Cordwood Part 7

Perhaps there is nothing in the line of discovery and improvement that has shown more marked progress in the last century than the railway and its different auxiliaries. When we remember that much less than a century has pa.s.sed since the first patent for a locomotive to move upon a track was issued, where now we have everything that heart can wish, and, in fact, live better on the road than we do at home, with but thirty-six hours between New York and Minneapolis, and a gorgeous parlor, bedroom, and dining-room between Maine and Oregon, with nothing missing that may go to make life a rich blessing, we are compelled to express our wonder and admiration.

To Peter Cooper is largely due the boom given to railway business, he having constructed the first locomotive ever made in this country, and put it on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad.

The first train ever operated must have been a grand sight. First came the locomotive, a large Babc.o.c.k fire-extinguisher on trucks, with a smoke-stack like a full-blown speaking-tube with a frill around the top; the engineer at his post in a plug hat, with an umbrella over his head and his hand on the throttle, borrowing a chew of tobacco now and then of the farmers who pa.s.sed him on their way to town. Near him stood the fireman, now and then bringing in an armful of wood from the fields through which he pa.s.sed, and turning the damper in the smoke-stack every little while so it would draw. Now and then he would go forward and put a pork-rind on a hot box or pound on the cylinder head to warn people off the track.

Next comes the tender loaded with nice, white birch wood, an economical style of fuel because its bark may be easily burned off while the wood itself will remain uninjured. Besides the firewood we find on the tender a barrel of rainwater and a tall, blonde jar with wicker-work around it, which contains a small sprig of tansy immersed in four gallons of New England rum. This the engineer has brought with him for use in case of accident. He is now engaged in preparing for the accident in advance.

Next comes the front brakeman in a plug hat about two sizes too large for him. He also wears a long-waisted frock coat with a bustle to it and a tall s.h.i.+rt-collar with a table-spread tie, the ends of which flutter gayly in the morning breeze. As the train pauses at the first station he takes a hammer out of the tool-box and nails on the tire of the fore wheel of his coach. The engineer gets down with a long oil-can and puts a little sewing-machine oil on the pitman. He then wipes it off with his sleeve.

It is now discovered that the rear coach, containing a number of directors and the division superintendent, is missing. The conductor goes to the rear of the last coach, and finds that the string by which the directors' car was attached is broken, and that, the grade being pretty steep, the directors and one brakeman have no doubt gone back to the starting place.

But the conductor is cool. He removes his bell-crowned plug hat, and, taking out his orders and time-card, he finds that the track is clear, and, looking at a large, valuable Waterbury watch, presented to him by a widow whose husband was run over and killed by the train, he sees he can still make the next station in time for dinner. He hires a livery team to go back after the directors' coach, and, calling "All aboard," he swings lightly upon the moving train.

It is now 10 o'clock, and nineteen weary miles still stretch out between him and the dinner station. To add to the horrors of the situation, the front brakeman discovers that a very thirsty boy in the emigrant car has been drinking from the water-supply tank on the tender, and there is not enough left to carry the train through. Much time is consumed in filling the barrel again at a spring near the track, but the conductor finds a "spotter" on the train, and gets him to do it. He also induces him to cut some more wood and clean out the ashes.

The engineer then pulls out a draw-head and begins to make up time. In twenty minutes he has made up an hour's time, though two miles of hoop-iron are torn from the track behind him. He sails into the eating station on time, and, while the master mechanic takes several of the coach-wheels over to the machine-shop to soak, he eats a hurried lunch.

The brakeman here gets his tin lanterns ready for the night run and fills two of them with red oil to be used on the rear coach. The fireman puts a fresh bacon-rind on the eccentric, stuffs some more cotton batting around the axles, puts a new lynch-pin in the hind wheels, sweeps the apple-peelings out of the smoking car, and he is ready.

Then comes the conductor, with his plug hat full of excursion tickets, orders, pa.s.ses, and timechecks; he looks at his Waterbury watch, waves his hand, and calls "All aboard" again. It is upgrade, however, and for two miles the "spotter" has to push behind with all his might before the conductor will allow him to get on and ride.

