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

Chapter 9

0227 1/9/1981 – 0510 1/9/1981:
C&SL Snowplow Extra One

There was fire burning each side of the Rock’s cab as Bud pushed it for all it was worth through the driving snowstorm . . .

The Rock’s whistle woke Bud from his nightmare. He looked over at Penny, who was sitting unconcerned at the throttle. From the sound, the GP-7 was plugging along much like always; there wasn’t a fire pursuing the train through a snow-covered forest.

“Where we at?” Bud asked as he stood up.

“Just blew for the 919 grade crossing,” the brakeman replied.

Bud looked around. It was still snowing and blowing just as hard, and he couldn’t see very far in the gray light of this stormy dawn. From what he could see, the Rock was pushing through the snow reasonably well. They were carrying a healthy load of power, but not an excessive one. He noticed that the wind was blowing past the Geep in the direction the train was going: John was keeping their speed less than that of the wind.

Best of all, they were passing the County Road 919 crossing, and were almost back to Spearfish Lake! Bud couldn’t help but approve of what John had done. “You’ve done well for your first time at bat. Had any trouble?”

“There were a couple of cuts that were a little tough a few minutes ago, this side of the swamp, but we punched right through them without adding much power.”

Bud’s watch told him that he’d had almost an hour of sleep. “Good job, John. Somehow or other, I’ll figure some way for you to get a break.”

John smiled in the dim light. “Oh, I’m good for a few hours, yet, if you can’t come up with something. If we can’t relieve Walt the next trip, I’ll steal an hour or two on the way back.”

John had the right to have hung up working hours before, but he was keeping on, and even more illegally than Bud. The desperate need had kept both sticking to their jobs, but how long could they go on, planning for a possible hour or two of sleep hours away?

They had been trying to support the firemen in Warsaw for less than a day, and there was no telling how much longer they would have to keep it up. The fire could go on for days if the storm kept up. Somehow, they’d have to continue to tough it out, until the storm let up or help arrived, somehow or another.

During the predawn hours, Fred Linder didn’t waste much time in turning the collection of bus flatcars into his rest train.

He started by persuading the nearly collapsed Archer to move an empty boxcar to the head of the scram train. The forty-year-old, forty-foot boxcar had been left on the Warsaw Oil Company siding months before and forgotten about, but once it was made part of the scram train, Linder moved the National Guard field kitchen into it.

The fire chief put a crew under the leadership of Skip Peterson, the school bus mechanic, to work at the chore of converting the school buses into a rest train while leaving it a scram train. The first bus had most of its seats removed. These were replaced by tables and chairs taken from the school; the impromptu dining hall was soon capable of seating about thirty people in only moderate discomfort. Almost immediately the dining bus was packed, and it stayed packed around the clock with an ever-changing relay of people. Some wit took a chunk of soap and wrote “WARSAW DINER – OPEN 24 HOURS – FIRE SALE” on the windshield of the bus, while the kitchen boxcar began to turn out a bland but always-ready bill of fare.

The rest of Warsaw’s school buses were loaded onto the empty flatcars that Plow Extra One had left behind, and most of the buses were turned into sleeping quarters by the simple expedient of throwing planks taken from the lumber yard across the seat backs. A hundred people at a time could find space to sleep, and the buses could be converted back to hauling people in a matter of minutes by simply tossing the boards back out into the snow. Here, too, the quarters were inadequate and uncomfortable, but they proved that they would make do by being crowded from the beginning by tired firemen and Warsaw locals.

Jim Horton had hoped to keep the rest center in the school as long as he could. There was more space there, the cooking facilities were better, and the school was vastly easier to heat. But it was not to be. He was supervising moving a reserve of food from the school when he smelled the pungent smoke from the still-burning hopper cars filling the halls. There were people sleeping on the floor all over the building, so to get them out in a hurry he hit the fire alarm.

