evacuation train from Warsaw to reach Rick’s came with a call from Kate: “There’s going to be five hundred evacuees from Warsaw here in an hour. Have coffee ready for them.”

Before Rick could say a word, she had hung up the phone and was dialing another number.

Betty and Kate dialed a lot of numbers in a few minutes. Kate was something of a mover and a shaker in the little community of Spearfish Lake, and she did know a lot of people – Bud’s faith was well placed.

Realizing that, by herself, finding places to stay for that many people in that short of a time was impossible, Kate did the next best thing: she called several members of the Spearfish Lake Woman’s Club, and got each of them to call around the community, looking for homes where people could take evacuees in, then asked those women to bring their lists to the railroad office as soon as possible. Arranging transportation to those homes involved a call to Sheriff Upton, telling him to come up with some school buses.

This in itself was probably as tough a chore, since it involved finding ten bus drivers who lived in town, plus someone who could get the keys for the buses and permission to use them, plus someone to plow out the parking lot at the bus barn. But buses would be waiting at the railroad office when the train got in, and the women’s club members could guide a busload of people to homes they’d contacted.

Even with Betty helping, at two or three minutes per call it was twenty minutes before the ball was rolling. Arranging for people to meet the train and assist people off was easy; there were all those Albany River firemen over at Rick’s to call on, and given a good start Rick could probably produce twenty gallons of coffee or more and get it over to the railroad office. Food was a little harder, since there was no way Rick would be able to prepare a little snack for five hundred people on such a short notice. Deciding cold food was about the best that could be done, she called the new manager of the Spearfish Lake Super Market, told him the railroad’s pickup would be there in thirty minutes, and to be prepared to load every packaged doughnut and roll in the place into the truck.

By now, people were starting to arrive at the railroad office. There was a fair amount of room for them to stand around, since the office was the former Decatur and Overland passenger and freight station, but it hadn’t been this busy in years.

Betty told Kate that Bud ought to be back in range by now, so she called him on the VHF to inform him that they’d be unloading at the station platform.

“Figured that,” Bud replied. “We’re about half an hour out and coming on strong.”

“Bud,” she called back. “I just had a thought. Do you have any ambulance or wheelchair cases on the train?”

“Got one ambulance case,” the radio squawked. “And they want the ambulance back. Have Joe Upton call the ambulance directly and see if there’s any harm done with a transfer. I really don’t want to have to mess around with the switching it would take to unload it. I wouldn’t know about any wheelchair or stretcher cases that might be on the buses or in the way car, and there’s no way to find out till we get in. I know they left one ambulance down there, so you might have them meet us anyway. How’s everything going down there?”

“Going fine,” Kate replied, biting her lip. Now was not the time to give Bud hell about the short notice. “Ed just walked in . . . just a second . . . he says he just rode Walt’s snowmobile out to the wye and lined the switches for you so you can come straight in.”

There was a crowd of Albany River firemen and Spearfish Lake residents waiting on the office platform a little after seven in the evening when the Milwaukee’s headlamp split the night. With air horns sounding, the two engines pulled slowly past the platform, followed by the big plow and the way car. In the station’s lights, the ambulance and the school buses loaded on the flatcars looked strange indeed to the welcoming committee that Kate had organized.

Walt halted the train just before the back steps of the way car reached the far end of the platform. Unnoticed by the crowd, Bud told Walt on the VHF that he would be in the office if needed, then quietly got off the Rock and walked through the snow to the back door of the old station. On his way, he noticed the school buses sitting in the parking lot, and a babble of voices told him that the first evacuees were getting off and going inside – and yes, were being greeted by hot coffee and doughnuts before they boarded the Spearfish Lake school buses for the short trip to the homes where they would stay. Over the babble, Bud picked out the words, “ . . . says she hadn’t picked a name out for him, but now she wants to call him ‘Stormy.’”