Thus began the history of a gigantic enterprise which has grown till it is a comfort, a convenience, a luxury, and yet a necessity. It has built up and beautified the desert. It has crept beneath the broad river, scaled the snowy mountain, and hung by iron arms from the canon and the precipice, carrying the young to new lands and reuniting those long separated. It has taken the hopeless to lands of new hope. It has evaded the solitude of the wilderness, spiked down valuable land-grants, killed cheap cattle and then paid a high price for them, whooped through valleys, snorted over lofty peaks, crept through long, dark tunnels, turning the bright glare of day suddenly upon those who thought the tunnel was two miles long, roared through the night and glittered through the day, bringing alike the groom to his beautiful bride and the weeping prodigal to the moss-grown grave of his mother.

You are indeed a heartless, soulless corporation, and yet you are very essential in our business.

BILL NYE'S LETTER.

HOW OLD BRINDLE MET HER DEATH WITH A TRAIN.

A QUAINT EPISTLE, IN WHICH THE HUMORIST GIVES HIS EXPERIENCE WITH RAILROAD OFFICIALS--HOW HE SECURED PAY FOR A COW.

DEAR HENRY: Your letter stating that you had just succeeded in running your face for a new curriculum is at hand and contents noted, as the feller said when I wrote to him two years ago and told him that his cussed railroad had mashed old Brin. You remember that just as you entered on what you called your junior year, old Brin remained out all night, and your mother and me took our coffee milkless in the morning.

Well, I went down to the pound to see if she had registered there, but she hadn't been stopping there, the night clerk said. He maintained, however, that "number two-aught-eight"--as he called it--had come in half an hour late with a cow's head on the pilot and brindle hair on the runnin' gears of the tender.

So I went over to the station and found Brin's head there, whereupon I went down the track in search of her, though I feared it would be futile, as you once said about administering a half sole to your summer pantaloons. Well, I was right about it, Henry. If I'd been in the futile business for years I couldn't have been more so than I was on this occasion. The old cow was dead and so identified with the right of way, that her own mother would not have known her.

I spoke to the conductor about it and he said it wasn't on his run and for me to see the other conductor. Time I found him he was on another road and killed in a collision with a lumber train. Then I wrote to the general traffic manager, using great care to spell all the words as near right as possible, and he didn't reply at all. His hired man wrote me, however, with a printing press, that my letter had been received and contents duly noted. In reply would say that the general traffic manager was then attending a tripart.i.te reunion at Chicago, at which meeting the subject of cows would come up. He said that there had been such compet.i.tion between the Milwaukee, the Northwestern and the Rock Island in the matter of prices paid for shattered cows, that farmers got to dragging their debilitated stock on the track at night and selling it to the roads, after which they would retire from business on their ill-gotten gains.

When the general traffic manager got back I went in to see him. He was very pleasant with me, but said he had nothing to do with the dead cow industry. "Go to the auditor or the general solicitor," said he, "they run the morgue." But they were both away attending a large Eastern ma.s.s meeting of auditors and general solicitors, where they where discussing the practicability of a new garnishee-proof pay-car, that some party had patented, they said.

So I went home and wrote to the auditor a nice, long, fluent letter in relation to the cow and her merits. I told him that it wasn't the intrinsic value of the cow that I cared about. Intrinsic value is a term that I found in one of your letters and liked very much. I wrote him that old Brin was an heir-loom and a n.o.ble brute. I said among other things that she had never been antagonistic to railroads. She had rather favored them; also that her habits and tastes were simple and that she had never aspired to rise above her station in life, and why she should rise higher than the station when she was injured I could not understand. I told him what a good milkster she was, and also that she came up every night as regular as an emetic.

I then wrote my name with a little ornamental squirm to it, added a postscript in which I said that you was now in your junior year, and I thought that about seventy-five dollars would be a fair quotation on such a cow as I had feebly described, and said good-by to him, hoping he would remit at a prior date if possible.

I got a letter after awhile, stating that my favor of the 25th ult. or prox. or something of that nature, had been duly received and contents noted. This was no surprise to me, because that is too often the sad fate of a letter. In fact the same thing had happened to the other one I had previously sent.

