fellow, and carried the blood of a Sioux chief in his veins. It was in
the time of the Black Hills excitement, when railroad men, struck by the
gold fever, were abandoning their trains even at way-stations and
striking across the divide for Clark's Crossing. Men to run the trains
were hard to get, and Tom Porter, trainmaster, was putting in every man
he could pick up without reference to age or color. Porter (he died at
Julesburg afterward) was a great "jollier," and he wasn't afraid of
anybody on earth. One day a war party of Sioux clattered into town and
tore around like a storm. They threatened to scalp everything, even to
the local tickets. They dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the
despatcher's office upstairs, while the despatcher was hiding below,
under a loose plank in the baggage-room floor. Tom, being bald as a
sand-hill, considered himself exempt from scalping parties anyway. He
was working a game of solitaire when they bore down on him, and got them
interested in it. That led to a parley, which ended by Porter's hiring
the whole band to brake on freight trains. Old man Sankey was said to
have been one of that original war party.
Now this is merely a caboose story, told on winter nights when trainmen
get stalled in the snow that drifts down from the Sioux country. But
what follows is better attested.
Sankey, to start with, had a peculiar name--an unpronounceable,
unspellable, unmanageable name. I never heard it, so I can't give it to
you; but it was as hard to catch as an Indian pony, and that name made
more trouble on the payrolls than all the other names put together.
Nobody at headquarters could handle it; it was never turned in twice
alike, and they were always writing Tom Porter about the thing. Tom
explained several times that it was Sitting Bull's ambassador who was
drawing that money, and that he usually signed the pay-roll with a
tomahawk. But nobody at Omaha ever knew how to take a joke. The first
time Tom went down, he was called in very solemnly to explain again
about the name, and being in a hurry and very tired of the whole
business, Tom spluttered: "Hang it, don't bother me any more about that
name! If you can't read it make it Sankey, and be done with it."
They took Tom at his word. They actually did make it Sankey; and that's
how our oldest conductor came to bear the name of the famous singer. And
more I may tell you: good name as it was--and is--the Sioux never
disgraced it.
I suppose every old traveler on the system knew Sankey. He was not only
always ready to answer questions; but, what is more, ready to answer the
same question twice. It is that which makes conductors gray-headed and
spoils their chances for heaven--answering the same questions over and
over again. Children were apt to be startled a bit at first sight of
Sankey, he was so dark. But Sankey had a very quiet smile that always
made them friends after the first trip through the sleepers, and they
sometimes ran about asking for him after he had left the train. Of late
years--and this hurts a bit--these very same children, grown ever so
much bigger, and riding again to or from California or Japan or
Australia, will ask, when they reach the West End, about the Indian
conductor. But the conductors who now run the overland trains pause at
the question, checking over the date limits on the margins of the coupon
tickets, and handing the envelopes back, look at the children, and say
quietly: "He isn't running any more."
If you have ever gone over our line to the mountains or to the coast,
you may remember at McCloud, where they change engines and set the diner
in or out, the pretty little green park to the east of the depot, with a
row of catalpa trees along the platform line. It looks like a glass of
spring water. If it happened to be Sankey's run and a regular West End
day, sunny and delightful, you would be sure to see standing under the
catalpas a shy, dark-skinned girl of fourteen or fifteen years, silently
watching the preparations for the departure of the Overland. And after
the new engine had been backed champing down, and harnessed to its long
string of vestibuled sleepers; after the air-hose had been connected and
examined; after the engineer had swung out of his cab, filled his cups,
and swung in again; after the fireman and his helper had disposed of
their slice-bar and shovel and given the tender a final sprinkle, and
after the conductor had walked leisurely forward, compared time with the
engineer, and cried, "All Abo-o-o-ard!" then, as your coach moved slowly
ahead, you might notice, under the receding catalpas, the little girl
waving a parasol or a handkerchief at the outgoing train. That is, at
Conductor Sankey; for she was his daughter, Neeta Sankey. Her mother was
Spanish, and died when Neeta was a wee bit. Neeta and the Limited were
Sankey's whole world.
