Golden Stories Part 38

But after too long a strain men become exhausted, benumbed, indifferent; reckless, even. The nerves give out, and will-power seems to halt on indecision; but decision is the life of the fast train. None of our conductors stood the hopeless fight like Sankey. He was patient, taciturn, untiring; and in a conflict with the elements, ferocious. All the fighting blood of his ancestors seemed to course again in that struggle with the winter king. I can see him yet, on bitter days, standing alongside the track in a heavy pea-jacket and Napoleon boots, a sealskin cap drawn snugly over his straight black hair, watching, ordering, signaling, while Number One, with its frost-bitten sleepers behind a rotary, tried to buck through ten and twenty-foot cuts which lay bank-full of snow west of McCloud.

Not until April did it begin to look as if we should win out. A dozen times the line was all but choked on us. And then, when snow-plows were disabled and train crews desperate, there came a storm that discounted the worst blizzard of the winter. As the reports rolled in on the morning of the 5th, growing worse as they grew thicker, Neighbor, dragged out, played out, mentally and physically, threw up his hands. It snowed all day the 6th, and on Sat.u.r.day morning the section men reported thirty feet in the Blackwood canon. It was six o'clock when we got the word, and daylight before we got the rotary against it. They bucked away till noon without much headway, and came in with their gear smashed and a driving-rod fractured. It looked as if we were at last beaten. Number One pulled into McCloud that day eighteen hours late; it was Sankey's and Sinclair's run west.

There was a long council in the round-house. The rotary was knocked out; coal was running low in the chutes. If the line wasn't kept open for the coal from the mountains, it was plain we should be tied until we could s.h.i.+p it from Iowa or Missouri. West of Medicine Pole there was another big rotary working east, with plenty of coal behind her; but she was reported stuck fast in the Cheyenne Hills. Foley made suggestions, and Dad Sinclair made suggestions. Everybody had a suggestion left. The trouble was, Neighbor said, they didn't amount to anything, or were impossible. "It's a dead block, boys," announced Neighbor sullenly after everybody had done. "We are beaten unless we can get Number One through to-day. Look there: by the holy poker, it's snowing again."

The air was dark in a minute with whirling clouds. Men turned to the windows and quit talking. Every fellow felt the same--hopeless; at least, all but one. Sankey, sitting back of the stove, was making tracings with a piece of chalk. "You might as well unload your pa.s.sengers, Sankey," said Neighbor. "You'll never get 'em through this winter."

And it was then that Sankey proposed his double-header.

He devised a snow-plow which combined in one monster ram about all the good material we had left, and submitted the scheme to Neighbor.

Neighbor studied it, and hacked at it all he could, and brought it over to the office. It was like staking everything on the last cast of the dice, but we were in the state of mind which precedes a desperate venture. It was talked over an hour, and orders were finally given by the superintendent to rig up the double-header and get against the snow with it.

All that day and most of the night Neighbor worked twenty men on Sankey's device. By Sunday morning it was in such shape that we began to take heart. "If she don't get through, she'll sure get back again, and that's what most of 'em don't do," growled Neighbor, as he and Sankey showed the new ram to the engineers.

They had taken the 566, George Sinclair's engine, for one head, and Burns's, the 497, for the other. Behind these were Kennedy, with the 314, and Cameron, with the 296. The engines were set in pairs, headed each way, and buckled up like pack mules. Over the pilots and stacks of the head engines rose the tremendous plows, which were to tackle the worst drifts ever recorded, before or since, on the West End. The ram was designed to work both ways. Under the coal, each tender was loaded with pig-iron.

The beleaguered pa.s.sengers on Number One, side-tracked in the yards, eagerly watched the preparations Sankey was making to clear the line.

Every amateur on the train had his camera out taking pictures of the ram. The town, gathered in a single great mob, looked silently on, and listened to the frosty notes of the sky-sc.r.a.pers as they went through their preliminary manoeuvers. Just as the final word was given by Sankey, conductor in charge, the sun burst through the fleecy clouds, and a wild cheer followed the ram out of the western yard; it was looked on as a sign of good luck to see the sun again.

Little Neeta, up on the hill, must have seen them as they pulled out.

Surely she heard the choppy ice-bitten screech of the 566; for that was never forgotten, whether the service was special or regular. Besides, the head cab of the ram carried this time not only Georgie Sinclair, but her father as well. Sankey could handle a slice-bar as well as a punch, and rode on the head engine, where, if anywhere, the big chances would come. What Sankey was not capable of in the train-service we never knew, because he rose superior to every emergency that ever confronted him.