That put a smile on Bud’s tired face. He went into the office and told the women, “You two did yourselves proud. I told Walt there was nobody else in town but you two who I could depend on to put something like this together with no notice.”

Bud’s praise stifled most of Kate’s well-planned tirade. “You could have given us a little warning,” she sniffed.

“I called you as soon as I found out that nobody had thought of doing anything on this end,” Bud said in defense.

“How could anybody be so stupid not think that much through?” she replied.

“Damn lucky anybody thought of it at all. We barely thought of loading these people onto the buses. John came up with that. I get the impression that Fred Linder is the only one who’s got any idea of what’s really going on up there, and he’s trying to be fourteen places at once.”

Betty broke into the discussion, “Since you brought all these people with you, I take it that things aren’t any better up there.”

“No,” Bud agreed, “But not much worse, either. They’re holding the same line they’ve held since noon, or at least they were when we left. We brought all these people with us since the wind is shifting, and all the junk from the burning fertilizer hoppers was getting too close to the school, where they’d taken this crowd. What’s the status of the next load?”

“The vehicles are loaded on and tied down. You’ve got the Albany River fire department and all their stuff,” Betty told him. “And you’ve got four trucks and two jeeps from the National Guard. They’re taking some people to set up a field kitchen, guard evacuated areas, and lend a hand where they can. People are all over the place, but most are close by. We’ve told everyone to come running when they hear the train whistle.”

“How many empty flats are we going to have left here?”

“Three. I told the National Guard guy – his name’s John Pacobel . . . ”

“I know him. I need to talk to him, too.”

“I told him to keep it light. Upton says that the Blair fire department is supposed to get here any time, so I told him we’d leave space for it. I also told him that you wouldn’t hold up for them unless they called in and were right at the edge of town. Is that all right?”

“That’s fine, Betty. You did great. We’ve still got a little time for Blair to get here, since we’ve got to get the rest of the Warsaw people unloaded.” As he spoke, he noticed the train pulling slowly forward, presumably to get more bus flats to the loading platform. “Then, we’ve got some switching to do to get the next load ready, so those flats can stay right up at the ramp until we’re all set to go.”

“Glad you think we did all right,” Betty told him. “Anything else we can do for you?”

“Ummmmmmm . . . did Rick’s stay open?”

“Yes, he’s had a crowd of firefighters there all night. The coffee is courtesy of him,” Kate told her husband.

“Great, have somebody go down there and bring some kind of food for Walt and John and Frank and me, and a thermos of coffee for each of us. See if you can get Upton on the horn and get us an ETA for Blair. I’ve got to go out and talk to Walt and Ed.”

Cliff Sprague was about half mad, but that was normal. “You could have sent one of your plows out to help us in.”

Linder tried to not get upset with Sprague, for he was too happy to see him: Sprague was the chief of the Walsenberg Volunteer Fire Department. With only an ailing village snowplow to support him, Sprague had led a six-hour struggle over forty-five miles of crooked forest roads to bring help from the east to Warsaw.

“Cliff, if you’d have given us a call, we’d have sent one. We’ve only had the county plows for an hour, since the train brought them up with Harry Masterfield’s bunch. Our village plow couldn’t break trail in this stuff, and the driver is too dumb to break wind and chew gum at the same time.”

This got Sprague even angrier. In an extremely curt tone, he asked, “What’s the situation?”

Linder told the newcomer about the fires in the paper storage warehouse and in the pulp yard, and warned him to have his men wear masks downwind of the burning fertilizer cars. Then, he got down to specifics: “I want to put you and your people on the warehouse fire. God knows why it hasn’t burnt through yet. My people have been on that since this morning, and the situation is stable for the moment. When that thing burns through, we want to try and protect the plant downwind more than we want to get after the fire in the shed.”

“Jesus,” Sprague swore. “Fifty miles through this shit to fight a toilet paper fire.”