When Georgie Sinclair began pulling the Limited, running west opposite
Foley, he struck up a great friendship with Sankey. Sankey, though he
was hard to start, was full of early-day stories. Georgie, it seemed,
had the faculty of getting him to talk; perhaps because when he was
pulling Sankey's train he made extraordinary efforts to keep on time;
time was a hobby with Sankey. Foley said he was so careful of it that he
let his watch stop when he was off duty just to save time. Sankey loved
to breast the winds and the floods and the snows, and if he could get
home pretty near on schedule, with everybody else late, he was happy;
and in respect of that, as Sankey used to say, Georgie Sinclair could
come nearer gratifying Sankey's ambition than any engine-runner we had.
Even the firemen used to observe that the young engineer, always neat,
looked still neater on the days when he took out Sankey's train.
By and by there was an introduction under the catalpas. After that it
was noticed that Georgie began wearing gloves on the engine--not kid
gloves, but yellow dogskin; and black silk shirts--he bought them in
Denver. Then--such an odd way engineers have of paying compliments--when
Georgie pulled into town on Number Two, if it was Sankey's train, the
big sky-scraper would give a short, hoarse scream, a most peculiar note,
just as it drew past Sankey's house, which stood on the brow of the hill
west of the yards. Thus Neeta would know that Number Two and her father,
and naturally Mr. Sinclair, were in again, and all safe and sound.
When the railway trainmen held their division fair at McCloud there was
a lantern to be voted to the most popular conductor--a gold-plated
lantern with a green curtain in the globe. Cal Stewart and Ben Doton,
who were very swell conductors and great rivals, were the favorites, and
had the town divided over their chances for winning it. But at the last
moment Georgie Sinclair stepped up to the booth and cast a storm of
votes for old man Sankey. Doton's friends and Stewart's laughed at
first; but Sankey's votes kept pouring in amazingly. The two favorites
got frightened; they pooled their issues by throwing Stewart's vote to
Doton. But it wouldn't do. Georgie Sinclair, with a crowd of
engineers--Cameron, Kennedy, Foley, Bat Mullen, and Burns--came back at
them with such a swing that in the final five minutes they fairly
swamped Doton. Sankey took the lantern by a thousand votes. But I
understood it cost Georgie and his friends a pot of money.
Sankey said all the time that he didn't want the lantern, but just the
same he always carried that particular lantern, with his full name,
Sylvester Sankey, ground into the glass just below the green mantle.
Pretty soon, Neeta being then eighteen, it was rumored that Sinclair was
engaged to Miss Sankey, and was going to marry her. And marry her he
did; though that was not until after the wreck in the Blackwood gorge
after the Big Snow.
It goes by just that name on the West End yet; for never were such a
winter and such a snow known on the plains and in the mountains. One
train on the northern division was stalled six weeks that winter, and
one whole coach was chopped up for kindling wood. The great and
desperate effort of the company was to hold open the main line, the
artery which connected the two coasts. It was a hard winter on trainmen.
Week after week the snow kept falling and blowing. The trick was not to
clear the line; it was to keep it clear. Every day we sent out trains
with the fear that we should not see them again for a week. Freight we
didn't pretend to move; local passenger business had to be abandoned.
Coal, to keep our engines and our towns supplied, we had to carry; and
after that all the brains and muscle and motive power were centered on
keeping One and Two, our through passenger trains, running.
Our trainmen worked like Americans; there were no cowards on our rolls.
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 Saturday morning the section men reported
thirty feet in the Blackwood canyon. 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
ship 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
passengers, 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 passengers 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-scrapers 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 principally 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 canyon. 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 muffled 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 massive 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 scrape 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 canyon of
the Blackwood. Once they went in, and twice. And the second time the
bumping 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 canyon, 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 assistant 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 rushing 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 Shore, likewise on the Michigan Central, and the Lehigh
Valley, and the Grand Trunk, and the West Shore, 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.
"Aunt Mary," he said, "is of medium height, dark complexion and usually
dresses in black. She is fifty-eight years old, but tells people she is
under fifty. You cannot miss her." And with this they were compelled to
be satisfied.
* * * * *