West of Dodge/Chapter 11
Little Jack Ryan, who had been mentioned incidentally by Pete Farley as the person to whom Dr. Hall was to look for sanitary offices about the boxcar, was a sort of janitor to the railroad yards. He had come by his diminutive appellation in some place remote from Damascus, perhaps in some gang of tarriers where there had been another Jack Ryan of greater altitude. It was a common designation among Ryans, Dugans and Murrays of the railroad fraternity. It was not the fashion in that caste to call a man Shorty. It was simply Jack for the big one and Little Jack for the little one, or lesser one, an arrangement satisfactory to all concerned.
Ryan made his appearance regularly every third day, bringing with him his pail and mop, precisely at four o'clock in the afternoon, moving in comfortable deliberation, smoking a corncob pipe. He grew more communicative and confidential with each succeeding visit, although he had not been a reluctant man from the beginning.
He was a stockily built man, rugged as a slab from a sawlog, supporting a large iron-gray mustache at what appeared to be a heavy expense to his face. His features were gaunt and seamed, his eyes hungry and harassed. Only his chin, which was cleanly shaved, appeared to be thriving among all his facial appurtenances. It seemed as if this chin had grown in its clean prosperity while the mustache had drained the substance out of his cheeks. It protruded in a challenging way, giving an insolent look below the mouth. Judging him by the anxious light of his eyes, that chin must have been getting him constantly into scrapes which kept him racked and strained to get out of with a whole hide.
When Ryan arrived at the boxcar office at precisely four o'clock this afternoon, he put his foot on the bottom step, removed the pipe from his mouth, nodded affably, on the footing of entire equality, his acquaintance with the doctor having progressed so far that Ryan could admit him to that plane.
"And how are you findin' thricks this evenin', Dochter?" Ryan inquired.
"Pretty fair, Jack. How are you?"
"Middlin' for an old felly with one fut in the cimit-a-a-ry. Wor you wantin' me to mop up the flure for you to-day?"
Dr. Hall said that, unless Ryan's present happiness and future prosperity depended on mopping up the flure, he would suggest a postponement of the operation until one of his patients, just about due, had come to have his broken arm looked over. Ryan said he guessed he could spare the time, although Ga-hd knew he was a much overworked and burdened man. He put down his pail, leaned his mop against the car, and sat wearily in the door, where he began to tell again about the troubles he had to bear incidental to the proper running of the railroad in that place.
The chief worry of Ryan's life was switch lamps. These had to be cleaned and filled, put up at evening, taken down in the morning, in unvarying program throughout the seasons. Section bosses might come, station agents might go, but Ryan kept right there on that job pouring oil into switch lamps and mussing the soot of them around his melancholy eyes. Just as if all that responsibility was not enough to break a man down, said Ryan, they made him rustle baggage when there was any to rustle, and there most always was.
"Dhrummers," said Ryan, "comin' to this currsed country to sell goods! Man dear, I tell you some of them fellys carry more in their thrunks than the biggest store in this town has got laid out on its shelves. And I'm the man that has to lift em, and h'ave 'em up to the thruck, and aise 'em down like a sore fut, besides fillin' the lamps and puttin' 'em out and bringin' 'em in every blessed evenin' and mornin' the year through. And sweepin' and moppin' the office flure, and the flure of this harspittle you have here; and keepin' the fires goin', and dumpin' the ashes in the winther days, and all of it done for the grand sum and reward of sixty dollars a month!"
Dr. Hall had heard it all before, for Ryan was not a man to permit his great public services to pass without acclaim, even though no other voice ever joined in his praise. The expected patient presently came across from the bunk-cars, passing the loquacious Ryan with high bearing. This man was straw-boss on a steel-gang, a strong broad fellow who looked down on Ryan, and all other men of his class who sought the easy waters beside the heavy current of railroad toil. He had got his forearm broken while at work, and was enjoying a vacation on full time, according to the railroad custom in those days. Mike Murray was his name. He was known to the boarding-train as Mickey Sweat.
"Are ye waitin' to have an aperation perfarmed on ye, Ryan?" he inquired with mocking solicitude, a gleam of humor in his light-blue eyes, over which his thin chalky eyebrows arched so sharply he seemed always on the point of exclamatory astonishment.
"I'm mindin' me own business," Ryan replied coldly.
"Oh, I thought the hard life ye lead had broke ye down, and ye'd come in to have y'r appendoolix cut out. Take it aisy, man; take it aisy. It's too much y're tryin' to do, holdin' up the dochter's office with the broad of your back agin it for hours at a time that way."
"I'm waitin' to sweep out the legs and arrums of ye, and throw them on the doomp," Ryan returned, equally high in his sarcasm. "There'll be nothing left of you but the stoomp when the dochter's through with ye to-day, Mickey me lad."
"O-o-oh, is that so?" said Mickey, comfortable in his distinction of being crippled and on full time. "Well, if ye ever take hold of an arrum of mine that's been coot off, Jackie me son, ye'll get the worst wallop ye ever felt since the cow kicked ye through the hedge. There'll still be enough stame left in me mimber to lay ye out cowld, man."
Ryan ignored the slur on that strength and endurance which he had stressed as so broadly essential to that trying situation of his but a few minutes before. He turned his back to fit it squarely against the end of the car, implying as plainly as a man could without words that he had no wish for further traffic in chaff with Mickey Sweat. He even allowed the straw-boss to go on his way when the doctor had finished with him, never turning an eye to acknowledge his parting shot.
"It's lucky the big stiff has the arrum of him broke," he said to Dr. Hall.
"The jerries seem to think you've got a pretty soft job of it, Jack," the doctor remarked.
