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The Hussy
by
“We camped up country and didn’t come back to clean up until next day. It was some cleaning. Every flat-car, box-car, coach, asthmatic switch engine, and even hand-car that mob of Spiggoties had shoved off the dock into sixty feet of water on top of the Governor Hancock. They’d burnt the round house, set fire to the coal bunkers, and made a scandal of the repair shops. Oh, yes, and there were three of our fellows they’d got that we had to bury mighty quick. It’s hot weather all the time down there.”
Julian Jones came to a full pause and over his shoulder studied the straight-before-her gaze and forbidding expression of his wife’s face.
“I ain’t forgotten the nugget,” he assured me.
“Nor the hussy,” the little woman snapped, apparently at the mud- hens paddling on the surface of the lagoon.
“I’ve been travelling toward the nugget right along–“
“There was never no reason for you to stay in that dangerous country,” his wife snapped in on him.
“Now, Sarah,” he appealed. “I was working for you right along.” And to me he explained: “The risk was big, but so was the pay. Some months I earned as high as five hundred gold. And here was Sarah waiting for me back in Nebraska–“
“An’ us engaged two years,” she complained to the Tower of Jewels.
“–What of the strike, and me being blacklisted, and getting typhoid down in Australia, and everything,” he went on. “And luck was with me on that railroad. Why, I saw fellows fresh from the States pass out, some of them not a week on their first run. If the diseases and the railroad didn’t get them, then it was the Spiggoties got them. But it just wasn’t my fate, even that time I rode my engine down to the bottom of a forty-foot washout. I lost my fireman; and the conductor and the Superintendent of Rolling Stock (who happened to be running down to Duran to meet his bride) had their heads knifed off by the Spiggoties and paraded around on poles. But I lay snug as a bug under a couple of feet of tender coal, and they thought I’d headed for tall timber–lay there a day and a night till the excitement cooled down. Yes, I was lucky. The worst that happened to me was I caught a cold once, and another time had a carbuncle. But the other fellows! They died like flies, what of Yellow Jack, pneumonia, the Spiggoties, and the railroad. The trouble was I didn’t have much chance to pal with them. No sooner’d I get some intimate with one of them he’d up and die–all but a fireman named Andrews, and he went loco for keeps.
“I made good on my job from the first, and lived in Quito in a ‘dobe house with whacking big Spanish tiles on the roof that I’d rented. And I never had much trouble with the Spiggoties, what of letting them sneak free rides in the tender or on the cowcatcher. Me throw them off? Never! I took notice, when Jack Harris put off a bunch of them, that I attended his funeral muy pronto–“
“Speak English,” the little woman beside him snapped.
“Sarah just can’t bear to tolerate me speaking Spanish,” he apologized. “It gets so on her nerves that I promised not to. Well, as I was saying, the goose hung high and everything was going hunky-dory, and I was piling up my wages to come north to Nebraska and marry Sarah, when I run on to Vahna–“
“The hussy!” Sarah hissed.
“Now, Sarah,” her towering giant of a husband begged, “I just got to mention her or I can’t tell about the nugget.–It was one night when I was taking a locomotive–no train–down to Amato, about thirty miles from Quito. Seth Manners was my fireman. I was breaking him in to engineer for himself, and I was letting him run the locomotive while I sat up in his seat meditating about Sarah here. I’d just got a letter from her, begging as usual for me to come home and hinting as usual about the dangers of an unmarried man like me running around loose in a country full of senoritas and fandangos. Lord! If she could only a-seen them. Positive frights, that’s what they are, their faces painted white as corpses and their lips red as–as some of the train wrecks I’ve helped clean up.