Like it or not, after that, the scram train was in business. It would take a big wind shift to move it from its position on the main line east of the fire, but if it shifted, the train could be moved away.

Plow Extra One was now crawling up to the state road crossing outside of Spearfish Lake. Bud yanked on the whistle cord, even though it seemed unlikely that anybody would be on the state road, then turned to his brakeman. “It’s time to be thinking about switching around for the next trip,” he said. “What I guess we want to do is to go past the east wye switch, then right back down to the piggyback ramp.”

“If they’ve already got flats loaded, that’ll put the empties on the wrong side of the full ones,” John replied. He thought about it for a moment and went on, “But what the hell. If they are, we’ll move them. We’d probably have to, anyway.”

“Look, if there’s a fire department waiting, we need to do a fairly fast turnaround this trip. Let’s get the switching done and the consist set up for the next trip, then why don’t you drop me at the office and run this rig on up to the engine shed and get it fueled up? Can you do that?’

“Yeah, sure. No problem.”

“Good, when you get up to the fuel hoses, tell Ed that I want to see him in the office.”

The flat cars at the piggyback ramp proved to be loaded. The Blair Volunteer Fire Department had arrived in Spearfish Lake not too long after Bud had left on the last run. The vehicles had been loaded onto the cars and tied down. Bud could see through the snow that another fire department had arrived, and was sitting in the parking lot waiting for the arrival of the empty flat cars that Plow Extra One had brought from Warsaw, “Guess we’d better see what they’ve got to go,” Bud told Penny, reaching for the radio.

“You girls awake in there?” he asked.

“I am,” Kate replied after a moment. “Betty’s asleep, now.”

“Good enough. What fire department is waiting to load?”

“That’s the Lynchburg people, plus some stuff from Blair that we didn’t have room for. We’ve got about five flatcar loads.”

“We didn’t bring that many empties with us. We’ve only got three empty, but we can get another if we unload the bus flat we brought,” Bud apologized. “If you can, refigure the loading to only take the major units. Take everything they can, but have them leave utility trucks and the like, if it comes to that. If you don’t know how to do it, don’t worry. I’ll be up to the office in a few minutes.”

It was only the work of a few minutes to get the loaded flats away from the piggyback ramp and replace them with the empty ones. Then, John took the Rock up Track One, left Bud at the office, and headed for the engine shed.

“Who’s running the 101?” Kate asked as soon as Bud was into the office.

“John.”

“I didn’t know he knew how to do that.”

“Well, to be truthful,” Bud replied, “I didn’t myself until a couple hours ago. That kid is going to make a short-line railroader yet. Did you get something worked out for loading Lynchburg?”

“I think so,” Kate replied, “But you’d better check it.”

Bud glanced at the sketch she had drawn on the back of an envelope. He took a second to figure out that she drawn a sketch of each flatcar, then drawn the Lynchburg units’ sizes over it, and it made sense. “Looks good to me,” he told her. “Give Tefke a call on the radio. Have him unload that Warsaw school bus. Our passengers are going to have to make do with truck cabs and the way car again. Have Tefke load like this once he gets the bus off. It looks like we’re going to make a short-line railroader out of you, too.”

“I wouldn’t want to do it every day,” she replied. “But I feel like I’m helping. I can’t ask for much more.”

“Let me tell you, Kate, I wouldn’t want to do this every day, either. This has been one hell of a day. Why don’t you call over to Rick’s and rustle up some breakfast for you and John and me?”

Bud looked up when he felt a blast of cold air, to see Ed Sloat walking into the office. “So what’s the word on the Burlington?” Bud asked.

“Still lousy. I think you could run her now if you had to, but she still needs to be dried out some more. I had her going an hour or so ago, and she was showing some life.”

“The heaters are doing the job, then?”

“Yeah, slowly.”

“If we towed it dead in train to Warsaw, do you think it would pull afterwards?”

Ed shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to depend on it.”