Linder had a pretty good idea of what was eating Sprague. The Walsenberg chief was the kind of person that thought he had to have charge of everything, every time. If he’d been the second chief there – an hour and a half quicker – he might have been able to complain Linder into doing everything his way. Now, he was third in line, following a less abrasive but equally forceful Harry Masterfield, neither of whom liked the other one a bit. If Wally Borck from Hoselton wanted to make an issue of it – and Wally wouldn’t – then he was fourth in line. Tough, Cliff, Linder thought. You’re going to have to do it my way, this time.

Linder got back on his snowmobile. It would be hard, but he’d have to be nice to Sprague if he was going to get any cooperation at all out of Walsenberg. There was another thing to remember: not to trust Sprague any farther than he could throw a fit.

Bud’s first stop was at the engine shed, where he could hear the muffled noises of Sloat’s cursing from down under the Burlington somewhere.

Sloat had been a real find for Bud when the railroad was first getting under way. With the old equipment, he needed someone who could take care of it, and it had been difficult to find an experienced railroad diesel maintainer. They had struggled along with part-time help for months, and Bud had been bitching about it over a beer at the Legion to a friend, George Webb, who ran the local weekly newspaper.

“Maybe I can help you out,” Webb told him. “Friend of mine from high school just retired from the Navy and moved back home.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So he’s been riding around in the engine rooms of diesel subs since about 1944.”

There wasn’t a whole lot about railroad engines that had been a mystery to Sloat, and he soon got over what little was. Now even the D&O shops occasionally called Spearfish Lake for advice.

“What do you make of this thing?” Bud asked the former chief petty officer.

“Piece of shit, but we already knew that,” Sloat told him as he crawled out from underneath the engine. “John was right. The traction motors are wet and shorting out.”

“What can we do about it?” Bud replied. “We need this engine.”

“Dry it out and hope for the best,” was Sloat’s advice. “I’m gonna get some kerosene heaters and try to blow some heat into the trucks. Maybe by morning we can use it again. Maybe not.”

“Well, do the best you can with it,” Bud told him. “We need this thing if you can possibly get it running.”

“Better not depend on it,” was Sloat’s response.

Bud shrugged and headed back out into the storm. The Milwaukee was pulling ahead again, and Bud climbed up into its cab. Let’s see, he thought. That makes the way car and six buses. We’re getting there.

Bud hadn’t seen Walt since the train left Warsaw. In the dim light of the cab, Archer looked older and more exhausted than he possibly could have been, flu or no flu. It had been a long day for Walt, and the night would be longer.

“God, I wish Adam were here,” Bud told the engineer of the Milwaukee. “That’d give us enough people to at least switch off a bit. We’ve got to make another run right back up there, and the Burlington isn’t ready to go yet.”

“I suppose we can, Bud,” Walt said bravely. “Sure as hell wish we could take a break, though.”

“Can’t right now, Walt. Tell you what. You remember Linder wanting us to leave an engine up at Warsaw? If we do, there probably won’t be much for us to do with it. I’ll leave you there with it, and when I get to the point that I absolutely have to take a break, you can make a run down here and back.”

“That would help,” Archer coughed.

“Look,” Bud added, “I’ll have Frank go with you this time. You just set the throttle, and I’ll adjust. You rest in the corner of the cab, and I’ll give Frank a yell on the VHF and have him wake you up if there’s any engine driving to be done.”

“Thanks, Bud. That’ll help a little.”

“Good. Till then, though, you and John have got some switching to do. The two engines and the plow are hooked up right, but we’ve got the bus load on the wrong end, and we want to take the buses back. We’ve got to get the fertilizer hoppers off the end of this consist and leave them on Two. Also, I want to haul the flats on Three in the direction they’re going so they can unload straight ahead, like last time.”

“That’s a bunch of switching,” Penny commented.

“It is at that,” Bud agreed. “Also, before we go, I want to pull right up to the engine shed and top both engines off to the brim. We may need the fuel if we leave an engine up there. In fact, whether it’s you or me or the both of us, I think we ought to top off every time we get down here. If we get stuck somewhere, that buys us a bunch of time to get out before we have to shut down, drain the engines, and walk home.”