"They're jillis. There's not a man on Bill Chambers's gang that has the brains in 'im to do me worruk. Wasn't I a jerry myself before I got me fut crooshed innunther the han'kyar and Pete Farley put me here to compinsate me for me sooferin'? I was. Many a year I hoomped me back over a tampin'-pick, dhrivin' rocks innunther the ties."
Ryan sighed over the recollection, in no hurry to get up and hump his back over the mop. Dr. Hall knew his habits very well; Ryan had explained the routine of his day many a time before. One hour every third day Ryan dedicated—that was the word he used—to the scrubbing of the car. He spent ten minutes in the actual work, the rest of the time getting ready to begin, and easing his tremendous energies down to stop.
Just then he was sitting as he had adjusted himself in his cold scorn of Mickey Sweat, back squarely against the car. Now he shifted a little to plant himself in the door, shoulders against the jamb. By degrees he would work around to the job that way, talking all the time. Dr. Hall sat in his surgical chair, never tired of Ryan, his plaints and self-praising, his views on the activities and ambitions of other men, always in relation to his own importance among them.
Ryan lived in a little tin house down the railroad. Snug on the bank of the river it stood, contrived out of cans from which railroaders and others in Damascus drew their chief sustenance. He had melted the tins apart in a bonfire and tacked them over the boards which he had picked up along the track, salved from the wreckage of boxcars, and appropriated by night from open loads of lumber which stopped convenient to his site.
In his domestic economy Ryan was a forehanded and original man. He had a wife, big as a feather bed, soft as dough, one of those half-Indian leavings which remained after the tribes were swept out of the way to make place for farms and towns. On these sunny spring days she could be seen from afar, moving ponderously about in a little fenced enclosure where Jack had spaded up the ground for a garden.
"You've come up in the world since then," Hall commended him. "This job is far and away better than jerrying. There's no telling where a man of your capabilities might go. Are you in line for another promotion?"
"There's nothing here for a man except the job of poompin' wather for the ingins. I'm no scientifical man; I'd do no good to set me heart on that job. It pays sivinty-five a month—it's a grand aisy job Tom Harris has, settin' in his nate little house watchin' the sthroke of the poomp, and never a lick of worruk to lay his hand to but shovelin' a bit of coal now and then. But it's not for me; I'm no scientifical man."
"There ought to be something else for a man of your merit, Jack. Why don't you strike Farley for a change?"
"No; I'm too far west of Dodge. There's no chance for a man to better himself out here, savin' he might be a brakey, or one of them fellys. I've thought of takin' me up a bit of land and goin' back to farmin', as I was brought up to in Donegal, but they tell me murphys won't grow here, although I'm goin' to try a hatful in me little garden. I've never seen a bit of a pig since I came out here. They say pigs can't live in this air so far west of Dodge."
"How long have you been in this country, Jack? this country west of Dodge, I mean."
"Three years!" Ryan replied, rolling his words solemnly.
"Not so long."
"It's more nor tin years in Arge'tine, where I was before. A man's cheated out of his life in this country where they put five winthers in one. Summer is the same. I've briled more grase out o' me body here than could be fried out of a whale. It's a ha-ard country; the ha-ardest country God made, and the last. The l'avin's he put in this place."
Ryan shook his head sadly, as if out of words to describe and denounce the atrocities of that country farther. He appeared to have fallen into a dream, his eyes fixed vacantly on some far-off place, while he moved his pipestem with precise stroke along his heavy gray mustache, now on the right section of it, again on the left, as if he drew that adornment into his features with deliberate pencil and careful hand.
"Tough country," said Dr. Hall. He got out of the chair, signifying to Ryan that he was ready for his professional stroke upon the floor.
"Tough," Ryan echoed feelingly. "It's cruel tough." He sighed, as for his bondage in a land he could not leave. "But I'll say for it, Dochter," hopefully, almost enthusiastically, looking around at Hall with a quickening light in his sad eyes, "it's the aiseyest country to shave in of a-a-ny country I ever set razor to me face in, barrin' none."
Dr. Hall looked at Ryan with appreciative grin, not quite certain whether it was praise or satire. Ryan was gathering up mop and pail, solemn as a professional scrubman about to begin the exercise of his art should be. It was certain he meant it for praise, a sort of justification, perhaps, in explanation why a man with a large chin and many burdens should remain there to bear its cruelties.
When Ryan mopped, he made a hissing noise, as if he operated by compressed air, like the brake of acar. He accomplished this by flattening his lips away from his teeth, which gave his face a desperate appearance, such as a man might present under the stress of some woeful pain. He slopped and sloshed, slinging his soapy compound into corners with heedless profusion, spreading a smell of strong lye around him. Dr. Hall retreated outside.
The rough work was soon over, when Ryan came to the door to wring the mop for taking up the little pools left standing. He put the mop under his foot and twisted the Stick, sighing as if the operation brought its deep regrets.
"They're jillis of me lifetime job," he said quite cheerfully. He did not wait for any comment, perhaps not expecting any, but turned to his drying-up with vigorous arm. "Well, a hoondred days is a hoondred dollars, as the old Jerry said, and it would be a dom mane man that'd charge ye for the boite ye'd ate."
"Are you going to the dance to-night?" Dr. Hall asked him, when Ryan appeared in the door presently with mop and pail, his work of purgation done.
"I'll be there to keep me eye on them they don't burn down the daypo," Ryan replied. "They'll be throwin' segyars around innunther the platform, and maybe upsettin' lanterns. The divil will be to pay before midnight. Yes, I'll be there to keep an eye on 'em to see they don't destr'y the company's property."
Ryan took up the implements of his art and went down the track, singing softly to himself as he rolled along in his weaving, deliberate gait:
An' hit me daughter Judy in th' grine."