“Well, then, I guess we won’t take it this trip. If we got up there with it running at all, it probably wouldn’t be any stronger than the Milwaukee. I suppose John told you about that?”

“He did,” the mechanic replied. “I couldn’t figure out anything from what he was saying, though.”

“He didn’t look at it. Walt and I kind of poked through it, but we couldn’t make heads or tails of it, either. Can the heaters on the Burlington pretty much take care of themselves?”

“Not really, but all they’ve got to do is be checked every now and then. I left Tefke watching them for a few hours while I went home and got some sleep. He managed to cork off a bit while you were gone the trip before last.”

“Good,” Bud said. “Look, I want you to go with me this trip. Take a few tools and whatever you think you might need to figure out what’s wrong with the Milwaukee, and maybe fix it. That’ll leave at least one of us halfway fresh. You mind doing that?”

“No, that’s fine. I was thinking of suggesting it, anyway. Roger can keep after those heaters.”

“All right. Go get those tools together, and tell John to come up to the office here and grab some sleep on one of the cots when he’s done fueling. That way, he’ll be here if something comes up. I’ll meet you out at the fueling dock when I’ve got everything ready here. I’m going to go over and check the loading.”

Out at the loading ramp, Roger Tefke was getting the Lynchburg Volunteer Fire Department tied down. All the vehicles were on the flat cars, and it wouldn’t be long before they were ready to go. The Lynchburg chief was there, and was a bit upset at having to leave an ambulance and a rescue van behind. Bud agreed that it was too bad, but that flatcar space was at a premium this trip. They’d try to take the vehicles next time.

Bud looked at the flatcars. They were packed tighter than the first run they made with the Spearfish Lake Fire Department. Well, everybody was getting more practiced with the loading, he thought. Tefke was having the firemen chain their vehicles down themselves, but was checking every tie down. Nothing would come loose this trip.

A few minutes later, Bud was back in the cab of the Rock with Ed, going around the wye. The simple way getting the consist into the loading dock had left the plow pointing the wrong way. In the process of turning around, the plow pointed westward out on the main. Bud had Ed get up into the plow’s cupola, and he powered the Rock off to the southwest for a ways. He was curious to see just how bad the snow had built up, and just how bad the conditions were that Ralph and his rescue train from Camden would be facing.

The going wasn’t easy at all. The Rock and the big plow could handle it for the short distance that Bud went, but just there, the countryside was open, and there was little alongside the tracks to cause them to drift over. The cuts, Bud knew, were going to be a different story, but the nearest one that he could test was California Cut, several miles away. He knew he didn’t have time to go that far.

“What do you think?” Bud asked Ed over the VHF. Over the last few years, Ed had a lot more experience with riding the plow than Penny, who had just started the day before.

“That’s got to be tough going ahead,” the brakeman/mechanic replied. “It’s hard to say, but we probably could get all the way to Camden with this rig, but there’s some cuts that we’d have to make a lot of runs at. And you know that section down there by Thunder Lake? The wind whips across that lake for miles, then dumps snow right on the tracks. That would take a lot of punching.”

Bud thought about it. The little plow couldn’t do the job that the big plow could. Maybe he was asking too much of his Camden crew. But then, McPhee had more experience than both Bud and Ed combined. Lots more experience. He ought to be able to recognize an impossible situation before he got stuck in it.

“I think McPhee’s got enough sense to know when to give up,” Bud said into the microphone. “Guess we’d better be heading back. I found out just enough to worry me more.”

A few minutes later, Bud yanked on the whistle cord, and Plow Extra one began to move. “Oh, hell,” he said to Ed on the VHF. “I was going to have Walt’s snowmobile loaded onto the running board. Well, to hell with it. We’ve done without it until now, so I guess we ought to be able to do without it this trip.”

“Good idea, but let’s get this show on the road,” Sloat agreed.

Soon, once again, Plow Extra One was on the move toward the stricken town.

