It would be difficult to say which of these dispatches distressed him
most. The first said he had sold himself for so much money, the second
that he had gone to the company and begged to be reïnstated. Slowly he
opened the first crumpled message and read down to the word "scab."
"George Cowels, the scab,--burned in effigy--a great mob about his
house." All these things passed swiftly before him, and the thought of
his wife and baby being in actual danger, his boy being kicked and
cuffed about, almost made him mad. He crushed the crumpled messages in
his right hand while with his left he pulled the throttle wide open. The
powerful Blackwings, built to make time with ten cars loaded, leaped
forward like a frightened deer. The speed of the train was now terrific,
and the stations, miles apart, brushed by them like telegraph poles. At
Mendota a crowd of men hurled sticks and stones at the flying train. As
the stones hailed into the cab, and the broken glass rained over him,
the desperate driver never so much as glanced to either side, but held
his place, his hand on the throttle and his eye on the track. For the
first time he looked at his watch. He was still more than an hour late.
He remembered how the old engineer had said, an hundred times perhaps:
"George, an express train should never be late; she should be on time or
in the ditch."
It was the first time Blackwings had ever been an hour late anywhere,
and with all his greater sorrows this grieved the young engineer. Now at
the way stations the crowd that awaited them invariably fell back as the
wild train dashed by, or, if they hurled their missiles, those aimed at
the locomotive struck the sleeper or flew across the track behind it, so
great was the speed of the train. Cowels yielded at last to the
irresistible desire to see how his companion was taking it, but as he
bent his gaze in that direction it encountered the grinning face of the
fireman, into which he threw the crumpled paper. Then, as he continued
to grin, the infuriated engineer grabbed a hard-hammer and hurled it
murderously at Guerin's head. The latter saved his life by a clever
dodge, and springing to the driver's side caught him by the back of the
neck and shoved his head out at the window and held it there. They were
just at that moment descending a long grade down which the most daring
driver always ran with a closed throttle. Blackwings was wide open, and
now she appeared to be simply rolling and falling through space.
Although we have no way of knowing how fast she fell, it is safe to say
she was making ninety miles an hour. While the fireman held on to the
engineer, squeezing and shaking away at the back of his neck, the speed
of the train was increasing with every turn of the wheels. Gradually the
resistance of the engineer grew feebler until all at once he dropped
across the arm-rest, limp and lifeless. Guerin, finding himself alone
on the flying engine, had presence of mind enough to close the throttle,
but with that his knowledge of the locomotive ended. He reasoned that in
time she must run down and stop of herself, and then the train crew
would come forward and relieve his embarrassment. It never occurred to
him for a moment that he might be regarded as a murderer, for he had
only held the engineer down to the seat, with no more violence than boys
use toward each other in play. And while he stood staring at the still
form of the driver that hung out of the window like a pair of wet
overalls, the engine rolled, the snow drifted deeper and deeper on the
headlight, and with every roll the bell tolled! tolled!! like a church
bell tolling for the dead. The train, slowing down, rolled silently over
the shrouded earth, the fire in the open furnace blackened and died, the
cold air chilled her flues and the stream of water from the open
injector flooded the boiler of Blackwings and put the death-rattle in
her throat. When at last the train rolled slowly into Galesburg the
fireman stood on the deck of a dead locomotive, with snow on her
headlight, and, as the crowd surged round him, pointed to the limp form
of the young engineer that hung in the window, dead.