"Ever been in Ecuador? Then take my advice - and don't.Though I take that back, for you and me might be hitting it for there together if you can rustle up the faith in me and the backbone in yourself for the trip.Well, anyway, it ain't so many years ago that I came ambling in there on a rusty, foul-bottomed, tramp collier from Australia, forty-three days from land to land.Seven knots was her speed when everything favoured, and we'd had a two weeks' gale to the north'ard of New Zealand, and broke our engines down for two days off Pitcairn Island.
"I was no sailor on her.I'm a locomotive engineer.But I'd made friends with the skipper at Newcastle an' come along as his guest for as far as Guayaquil.You see, I'd heard wages was 'way up on the American railroad runnin' from that place over the Andes to Quito.Now Guayaquil- "
"Is a fever-hole," I interpolated.Julian Jones nodded.
"Thomas Nast died there of it within a month after he landed.- He was our great American cartoonist," I added.
"Don't know him," Julian Jones said shortly."But I do know he wasn't the first to pass out by a long shot.Why, look you the way I found it.The pilot grounds is sixty miles down the river.'How's the fever?' said I to the pilot who came aboard in the early morning.'See that Hamburg barque,' said he, pointing to a sizable ship at anchor.'Captain and fourteen men dead of it already, and the cook and two men dying right now, and they're the last left of her.'
"And by jinks he told the truth.And right then they were dying forty a day in Guayaquil of Yellow Jack.But that was nothing, as I was to find out.Bubonic plague and small-pox were raging, while dysentery and pneumonia were reducing the population, and the railroad was raging worst of all.I mean that.For them that insisted in riding on it, it was more dangerous than all the other diseases put together.
"When we dropped anchor off Guayaquil half a dozen skippers from other steamers came on board to warn our skipper not to let any of his crew or officers go ashore except the ones he wanted to lose.A launchcame off for me from Duran, which is on the other side of the river and is the terminal of the railroad.And it brought off a man that soared up the gangway three jumps at a time he was that eager to get aboard.When he hit the deck he hadn't time to speak to any of us.He just leaned out over the rail and shook his fist at Duran and shouted: 'I beat you to it! I beat you to it!'
"'Who'd you beat to it, friend?' I asked.'The railroad,' he said, as he unbuckled the straps and took off a big '44 Colt's automatic from where he wore it handy on his left side under his coat, 'I staved as long as I agreed - three months - and it didn't get me.I was a conductor.'
"And that was the railroad I was to work for.All of which was nothing to what he told me in the next few minutes.The road ran from sea level at Duran up to twelve thousand feet on Chimborazo and down to ten thousand at Quito on the other side the range.And it was so dangerous that the trains didn't run nights.The through passengers had to get off and sleep in the towns at night while the train waited for daylight.And each train carried a guard of Ecuadoriano soldiers which was the most dangerous of all.They were supposed to protect the train crews, but whenever trouble started they unlimbered their rifles and joined the mob.You see, whenever a train wreck occurred, the first cry of the spiggoties was 'Kill the Gringos!' They always did that, and proceeded to kill the train crew and whatever chance Gringo passengers that'd escaped being killed in the accident.Which is their kind of arithmetic, which I told you a while back as being different from ours.
"Shucks! Before the day was out I was to find out for myself that that ex-conductor wasn't lying.It was over at Duran.I was to take my run on the first division out to Quito, for which place I was to start next morning - only one through train running every twenty-four hours.It was the afternoon of my first day, along about four o'clock, when the boilers of the GOVERNOR HANCOCK exploded and she sank in sixty feet of water alongside the dock.She was the big ferry boat that carried the railroad passengers across the river to Guayaquil.It was a bad accident, but it was the cause of worse that followed.By half-past four, big trainloads began to arrive.It was a feast day and they'd run anexcursion up country but of Guayaquil, and this was the crowd coming back.
"And the crowd - there was five thousand of them - wanted to get ferried across, and the ferry was at the bottom of the river, which wasn't our fault.But by the Spiggoty arithmetic, it was.'Kill the Gringos!' shouts one of them.And right there the beans were spilled.Most of us got away by the skin of our teeth.I raced on the heels of the Master Mechanic, carrying one of his babies for him, for the locomotives that was just pulling out.You see, way down there away from everywhere they just got to save their locomotives in times of trouble, because, without them, a railroad can't be run.Half a dozen American wives and as many children were crouching on the cab floors along with the rest of us when we pulled out; and the Ecuadoriano soldiers, who should have been protecting our lives and property, turned loose with their rifles and must have given us all of a thousand rounds before we got out of range.
"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.