“It’ll also keep us warm while we’re waiting,” Penny noted.

“Bud,” the VHF squawked with Betty’s voice. “The guy from the National Guard you wanted to talk to is here.”

“I’ll be right there,” Bud replied into the radio before turning to the men in the Milwaukee. “You guys get hot on the switching. I’ll be in the office or the engine shed if you need me.”

Now that the Walsenberg Fire Department had arrived to relieve the lone Warsaw pumper and tanker that had stood off the fire at the paper warehouse for so long, Bruce Marshall felt that he could dare take a break. One of the firemen told him that Jim Horton had arranged for coffee and sandwiches at the school, and right about now, that sounded wonderful to the desperately tired plant manager.

It was only when he reached the school that he realized how tired and keyed up he was. He could barely hold a cup of coffee in his hand, and the shaking wasn’t shivering from the cold. A second cup of coffee warmed him, and he was a bit relieved to see Fred Linder arrive in the cafeteria. The fire chief brought his own cup of coffee and sat down beside Marshall, saying, “Now, I begin to see what the kids bitch about.”

“It’s food, and it’s here,” Marshall replied, Linder’s company bringing him under control. “At the moment, I can’t be too particular.”

“I know what you mean. How are things in the plant?”

“I can’t think of anything else that we can do over there,” Marshall related. “If you can think of anything else that’s remotely possible for us to do, I’ll see that it gets done. About the only thing I can think of doing right now is worry about it.”

“Would it help you if I told you that everybody in town is worrying along with you? You’re not alone.”

The plant supervisor looked around him. No one sat nearby, but he lowered his voice almost to a whisper and leaned over to the fire chief, saying, “Fred, do you have any idea how this fire started? Could it have been arson?”

“I talked to Whitehall about it,” Linder replied. “My guess is that something electrical screwed up in the warehouse. Clay seems to think it could have started with that door motor that’s been giving trouble, and he could be right. But there’s no way for us to tell. Even when we get the fire out in there, there probably won’t be any way to tell, ever. When the fire’s out, I’ll have the fire marshals from down in Camden go through the place, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll find anything, either.”

“Guess we’ll just have to wait and see,” Marshall replied, and changed the subject. Perhaps he was getting a little paranoid from all the worry, but he had some suspicions that he wasn’t ready to talk about right now.

“John, you heard about the toxic smoke up there in Warsaw, didn’t you?” Bud asked the National Guard captain.

“I’d heard. What about it?”

“Did you have your people bring gas masks? They may well be right in the middle of it.”

“Didn’t think of it. I suppose we ought to get them. Is it all right if we unload one of our trucks to go back over to the armory?”

“Take our pickup,” Bud said. Bud had been an enlisted man in the early days of Vietnam, and Pacobel reinforced all his old opinions about officers and horses’ asses. “While you’re at it, why don’t you bring every gas mask Battery D owns? There’s a lot of people up there trying to work in that stuff without any lung protection at all. I’d like a few of them to spread around the train crew, too.”

“But . . . ”

Betty broke in. “Joe Upton for you, Bud. He says it’s important.”

“Good,” Bud said, reaching for the phone. “Maybe it’s about Blair.” Putting the phone to his ear, he said to the National Guard man, “Believe me, John, this is a very important service that the Guard can perform.”

“All right,” the green-clad man agreed. “I’ll send someone.”

“Make it quick,” Bud said, punching the phone button and saying, “What’s up, Joe? Is Blair in town?”

“No, nowhere near it,” the sheriff replied. “You might as well leave without them. That’s not why I called, anyway. You know, that girl had a hell of a ride on the ambulance on the way down here. She and her kid are all right, but the odds are that we’re going to have some injured people coming down here some trip with you, and a ride like that could kill them.”