While the scram train was being jury-rigged for its purpose, Jay Roberts was feeling lonely and cold, as he stood in the storm, beating on the side of a hopper car to try and get the caked-up DAP to flow into the elevator. It was a lonely vigil, wearing a gas mask and sweating despite the cold. It was a constant routine of inspecting the flow with a flashlight, then poking around in the hopper’s gate with the crowbar, then picking up the sledge for another shot at breaking the load loose. In a way, the hopper car resembled an hourglass, with its load slowly flowing through the hole in the bottom. But instead of dry sand or salt, the DAP was coming in chunks that had to be broken up.

After an hour or so, Chip Halsey and Fred Linder came out to the hopper car to inspect the progress. The plant supervisor climbed up to the top of the car, opened a hatch, and in the light of his flashlight studied the contents of the first bin. Back on the ground, he told the other two, “It’s doing better than I expected. Just guessing by eye, I’d say it’s about two-thirds empty.”

“Good,” Linder replied. “You can get started loading it pretty soon.”

“Not just yet. We’ve got two more bins to go, then the other car, before we can get the elevator turned around.”

“We’ve got to do better than that,” Linder replied. “The longer that stuff sits there, the more chance we have of it getting away from us. How about as soon as that bin gets empty, you start loading it again with your front loader?”

Halsey scratched his head. “It’s a good idea, Fred, but that hopper is higher than you think. The bucket on the front loader won’t get within three feet of the hatch.”

The fire chief was feeling the pressure to get the ammonium nitrate out of town. “We could get a gang of guys with shovels . . . ” he started, then thought better of it. “Naw, that’d take too long, and there’d be no place for them to stand to unload the bucket that high in the air. What we’ve got to do is to get the loader up in the air farther. How about a ramp of some kind?”

“I don’t know what we’d build a ramp out of that fast.”

“How about snow? God knows, we’ve got enough of it. I could get Don Kuralt to bulldoze a snow ramp up to a level where you could fill the hopper bins right from the loader bucket.”

“Fred, with all that weight up in the air and the rear wheels of the loader steering, it’s going to handle like a hog on ice skates. Besides, it doesn’t have much bite. I doubt that it’d climb a slick snow ramp without sinking in and spinning its wheels.”

“It’s not going to sink in after Don packs it down with the bulldozer. As for bite, there ought to be some chains somewhere in town that’ll fit it. The tires look about the size Skip uses on the school buses.”

Halsey shrugged. “It might work.”

“It’d better work. I’ll get Don right over here. He’s got to re-spot that car here pretty soon, anyway.”

As the wee small hours of the morning passed, there were hopes in Warsaw that things were under control. The arrival of the Albany River fire department on Plow Extra One had given Linder some reserves; he had sent them straight to Yard 3 to add to the combined force that was trying to keep the fire out of the next yard. They were having some success. Although they’d had had a dozen scares since nightfall, each time they had been able to drown the small outbreaks of fire with a flood of water from the two-and-a-half-inch hoses.

Linder rode his snowmobile from the Northern Fertilizer plant to the Yard 3 fire, where Kuralt was still working his bulldozer. “Get your Cat back over to the fertilizer plant,” he ordered, and went on to explain the ramp he wanted graded up to the hopper car. As the bulldozer waddled off, Linder turned to check on the progress of the fight at hand.

“How’s it going?” he yelled to Masterfield over the roar of the Spearfish Lake rural pumper.

“Oh, we’re hanging on,” the Spearfish Lake chief replied, equally loud.

“Good enough,” Linder said. “Look, you’ve got Albany River up here now, and my guys are coming back off their rest breaks. Why don’t you start sending your people off for a break? Warsaw is going to be a little under-strength, since I’ve got some people filling in for Walsenberg, but you ought to be able to get by with what you’ve got left.”

“Sounds good. Where can they get something to eat?” Masterfield yelled over the noise.

“Send them upwind till they get to Plant Street, have them hang a left and go down to the railroad crossing. We’re getting a National Guard field kitchen set up there.”

