Snow and ice on that mountain. Nothing but snow. The wind drove it
with a howl against the windows, where it stuck on the warm panes.
Sometimes I could just make out the blur of the semaphore lights and
sometimes I couldn’t. All day the blizzard had dumped its swirling
load about us, and now, when night closed down, the storm took the
tower in its teeth, shaking it like you’ve seen a dog shake a rat.
Oh, we were warm and cozy enough with our stove red hot. Which was
more than Donaldson, the agent at Hastings, could say. His wire talk
was rotten, chattery, and he told us he’d run out of coal. Looked like
he’d freeze to death, according to him. But Big Ben prophesied grimly
that Donaldson could take care of himself, so we might as well save
our worries.
I don’t suppose you ever heard of Big Ben, but that is your loss.
Every soul on the Mountain Division knew him. His Morse snapped out
like a track torpedo, fast, too, but accurate, staccato, with a smooth
flow as if a machine had hold of the key. Dots and dashes were part of
him, for, after years of it, he could express himself better that way.
Sort of feeling for the language, I suppose. I’ve seen the same gift
since, but never to the extent Ben possessed it. Why, he could come
mighty close to telling the color of your eyes over a telegraph-wire.
He and I had worked tower BB-17 on the Mountain Division for three
years, and during that time I never saw him flurried. Once a freight,
running extra, got by us—dispatcher tangled up his train-sheet. Forty
minutes later a relay came into stop her or she’d meet 87 on the big
grade.
It takes just forty minutes to run from our tower to Hastings, further
down the line. Hastings is the last station with a siding before the
grade. In other words, the freight ought to have been getting her O.
K. from Hastings right then.
Was Ben excited? Not one little bit.
Donaldson caught his first call. Clear as a bell it was. And Donaldson
had time to flag the freight.
But the particular night I’m speaking of, my side partner appeared a
bit uneasy, which was enough to set my think-tank working. He’d drop
down alongside the key for a moment; then he’d wander over to the
windows, trying to pierce the blizzard.
He was a big man with a hearty laugh and a mouth full of teeth and a
whiskered chin full of determination. His red hair, as brilliant as
the glow in his corn-cob pipe, usually stood on end. But his eyes were
gray and pleasant; that is, generally they were. Yet I’ve noticed ’em
hard as rocks, drilling into you with a gleam in ’em like you see
jumping across a spark-gap. Right now they were anxious.
Perhaps that wasn’t so strange, either, for all day long, from the
length of the division, had come bunches of trouble. A snowshed out
here; a freight ditched there; hell to pay everywhere.
Wires were down, too. Not a word could we get below Hastings or north
of the junction. Toward night every siding was overflowing with
deadheaded rolling stock. You see, the big grade—it’s four and a half
per cent in places—handicaps us because even our best oil-burners
won’t haul much tonnage on it in a blizzard. They can’t make steam.
And this particular frolic of the elements promised to beat anything
that had struck us in twenty years. At 10 P.M. the chief dispatcher
ordered the line cleared for the night, barring No. 77 southbound,
which was to make her run as usual. I reckon you’ve heard of that
train—the Cumberland Limited, all steel and solid Pullman? She was to
follow a snow-plow, and headquarters gossip filtering to us hinted she
might find the blizzard a bit of a teaser.
Suddenly Big Ben turned on me. “Jim,” said he, “I don’t like it.
What’s the old man thinking of to let 77 through? Have you heard what
she’s carrying to-night?”