Bucking snow is princ.i.p.ally brute force; there is very little coaxing.

West of the bluffs there was a volley of sharp tooting, like code signals between a fleet of cruisers, and in just a minute the four ponderous engines, two of them in the back motion, fires white and throats bursting, steamed wildly into the canon. Six hundred feet from the first cut, Sinclair's whistle signaled again. Burns and Cameron and Kennedy answered; and then, literally turning the monster ram loose against the dazzling mountain, the crews settled themselves for the shock.

At such a moment there is nothing to be done. If anything goes wrong, eternity is too close to consider. There came a m.u.f.fled drumming on the steam-chests; a stagger and a terrific impact; and then the recoil, like the stroke of a trip-hammer. The snow shot into the air fifty feet, and the wind carried a cloud of fleecy confusion over the ram and out of the cut. The cabs were buried in white, and the great steel frames of the engines sprung like knitting-needles under the frightful force of the blow. Pausing for hardly a breath, they began the signaling again; then backed up and up and up the line; and again the ma.s.sive machines were hurled screaming into the cut. "We're getting there, Georgie," cried Sankey when the rolling and lurching had stopped.

No one else could tell a thing about it, for it was snow and snow and snow; above and behind and ahead and beneath. Sinclair coughed the flakes out of his eyes and nose and mouth like a baffled collie. He looked doubtful of the claim until the mist had blown clear and the quivering monsters were again recalled for a dash. Then it was plain that Sankey's instinct was right; they were gaining.

Again they went in, lifting a very avalanche over the stacks, packing the banks of the cut with walls hard as ice. Again, as the drivers stuck, they raced in a frenzy, and into the shriek of the wind went the unearthly sc.r.a.pe of the overloaded safeties. Slowly and sullenly the machines were backed again. "She's doing the work, Georgie," cried Sankey. "For that kind of a cut she's as good as a rotary. Look everything over now while I go back and see how the boys are standing it. Then we'll give her one more, and give it the hardest kind."

And they did give her one more; and another. Men at Santiago put up no stouter fight than these men made that Sunday morning in the canon of the Blackwood. Once they went in, and twice. And the second time the b.u.mping drummed more deeply; the drivers held, pushed, panted, and gained against the white wall; heaved and stumbled ahead; and with a yell from Sinclair and Sankey and the fireman, the double-header shot her nose into the clear over the Blackwood gorge. As engine after engine flew past the divided walls each cab took up the cry; it was the wildest crowd that ever danced to victory. Through they went and half-way across the bridge before they could check their monster catapult. Then, at a half full, they shot it back again at the cut, for it worked as well one way as the other.

"The thing is done," declared Sankey, when they got into position up the line for a final shoot to clean out the eastern cut and get head for a dash across the bridge and into the west end of the canon, where there lay another mountain of snow to split. "Look the machines over pretty close, boys," said he to the engineers. "If nothing's sprung, we'll take a full head across the gorge--the bridge will carry anything--and buck the west cut. Then after we get Number One through this afternoon, Neighbor can put his baby cabs in here and keep 'em chasing all night.

But it's done snowing," he added, looking at the leaden sky.

He had the plans all figured out for the master mechanic, the shrewd, kindly old man. I think, myself, there's no man on earth like a good Indian; and, for that matter, none like a bad one. Sankey knew by a military instinct just what had to be done and how to do it. If he had lived, he was to have been a.s.sistant superintendent. That was the word that leaked from headquarters afterward. And with a volley of jokes between the cabs and a laughing and yelling between toots, down went Sankey's double-header again into the Blackwood gorge.

At the same moment, by an awful misunderstanding of orders, down came the big rotary from the west end with a dozen cars of coal behind. Mile after mile it had wormed east toward Sankey's ram, and it now burrowed through the western cut of the Blackwood, crashed through the drift Sankey was aiming for, and whirled out into the open, dead against him, at forty miles an hour. Each train, in order to make the grade and the blockade against it, was straining the cylinders.