“Good enough,” Masterfield replied. “Got to hand it to you, Fred, that’s a good idea. How are things over at the warehouse fire?”

“Stable the last time I was there, but that’s getting to be a while. I’ve got to head over that way now. Anything I can do for you here?”

“Yeah, see if you can speed up refilling the air packs. The gas masks you sent over are fine, but they ice up too easily.”

“Just be glad you’ve got them,” Linder said, yelling over the roar of the pumper. “There’s no way we can jam air as fast as we use it. I’ll try and get you some more, but I can’t promise you much yet.”

“Well, do the best you can,” Masterfield said as Linder revved his snowmobile up and headed up Plant Street.

While the snowmobile took him through the storm, Linder thought about the face mask situation. It had become steadily more critical during the night as the wind shifted and caused the toxic smoke to be blown more and more into areas where there was great need for work. At nightfall, it had still been possible to work in the paper plant and the fertilizer plant without much danger from the gases. As the wind shifted, first the fertilizer plant, then the paper plant had come under the cloud of smoke from the burning hopper cars. The fertilizer plant people had their own gas masks, and there weren’t that many people there, but as the smoke cloud had started getting into the paper plant the situation had become very serious, indeed. Marshall had been near the point of pulling his fire patrols out of the paper plant for lack of lung protection.

At nightfall, only a small percentage of firemen at the warehouse fire needed face masks, but the wind had since shifted to where the whole area now needed them. Only the yard fire situation was better, for here, where much of the afternoon’s fight had to be made with face masks, now only the southern exposure of Yard 4 had much toxic smoke getting near it.

Plow Extra One’s surprise gift of the National Guard gas masks had taken much of the edge off the situation. The masks were hard to work in, uncomfortable to wear, and had a tendency to fog and ice up – but Marshall was still able to keep his patrols in the plant, and the limited air compressor capacity problem was now less critical. Ellsberg’s bright idea had been an absolute godsend to Fred Linder; not the first he had managed, and Linder expected that it wouldn’t be the last. The Warsaw chief knew that his own department would never have been able to hold this line without the assistance brought in by the train.

Linder dreaded going to check on the warehouse fire. Mostly, he dreaded locking horns with Cliff Sprague again, but to his surprise, Sprague was almost mellow when Linder asked how things were going.”

“Still stable,” Sprague reported, “But I’m pretty sure the roof is going to go pretty soon. Until then, I’m sending some of my people for rest. When that roof goes, we’re going to have our hands full. We might as well have our people as fresh as possible for that.”

“Let me know when the roof goes,” Linder replied. “I’m worried about the exposure on the main plant. When it shows signs of going, I’ll pull Albany River off the yard fire and have them help you protect the plant. I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the warehouse, but I am worried about the exposure. I just wish the hell there was some way we could take care of this before the roof goes.”

Sprague could understand this. Like Warsaw, Walsenberg was pretty much a one-industry town. Walsenberg wouldn’t hurt quite as badly if its copper concentrator burned down, but there wouldn’t be much town left, either. Sprague had become used to sleepless nights worrying about fighting a fire there. “Yeah, if that roof goes, we’ll get right on it,” he told Linder. “Got another problem, though. My gas supply is getting low in several of the trucks. Is there any place in town we can send them to get filled?”

“Leave them on line. I’ll get the oil company to come over here with a load of gas in their delivery truck.”

“That’s going to be kind of risky if the roof goes while we’re fueling.”

Linder shrugged. “So if you see any sign of it starting to go, get the truck the hell out of here. How are your face masks holding out? We’ve been having trouble getting enough filled for everybody.”

“No problem. We could stand for faster service, but our truck is keeping up.”

“Your truck?”