“Putting the ambulance on the flat seemed like the quickest thing to do,” Bud replied. “But, on the way down here, I kind of suspected that they might have a rough time of it.”

“Got any ideas to smooth it out?”

Bud stared at the ceiling for a moment. “Well, the way car doesn’t exactly ride like a passenger car, but it might be a bit better. We’ve got bunks and a heater in there. If you were to get it loaded with medical equipment and what not, we could use it.”

“How long have we got?”

“Twenty minutes, half an hour, maybe longer. By the way, they want the ambulance we brought with us back up there.”

“I knew that. We’ll be there as quick as we can with emergency equipment. Wait for us.”

Only when a rare recognizable landmark loomed out of the snowblown night would any of the six Hoselton men have any idea of where they were. There were no landmarks here, and Clint Borck, the fire chief’s son, missed the corner. Where the road turned, he went straight.

The pickups weren’t much use in this stuff. A two-foot blade in a six-foot drift is next to useless, but even Clint was surprised how deep into the ditch the pickup ended up, considering that the ditch was full of snow. The pickup’s doors were buried. Clint opened the driver’s side window and started to dig with his hands toward the surface, but was soon met by snow shovels coming the other way.

None of the six made much comment as they stood in the lights of the second pickup. They’d been going since noon, it was long after dark, they were less than half the way to Spearfish Lake, and they were tired. They’d had trucks stuck so many times that it wasn’t surprising any more, but they hadn’t yet stuck one as bad as Clint’s Dodge was now.

“I got my doubts,” Clint said.

“Better try it,” the tanker driver replied. “It’s gonna be hell with only one blade.”

“Never get it out with just the Ford,” Clint replied. “Let’s hook up all three trucks.”

They got the chains out again. It wasn’t the first time they’d had to use all the trailing trucks to get the lead pickup out of a drift. The chains were close at hand, and they were by now all too experienced at using them.

Even with all the wheels pulling, they just spun in place. Clint had really stuck it. They set to work with snow shovels, and before long they had managed to clean out around the pickup a bit.

The second time, the pull went all right, and the pickup managed to lurch back up onto the road. The only problem was that the tanker driver wasn’t looking where he was backing, and he managed to stick the tanker into another ditch on the far side of the road.

There wasn’t much that could be said. Clint’s pickup, which had stalled in the ditch, had to be moved before they could get a pull on the tanker, and with all the snow that had gotten up under the hood, it wasn’t really anxious to run. Eventually, they managed to get it to run on maybe five of eight cylinders, and Clint sat in it with his foot flat on the floor while the other five men turned to on the tanker.

The tanker wasn’t stuck too bad, but if the Dodge had been able to pull, it would have been welcome. Slowly, reluctantly, the Ford and the pumper managed to yank the tanker back up onto the road.

“You better lead for a while,” Clint yelled to the Ford’s driver. “Until this thing gets itself dried out, it’s gonna have a hell of a time pulling its own weight.”

It was strangely silent in Bud’s office after he ended the call with Upton. It was the first time he’d had a chance to think ahead more than the next few minutes since early in the morning.

There would have to be at least one more run, for Blair, and who knew about after that? The weather reports even that afternoon had the storm ending that evening, but now it seemed that the low had stalled. They were calling for at least another day before the weather cleared. That told Bud that the weather bureau didn’t know, either. Besides, Bud’s decades of living with winter storms had long ago taught him that the wind would have to shift clear around before the weather would clear. So far, it had shifted only a small fraction of what was necessary. It could be blowing and snowing like this for days.

Bud suspected that he couldn’t carry on like this for days.

The Burlington could possibly be made ready to help out at some time in the future, but that couldn’t be depended on. In any case, it had to be sent with at least one other engine, since it had already proved it couldn’t survive a round trip to Warsaw in this weather. If Bud left the Milwaukee at Warsaw, like Linder wanted, then that put a lot of weight onto the dependability of the Rock. Well, the Rock could be depended upon, but who would run it?