I was mad, and wrote to the president of the company stating in crisp language that if his company would pay more cash for cows and do less in the noting and contents business, he would be more apt to endear himself to those who reside along his line and who had their horses scared to death twice a day by his arrogant and bellering besom of destruction.

"If you will deal more in scads and less in stenography and monkey business," says I, in closing, "you will warm yourself into the hearts of the plain people. Otherwise," I says, "we will arise in our might and walk."

I then, in a humorsome way, marked it "dictated letter" and sent it away.

I got it back in the face by way of the dead-letter office where they know me. I'll bet they had a good laugh over it, for they opened it and read it while it was there. I wouldn't be surprised if every man in Congress had a good hearty laugh over that letter. Congressmen enjoy a good thing once in a while, Henry. They ain't so dumb as they look.

But I finally got my pay for old Brin, to make a long story short. They cut me down some on the price, but I finally got my money. No railroad company can run over a cow of mine and mix her up with a trestle three-quarters of a mile long, without paying for it, and favors received and contents duly noted don't go with

Your father,

BILL NYE.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

BILL NYE

ATTENDS A WESTERN THEATER AND SEES A REMARKABLE SHOOTING AFFRAY.

Those were troublesome times, indeed, when we were trying to settle up the new world and a few other matters at the same time.

Little do the soft-eyed sons of prosperity understand to-day, as they walk the paved streets of the west under the cold glitter of the electric light, surrounded by all that can go to make life sweet and desirable, that not many years ago on that same ground their fathers fought the untutored savage by night and chased the bounding buffalo by day.

All, all is changed. Time in his restless and resistless flight has filed away those early years in the county clerk's office, and these times are not the old times. With the march of civilization I notice that it is safer for a man to attend a theatre than in the early days of the wild and wooly west. Time has made it easier for one to go to the opera and bring his daylights home with him than it used to be.

It seems but a few short years since my room-mate came home one night with a long red furrow plowed along the top of his head, where some gentleman at the theatre had shot him by mistake. My room-mate said that a tall man had objected to the pianist and suggested that he was playing pianissimo when he should have played fortissimo, and trouble grew out of this which had ended in the death of the pianist and the injury of several disinterested spectators.

And yet the excitement of knowing that you might be killed at any moment made the theatre more attractive, and instead of scaring men away it rather induced patronage. Of course it prevented the attendance of ladies who were at all timid, but it did not cause any falling off in the receipts. Some thought it aided a good deal, especially where the show itself didn't have much blood in it.

The Bella Union was a pretty fair sample of the theatre in those days.

It was a low wooden structure with a perpetual band on the outside, that played gay and festive circus tunes early and often. Inside you could poison your soul at the bar and see the show at one and the same price of admission. In an adjoining room silent men joined the hosts of faro and the timid tenderfoot gamboled o'er the green.

I visited this place of amus.e.m.e.nt one evening in the capacity of a reporter for the paper. I would not admit this, even at this late day, only that it has been overlooked in Mr. Talmage since; and if he could go through such an ordeal in the interests of humanity, I might be forgiven for going there professionally to write up the show for our amus.e.m.e.nt column.

The programme was quite varied. Negro minstrelsy, sleight-of-hand, opera bouffe, high tragedy, and that oriental style of quadrille called the khan-khan, if my sluggish memory be not at fault, formed the princ.i.p.al attractions of the evening.

At about 10:30 or 11 o'clock the khan-khan was produced upon the stage.

In the midst of it a tall man rose up at the back of the hall, and came firmly down the aisle with a large, earnest revolver in his right hand.

He was a powerfully built man, with a dyed mustache and wicked eye on each side of his thin, red nose. He threw up the revolver with a little click that sounded very loud to me, for he had stopped right behind me and rested his left hand on my shoulder as he gazed over on the stage. I could distinctly hear his breath come and go, for it was a very loud breath, with the odor of onions and emigrant whisky upon it.

The orchestra paused in the middle of a snort, and the man whose duty it was to swallow the clarionet pulled seven or eight inches of the instrument out of his face and looked wildly around. The gentleman who had been agitating the feelings of the ba.s.s viol laid it down on the side, crawled in behind it, and spread a sheet of music over his head.

The stage manager came forward to the footlights and inquired what was wanted. The tall man with the self-c.o.c.king credentials answered simply: