Workin' on the Railroad by Deirdre O'Dare

Author:Deirdre O'Dare [O'Dare, Deirdre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JMS Books LLC
Published: 2017-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

For the next several days, work moved along at a decent pace. They finished the basic track to the mine and began to work on the complex of Ys, short stubs, cross-overs, and sidings that would make up the mini-yard at the mine site. For Roane, the distance that had sprung up between him and Alden, as sudden and inexplicable as the burst of attraction, remained a nagging puzzle in the back of his mind.

He tried not to let it infringe on his work and, as far as he could tell, he succeeded. He could get no notion of what Alden thought or felt, and the older man seemed to avoid any chance for even a moment of private conversation. Alden also vanished on weekends as quickly as any of the other men on the crew. Roane went to Gallup with Willie and Jack one weekend for a big powwow but came back early, and on another he returned home to Albuquerque to pick up some more clothes and a few other things he wanted.

Flannery became conspicuous by his absence. There were rumors he’d had a death in his family, that he’d had a heart attack and was in the hospital, and that he was just hiding out in his car, embarrassed to show his face after his near miss with a serious accident. Part of the time his truck was parked beside his car and sometimes it was gone, but nobody saw him. Nobody saw the two Latino guys either, but Mike Hale came and went, appearing at odd times to watch the work from a safe distance and vanishing just as abruptly.

Exactly who Hale was and what he was doing on the crew occupied almost as much of Roane’s thoughts as did the situation with Alden. Mike was a real enigma, although he now seemed to treat Roane with a guarded respect on the rare occasions their paths crossed. Before their discussion over Flannery, Hale had studiously ignored Roane. Still, the mysterious man never seemed to do anything except wander around and look at stuff. Was he even an employee? No one seemed to know.

On the job, Alden treated Roane very much as he did any of the other crew members, being neither curt nor friendly. Roane continued to spot for the panel placements, which were even more complex as they laid out switch points, junctions, and cross-overs to create the maximum maneuverability for the locomotives and cars in the limited space available.

The mine site lay in a fold between two ridges running into the higher mountains, into which the actual entrance tunnel for the mine disappeared. Even serious earth-moving could not create a lot more space, so they had to work with what was there. For the time being, the mine’s production of ore had to be hauled out by truck, and the coming and going of the fleet of dump trucks posed added hazards and delays for the track work. Still, they plodded on as

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