Bud knew that he had already asked more of Walt than he should; he couldn’t be counted on to last much longer. Just about as soon as he and John started on this trip, Bud knew they would be running illegally, the hours-of-service limit having long since passed. And he knew that he would tough it out as long as he could, and the hell with the Interstate Commerce Commission, and between John and Ed and Frank, he could expect to put together some kind of a crew – but even he would wear out sometime.

He had to face it: he needed help.

Right. Now, where was it going to come from?

Bud had to think about that one for a bit. What help was available, especially with the drawbridge out? Not much. The Chessie was down in Camden, but that wasn’t any help. The little GE didn’t have enough power to get through the snowdrifts that had to have accumulated between Spearfish Lake and Camden. That took care of that.

What he really needed was people, and any power would be welcome. Could the D&O help? The Decatur and Overland certainly had people and power – but with that stinking bridge out over the Marshall river, any motive power from them was as far away as the moon, since they couldn’t run up the Kremmling branch, the old back way onto the C&SL, any longer. The Dirty and Old had people, of course, but they were eighty miles away over roads that even the state had given up trying to clear.

Bud tried to quit thinking about red and white D&O engines. There was one that kept intruding onto his tired mind, and that was silly. All the D&O power was on the other side of the river.

Or was it?

That was it! All the D&O power wasn’t on the other side of the river. That marooned D&O SW9 was in his own engine shed at the C&SL Camden yard!

The SW9 was probably almost as old as the Milwaukee, and not much stronger than the NW2 was normally, but it was horsepower. The Chessie and that SW9 should have enough power to punch through the accumulated snow with the little plow. When they got through, they would represent the equivalent of the power of the Rock. And the people they could bring! The storm and the railroad bridge wouldn’t be able to stop the D&O from getting people to the C&SL Camden Yard, even if they had to get there by snowmobile through the city! Bud reached for the phone.

“Sure, I can let you have the 1478,” Les Marks, the Decatur and Overland Division Superintendent told Bud a few minutes later; Bud hadn’t been surprised to find Marks in his office on a night like this. “I’ll have to show her on my books as a lease, but you can have her for a dollar a day if you’ll put the fuel in her.”

“Good enough,” Bud replied. “I really appreciate it.”

“Aw, she’s no goddamn good to us sitting over there on the other side of the river like that, and from what I hear on the radio, you probably can use it.”

There were three items that Bud wanted to talk Marks out of. Two were critical, and the third was a long shot. But there was hope for two, and Bud now had one. “Don’t I know it,” he said. “Now, I’ve only got one engineer, besides me, and he’s about to drop dead from the flu. I’ve been running one of the units myself, and one of our brakemen is a banker who’s helping out. I’ve only got two guys in Camden, and they’re both old retirees. I just don’t have enough hands up here to do the job. Is there any way I can get my hands on a couple of your engineers and brakemen and have them come up on that extra from Camden?”

There was silence for a moment. “Um, I dunno, Bud. I can just kind of ignore the 1478, since it’s marooned anyway, but I’d have to figure out some way to pay my people.”

Bud thought fast. He needed the extra help, and there was a limit to how generous Marks could be. At least he hadn’t shut the door entirely. Very well, Bud would prop it open.

“Hell’s fire, Les, if you can’t figure out some way to pay your people for this trip, I’ll pay them myself. If you want to round them up for me, I’ll hire them, just so long as it’s understood that this is temporary, at my wages and on my work rules.” That would be expensive, and there wasn’t any way to pay for it. There was no way the railroad could expect to be paid for anything they’d done for the past day, but Bud would find the money somewhere if he had to.

Marks surprised him. “Oh, I think we can avoid that, Bud. That might cause more problems than it’s worth, what with the union and all. I’ll see if I can find guys who will make the trip on a volunteer basis, and maybe I can fight it out with Decatur afterwards and write the whole thing off to public affairs or something. Don’t worry about paying them. I’ll come up with something down here. How many do you need?

