"Brush the snow off the headlight!"
"What?"
"Brush the snow off the headlight!"
It was the first time the engineer had spoken to the fireman since they
left Chicago. When they crossed the last switch and left the lights of
the city behind them he had settled down in his place, his eyes, with a
sort of dazed look in them, fixed upon the front window. The snow was
driving from the north-west so hard that it was impossible for the
engineer, even when running slowly through the country towns, to put his
head outside the cab, and now they were falling out into the night at
the rate of a mile a minute.
It was Barney Guerin's first trip as a fireman. He was almost exhausted
by the honest effort he had been making to keep the engine hot, and now
he looked at the engineer in mingled surprise and horror. He could not
believe that the man expected him to go out over the wet and slippery
running-board to the pilot and wipe the snow from the headlight glass.
He stood and stared so long that the fire burned low and the pointer on
the steam gauge went back five pounds. For the next two or three minutes
he busied himself at the furnace door, and when he finally straightened
up, half-blinded by the awful glare of the fire-box, half-dazed by being
thrown and beaten against the sides of the coal tank, the engineer said:
"Brush the snow off the _headlight_!"
The fireman opened the narrow door in front of him and the storm came in
so furiously that he involuntarily closed it again. Again he tried and
again was beaten back by the wind. Pulling his cap tight down he faced
about and stepped out with his back to the storm. Holding to the hand
railing he worked his way to the front end. One sweep of his gloved hand
swept the snow away and the great glare of the headlight flashed up the
track.
"My God! how she rolls!" exclaimed the engineer.
And she did roll.
Never before in the history of the road had the Denver Limited been
entrusted to a green crew, for the engineer was also making his maiden
trip. The day coach was almost empty. In the chair car, with four chairs
turned together, the newly-made conductor, the head brakeman, a country
editor, and the detective sent out to spot the crew, played high five.
The three or four passengers in the sleeper were not asleep. They were
sitting silently at the curtained windows and occasionally casting
anxious glances at the Pullman conductor who seemed to be expecting
something to happen. Where were all the people who used to travel by
this splendid train? The road was now considered, by most people, as
unsafe and the people were going round it. Public opinion, at the
beginning of the strike, was about equally divided between the men and
the company. Now and then a reckless striker or sympathizer would blow
up a building, dope a locomotive or ditch a train, and the stock of the
strikers would go down in the estimation of the public. Burlington stock
was falling rapidly--the property was being wrecked.
On nearly every side track could be seen two or three dead engines that
had been ruined and abandoned by amateur engine-drivers, and now and
then at way-stations the smouldering ruins of a freight train, whose
blackened skeleton still clung to the warped and twisted track. At every
station great crowds of people blocked the platforms, for the Limited
had not been able to leave Chicago for more than a month. The engineer
had scarcely touched the whistle, deeming it safer to slip quietly
through the night, and the light train was now speeding noiselessly over
the snow-muffled earth. They had left Chicago two hours late, and as
they had a clear track, so far as other trains were concerned, the
young driver was letting her go regardless of danger. At any moment they
might expect to be blown into eternity, and it was just as safe at
seventy miles an hour as at seventeen.
Besides, George Cowels was desperate. For five long years he had fired
this run with the same locomotive. He knew all her tricks and whims, her
speed and power, and the road was as familiar to him as was his mother's
face. He knew where the "old man" used to cut her back and ease off on
the down grades. He knew that he ought to do the same, but he did not.
"Let her roll," he would say to himself; and she did roll, and with
every swing the bell sounded a single note, low and mournful, like a
church bell tolling for the dead. It seemed to the unhappy engineer that
it tolled for him, for that day he had died to all his friends.
Although he had only been out a little over an hour now, he knew that in
that hour the story of his desertion had flashed out to every division
of the various brotherhoods in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and
that a hundred thousand men and women would curse him that night before
they slept. He recollected what a vigorous striker he had been in the
beginning, how he had shouted, "Put him out" when the grand master had
said: "We are fighting a losing fight." He recalled with some bitterness
that their leader had looked him straight in the face when he added:
"And you who fight hardest here will be first to fall."
Then the face of his ten-year-old boy rose up before him, as it had
appeared from the street as he was leaving his home that evening, all
bruised and bleeding, with soiled and torn clothes, and he heard the
brave child's explanation: "Mamma, I wouldn't 'ave fit, but Dugan's boy
said my papa was a scab."[4]
[4] _The reader must pardon the use of this vulgar word, for we must use
it here or spoil this story._
Ordinarily it would require a great deal of "sand" to enable a man to
take out a train of this kind and run at such a high rate of speed
through a country full of anarchy, but in Cowels's case it required
nothing in the way of bravery. The great sacrifice he had made in
abandoning all that he held to be honorable,--the breaking of his vow,
the violation of his oath, had left him utterly indifferent to personal
danger.
It will be difficult for those unacquainted with the vast army of daily
toilers to appreciate the sufferings of this youthful engine-driver. A
king, who in a night's debauch loses an empire, loses no more than the
man who abandons all that he holds sacred. The struggles and
disappointments of the poor mean as much to them as similar sorrows mean
to the rich. The heart of a Bohemian milkmaid beats as wildly, aches as
sorely and breaks as surely as does the heart of the proudest princess.
This man and his wife, on the day they abandoned the cause of his
comrades--of the Brotherhood of which he had been so proud, of whose
strength he had boasted in many a crowded hall--made a great sacrifice.
To stand disgraced in their little world was to be disgraced before all
the people of all the earth, for in that world were the only people they
knew and cared about.
When the fireman returned to the cab he was almost overcome with terror.
More than once, as he worked his way along the side of the rolling,
plunging engine, he had nearly been dashed to death. The very machine,
he fancied, was striving to shake him from her. Once he had lost his
footing on the running board and only saved himself by clinging to the
hand rail while the rolling steed beat and thrashed him against her iron
side.
"Never ask me to do that again," he shouted, as he shook his clenched
fist at the engineer. The latter laughed, then asked:
"Why?"
"Because it is dangerous; I nearly lost my life."
"And what if you had?" said the engineer, and he laughed again. "Why,
don't you know that thousands would rejoice at the news of your death
and scarcely a man would mourn? Don't you know that at thousands of
supper-tables to-night, working men who could afford to buy an evening
paper read your name and cursed you before their wives and children?
Nearly lost your life! Poor, miserable, contemptible scab."
"Never apply that name to me again!" shouted Guerin, and this time it
was not his fist but the coal-pick he shoved up into the very face of
the engineer.
"Why?"
"Because it is dangerous; you nearly lost _your_ life."
The engineer made no reply.
"And what if you had?" the fireman went on, for it was his turn to talk
now.
"If my action makes me contemptible in the eyes of men, how much more
contemptible must yours make you? I take the place of a stranger--you
the place of a friend; a man who has educated you, who has taught you
all you know about this machine. Right well I know how I shall be hated
by the dynamiters who are blowing up bridges and burning cars, and I
tell you now that it does not grieve me. Can you say as much? Here's a
copy of the message that went out to your miserable little world
to-night--read it, it will do you good. I fancy your friends will be too
busy cursing you this evening to devote any time to mere strangers."
Cowels took the message with a jerk, turned the gauge lamp to his corner
and read:
The Denver Limited left to-night, two hours late, Fireman George
Cowels as engineer, and Time-keeper Guerin as fireman. Cowels is the
man who wanted the grand master thrown out of a hall in Chicago. He
was a great labor agitator and his desertion is a great surprise.