“Yeah.” Sprague pointed at the grass truck, sitting near the corner of Shed 3. “We’ve got an engine-driven compressor on it. One of my guys got mad at having to drive miles to fill air packs, so he cobbled up the parts so we can jam air on the spot. Hell of a good idea. This is the first time we’ve used it at a fire, and it’s working like a charm.”

“Glad he thought of it,” Linder replied. “We’re having a rough time keeping up with air for our own people, let alone Spearfish Lake.”

Linder had long ago given up his own face mask to the cause, and he donned a gas mask as he rode the snowmobile into the toxic smoke cloud to check on developments in the main paper plant.

The plant was fairly well lit, but Marshall was hard to find since his own gas mask tended to make him less identifiable. Once Linder found him, he warned of the possible danger developing on the west wall. “That roof could go any time now,” he warned. “When it does, things could get out of hand there quickly. We’re going to want a constant watch.”

“That’s going to be hard,” Marshall replied. “We don’t have gas masks for enough people to keep up a constant patrol all over the plant.”

“Concentrate on the east wall and the roof,” the fire chief replied. “I’ve got a few masks up my sleeve, and I’ll get some over to you. I’d say just keep a roving patrol elsewhere in the plant but have them keep a close watch on the north wall. The wind’s getting far enough around that something from Yard 3 could maybe get over there. I’d have thought Yard 3 would be burning out by now, but apparently some of the pulp over there is just now drying out enough to burn. It looks like it could go on for hours.”

Linder rode on. At the fertilizer plant, Kuralt was just moving the hopper car forward to the snow ramp he had bulldozed. The front loader was waiting for the car to be pulled up, a bucket load of ammonium nitrate at the ready, Halsey himself driving. “Here goes nothing,” he yelled to Linder as the hopper car came to a stop on a piece of two by four laid on the tracks.

Halsey let up on the clutch, and the machine pulled forward slowly. Linder walked alongside the machine at a respectful distance as it chugged up the ramp in low gear, Halsey raising the bucket as it moved ahead.

Kuralt’s job wasn’t perfect, and the machine jolted from side to side. A few pounds of fertilizer spilled from the bucket. At the top of the ramp, Halsey touched a lever, and a thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate dumped into the hopper car, shaking it a bit.

“Looks like it’ll work,” Linder told Halsey after the fertilizer plant owner had dumped the third load. “I’ll leave Don here. He’s going to want to manicure that ramp a bit from time to time.”

“That ramp isn’t the greatest,” Linder told Halsey after the fertilizer plant owner had dumped the third load. “This thing is going to get stuck real easy.”

“So what if it does? Don’ll be here to pull you out, and he can fix the ramp. We’ve gained hours!”

“Oh, it’ll do,” Halsey replied, heading off to the plant door for yet another half-ton of the fifty tons of deadly fertilizer yet to be moved.

Twenty-five miles to the west, the visibility hadn’t improved much for the handful of Hoselton men.

Clint Borck’s Dodge pickup hadn’t run any better since it had been pulled from the snow-filled ditch. For hours, now, it had been uselessly trailing the tiny convoy as it crawled behind the blade-equipped Ford.

But now, the Ford wasn’t running at all. The six men were all under its hood, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

“It’s not getting any spark, for sure,” Clint said.

“Goddamn Ford electronic ignition,” the tanker driver replied. “Sometimes, when they’re starting to go bad on you, if you let ’em rest for a few minutes, they’ll work again. For a while, that is.”

“It’s been resting ten minutes, now,” the Ford driver replied. “And it’s got nothing.”

“I suppose it’s hopeless to think that we could cannibalize the Dodge,” Bunsen commented.

This was such an obvious conclusion that nobody would say anything in reply. Clint left the little group and walked back to his own truck. It wouldn’t idle, and it didn’t start well, but as soon as he got it running, he backed off, aimed at the other lane of the county road, and took a good long run at the snow. The weight of the snow soon brought the truck’s lunge to a stop, and it wasn’t easily backed up for another run.