“We won’t need full crews. I wouldn’t know what to do with them, anyway. If I could have three or four engineers and brakemen, especially guys who used to come up here when this was your track, it would really be a blessing. You left a way car of yours down in my yard, too, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we can bring them up here in that. My guys in Camden will have to be in charge of the run, of course.”

“Couldn’t agree more. After all, it’s your track and all that. Anything else we can do for you?”

“Have you guys managed to figure out any way to get that bridge closed so that we can run traffic over it?”

“Not yet,” Marks admitted. “In fact, it may take longer than we thought. It seems the motor burned out because the bridge was jammed, not the other way around. It begins to look like something is messed up in the structure. We don’t know for sure, yet. It was too wild to do too much out there today.”

That was about what Bud had expected. It could take months. “All right, then,” he said, taking a deep breath. “What’s the chances of running a relief train up to me on the Kremmling branch?”

Bud could feel the D&O man’s frown through the phone. “I doubt it like hell, Bud. That branch hasn’t been used for years. Some guy that was up there hunting last fall told me that there were trees growing up between the ties. Besides, we haven’t run north of Rochester since Big Pit closed for the winter. I’m not sure we could even make it to the branch, what with all the snow we’ve had this winter.”

“You ought to be able to make it through,” Bud replied. “The way things are frozen up, the roadbed ought to be pretty stable.”

“Yeah, and I might get a bunch of motive power and people stranded forty miles from Forty-Mile, too.”

As casually as he could manage, Bud replied, “I’d sure like you to try. I’d like to know just how bad the branch is, myself. After all, if you guys don’t get that bridge fixed pretty soon, I’m pretty well going to have to ask for trackage rights over it.”

With malice aforethought, Bud had casually dumped a bundle of snakes on the D&O man’s desk – not a nice way to treat him considering how helpful he had been, but Bud was looking beyond the Warsaw fire, too.

Marks knew a bundle of snakes when he saw it; that’s why he had his job. The people in the D&O home office had been pressuring for permission to pull those tracks up for years. An appeal like Bud was threatening could cost them years more. Plus, if the Camden and Spearfish Lake asked the I.C.C. for and got a directed service order, then the Decatur and Overland would be forced to fix up the line, and that would cost even more money.

“I can’t give you a yes or a no on that, Bud,” Marks replied finally. “I’ll have to ask Decatur, and I can’t do that before morning.”

“Can’t ask for much more than that,” Bud told him. “Look, I really appreciate the help.”

“Well, good luck to you, too,” Marks replied. “I just wish there was more I could do for you.”

“Get me some relief up through Kremmling and it will be a big help all around,” Bud said.

“Tell you what,” Marks said, thinking furiously. If he was very cooperative, perhaps Bud might be willing to be flexible on the directed service order business. If everything was done informally, without an appeal to the I.C.C., they might be able to keep the abandonment on track. “I’ll see if we’ve got people and motive power to start someone in that direction sometime tonight. It’ll be well in the day tomorrow before they could even get to the branch, and by then I ought to know something from Decatur.”

“Can’t ask for much more than that,” Bud replied, reading Marks perfectly. “Let me know what happens.”

Bud hung up the phone, thinking about what he’d just done, and couldn’t help but think about the relief train through Kremmling. He soon realized that there was no use worrying about it; whatever the decision was, he couldn’t plan on it at this point. Now, the next step was to sort out how much he could figure on getting out of his Camden crew, Ralph McPhee and Harold Stevens. Both were on up there in years; Bud didn’t know how old they were, but suspected they both were pushing eighty. About all he could do, he knew, was sound Ralph out and go from there, so he called Ralph at his home in Camden.

“I didn’t think I’d be hearing from you tonight,” the old man said. “I kind of figured you’d be too busy to want to call down here and jaw.”