Through the swirling snow that half hid the bridge and interposed between the rus.h.i.+ng plows Sinclair saw them coming. He yelled. Sankey saw them a fraction of a second later, and while Sinclair struggled with the throttle and the air, Sankey gave the alarm through the whistle to the poor fellows in the blind pockets behind. But the track was at the worst. Where there was no snow there were "whiskers"; oil itself couldn't have been worse to stop on. It was the old and deadly peril of fighting blockades from both ends on a single track. The great rams of steel and fire had done their work, and with their common enemy overcome, they dashed at each other like madmen across the Blackwood gorge.

The fireman at the first cry shot out the side. Sankey yelled at Sinclair to jump. But Georgie shook his head: he never would jump.

Without hesitating, Sankey picked him from the levers in his arms, planted a sure foot, and hurled him like a coal shovel through the gangway far out into the gorge. The other cabs were already empty. But the instant's delay in front cost Sankey his life. Before he himself could jump the rotary crashed into the 566. They reared like mountain lions, pitched sideways and fell headlong into the creek, fifty feet.

Sankey went under them. He could have saved himself; he chose to save George. There wasn't time to do both; he had to choose, and to choose instantly. Did he, maybe, think in that flash of Neeta and of whom she needed most--of a young and a stalwart protector rather than an old and failing one? I do not know; I know only what he did. Every one who jumped got clear. Sinclair lit in ten feet of snow, and they pulled him out with a rope: he wasn't scratched. Even the bridge was not badly strained. Number One pulled over it next day.

Sankey was right; there was no more snow; not even enough to cover the dead engines that lay on the rocks. But the line was open: the fight was won.

There never was a funeral in McCloud like Sankey's. George Sinclair and Neeta followed first, and of the mourners there were as many as there were spectators. Every engine on the division carried black for thirty days.

Sankey's contrivance for fighting snow has never yet been beaten on the high line. It is perilous to go against a drift behind it: something has to give. But it gets there, as Sankey got there--always; and in time of blockade and desperation on the West End they still send out Sankey's double-header; though Sankey, as the conductors tell the children, traveling east or traveling west--Sankey isn't running any more.

VIII

AUNT MARY TELEGRAPHS

A Comedy of Everyday Life

By LLOYD E. LONERGAN

"AUNTIE left on the six-o'clock train last night. Meet her at the depot.--CLARA."

This telegram, dated New York, greeted Frank Carey when he reached his pleasant little home on Indiana Avenue, Chicago.

"Aunt Mary will be here to-night," he said to his wife, "my rich aunt from New York, you know. I am to meet her at the depot."

"When does she arrive?" fluttered pretty little Mrs. Carey, a bride of a few months. "Cannot I go with you to the depot?"

Mr. Carey said she could, then he thought for a moment, then he put his doubts into words after a second reading of the telegram.

"I wonder what road she is coming in on?" he said.

"'Twas stupid of her," replied his wife, "but call up the railroads and find out which one has a six-o'clock train from New York. Silly!"

Mr. Carey kissed his wife and remarked that she was the brightest little girl in the world, after which he gaily telephoned, listened intently to someone on the other end of the line, made numerous notes, and turned to his wife in despair.

"Bless Clara!" he said devoutly.

His wife looked surprised, so he hastily explained.

"There is a six o'clock train from New York on the Pennsylvania, also on the Lake Sh.o.r.e, likewise on the Michigan Central, and the Lehigh Valley, and the Grand Trunk, and the West Sh.o.r.e, and the B. &. O.!"

"Which one is auntie coming on?" inquired Mrs. Carey with interest.

"All of them," replied her husband wrathfully. "She is sitting on the cow-catcher of each and every train, and if I'm not there to meet her she'll disinherit me. Haven't you any sense?"

Whereupon there were tears, apologies, and finally a council of war. It was Mrs. Carey who solved the problem.

"All we have to do," she cried, "is to meet all the trains. Won't it be cute?"

Carey didn't think so, but was afraid to express himself. He simply tried to look impressed and listened.

"There are only seven trains," she continued. "Now you," counting on her fingers, "are one, and I am two and Mr. and Mrs. Haines next door, who belong to my whist club, are four; and Ella Haines is five; and I just saw Mr. What's-his-name go in to call on Ella--and he'll be six; and that horrid man on the next block who is in your lodge will have to be seven."

The "train meeters" were gathered together inside of an hour. Mrs. Carey overruled all objections and laughed away all difficulties. She told them it would be a lark, and they believed it--at the time! As none of them had met Mrs. Smith (Aunt Mary), Carey was called upon for a description.