It took Clint six or seven runs to get past the stalled Ford, which still showed no signs of running. Clint stopped beside the little group. “It’s gonna take till spring at that rate,” the tanker driver observed.

“Beats sitting here,” Clint replied. “We’ve only got maybe five miles to go. Maybe less. You’d think that they’d have plowed the roads in Spearfish Lake a bit.” Clint closed the truck door and backed off for another run.

“You know, there’s a thought,” the Ford driver said. “Maybe if we gave them a call, they could send a plow out to us.”

After yet another circuit of the trouble spots, where everything was still fairly stable, the Warsaw fire chief decided to see how the coffee at the scram train was doing. He had barely sat down to his cup of coffee in the crowded dining bus when the flashing lights of a Walsenberg ambulance caught his attention. “Jesus,” someone in the crowded bus said. “That’s the third one in the last few minutes. What’s going on over there?”

Coffee forgotten, Linder headed out of the bus to the ambulance. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” an ambulance attendant replied. “Charlie here just collapsed. He’s having trouble breathing. We’ve got him on oxygen.”

Linder didn’t wait for a Spearfish Lake doctor to examine the fallen Walsenberg fireman. He got on his snowmobile and headed for the warehouse fire.

Sprague was at the Walsenberg pumper, bending over the unconscious form of yet another fallen firefighter. “What the hell is the matter, Cliff?” Linder yelled over the pumper’s roar.

“Be goddamned if I know,” These guys have started dropping like flies. You’d think that they were inhaling smoke or toxic gas, but they’ve all been wearing face masks.”

“Those are the air packs you filled on your grass truck?”

Sprague nodded. Linder motioned the chief onto the back of his snowmobile.

At the grass truck, the air was still clear. “He couldn’t have been pumping smoke into the tanks,” the Walsenberg chief said. “We’re pretty well out of the line of the smoke here.”

Linder started to say something, but then the wind said it for him as a tongue of the smoke cloud drifted over the grass truck, quite clear in the blaze of light surrounding the truck. “That little bit of smoke couldn’t be knocking those guys flat,” Sprague protested.

Linder thought that Sprague might have a point. Maybe it would be best to have a closer look, though. He climbed up onto the tail of the truck, which was pointed into the wind, and took his gas mask off.

Over the past day, Linder had smelled so much fertilizer smoke that he wasn’t sure if he was smelling right. “Cliff, come up here,” he called. The other chief joined him, and Linder went on, “Do you smell exhaust smoke?”

“Could be. Now that you mention it, the exhaust pipe of this thing is dead upwind of the air compressor intake.” The Walsenberg chief paused for a moment, then went on, “The combination of carbon monoxide and the toxic smoke . . . ”

“I think if I were you,” Linder said gently, “I’d valve off all that stuff you’ve jammed in the last couple hours.”

“Yeah, but that leaves my guys without any air at all!”

“Better they be without and using gas masks than to breathe that shit.”

Linder was in a tough position. Being the first chief on the spot, he was in charge of fighting the fire, but there was a limit to how far he could make an order stand. “I’ve still got a few gas masks for emergencies,” he went on. “And there may be some that aren’t being used. Plus, I’ll try and get you some extra air.”

Back at the little cluster of ambulances parked next to the standby train, Linder counted up the score: eight Walsenberg firemen felled out of a total strength of twenty-one. Five were out for the duration; they were breathing poorly, kept alive only by the limited supply of oxygen in Warsaw. Three more were not well, and ought to be evacuated, but were breathing on their own. Linder told the ambulance people and the doctor to load the stricken firemen in the caboose the next time the train was in.

“How long do you think that will be?” the doctor asked.

“Um, let’s see, they left sometime about midnight, so they ought to be back about four or five.”

“Any chance of getting them here quicker? I’d like to get these guys out of here. They’re going to use up a lot of the oxygen we’ve got left.”

Linder never got a chance to reply. The radio interrupted, “Fire reported in the northwest corner of the paper plant.”

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