“No, Ralph, I need you guys and the 303 too bad. I want you and Harold to get her going, hook up the little plow and that D&O SW9 down in the engine shed and get on up here. The D&O is going to be sending some of their people over to help you guys make the run up here.”

“You really need us that bad?”

Bud thought for a moment before replying; he knew he was asking a lot. “We need you that bad,” he replied gently. “We’re busting our butts hauling fire departments to Warsaw and evacuees out. The 104 is dead, and Walt’s got the flu so bad he’s going to fall over any second now. I don’t even have an extra set of hands to run the Milwaukee, and I’m already hoglawed.”

“If you need us that bad, we’ll get there,” the old engineer replied. “I just want you to realize that we ain’t gonna be able to make no quick trip up there, what with all this snow. Even if everything all falls right into place, it’s gonna be during the day tomorrow sometime before we can make it to Spearfish Lake.”

“I know,” Bud agreed. “Say, two or three hours to get going, and then maybe eight hours to get here, with all this snow. That makes it tomorrow morning. We can hold out that long.”

“You got anything you want us to bring?”

Bud thought. Here was a priceless opportunity to get essential supplies that might be needed. But Ralph’s train – Plow Extra Two – wouldn’t have much power. He told McPhee, “Mostly, I want you to bring the two engines and fresh crews. I can think of all sorts of things I could want you to bring, and I’m sure the fire chief in Warsaw could think of more. But it’s been two days since we’ve been over those tracks with SLCR22, and these tracks up here are getting good and plugged if we even wait four hours between plowings. I’d say to keep it light. You haven’t got all that much power and the little plow doesn’t have the punch of the big one up here. If we can think of something that’s fairly light and really important, I guess you could take one box car or flat car. I’ll ask around.”

“How about fire department units? Or reporters? I’ve had calls from both the Camden fire department and two TV stations wanting to know if we could run them up there.”

“I don’t know, Ralph. I think we’d better skip the fire department units. You don’t have that much power, although God knows they’d be useful. As to extra people, well, you’ve about got to take that D&O way car you’ve got down there to load the spare crews, so you might as well take it full. If you can bring a couple doctors, good. I don’t see any harm in bringing a couple reporters, but don’t bury the way car in ’em.”

“We can manage for you, Bud,” the old man replied. Bud knew that McPhee had seen a lot of snowstorms in his day, and Bud had a feeling that McPhee would indeed manage.

“Couple of other things, Ralph,” Bud went on. “Don’t stick your necks out too far. We need you, but don’t get yourself stuck way the hell from civilization somewhere. But be prepared for it. Take enough stuff in the way car that you can camp out in it for a while if you have to. Food, stove fuel, sleeping bags, stuff like that. Keep in touch with the office when you can, so we’ve got some idea of where you are, and let us know when you get going.”

“I’d already thought about that,” McPhee said. “I been expecting this call for a couple hours, ever since the reporters started calling. We’re going to be meeting you somewhere. How do you want to handle that?”

Bud looked up when he felt a blast of cold air, to see John Penny walking into the office, but he kept right on talking to the old man in Camden. “I don’t know just yet. The track is yours to Spearfish Lake. I don’t know where I’ll be when you get up here, but start calling on the VHF once you get this side of Albany River, and we’ll work out something. If I’m not here, come right on in.”

“What if the radio goes out? I kind of hate to depend on those things.”

“Well, then I guess we’re kind of on smoke orders. Come on into the office and use your good judgment. I don’t know what our situation will be like then, so do whatever you have to.”

“Good enough, Bud. I’ll see you when we get there.”

Bud hung up the phone and turned to Penny. “I hope Ralph remembers how to find the office,” Bud told him. “It must be months since he’s been up here.”

“Yeah,” Penny replied, “And that time I think he was fishing.”

“How close to being ready to go are we?”

“Pretty close. That’s why I came. They’re loading the way car, now.”

“Well, let’s do it, then,” Bud said, reaching for his coat.

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