AS THE DESPATCHER SAW
"If you can recollect the blizzard that Roscoe Conkling went down in
one March day in the streets of New York, it will give you the date;
possibly call to your mind the storm. I had the River Division then,
and we got through the whole winter without a single tie-up of
consequence until March.
"The morning was still as June. When the sky went heavy at noon it
looked more like a spring shower than a snow-storm; only, I noticed
over at the government building they were flying a black flag splashed
with a red centre. I had not seen it before for years, and I asked for
ploughs on every train out after two o'clock.
"Even then there was no wickedness abroad; it was coming fairly heavy
in big flakes, but lying quiet as apple-blossoms. Toward four o'clock
I left the office for the roundhouse, and got just about half-way
across the yard when the wind veered like a scared semaphore. I had
left the depot in a snow-storm; I reached the roundhouse in a blizzard.
"There was no time to wait to get back to the keys. I telephoned
orders over from the house, and the boys burned the wires, east and
west, with warnings. When the wind went into the north that day at
four o'clock, it was murder pure and simple, with the snow sweeping the
flat like a shroud and the thermometer water-logged at zero.
"All night it blew, with never a minute's let-up. By ten o'clock half
our wires were down, trains were failing all over the division, and
before midnight every plough on the line was bucking snow--and the snow
was coming harder. We had given up all idea of moving freight, and
were centring everything on the passenger trains, when a message came
from Beverly that the fast mail was off track in the cut below the
hill, and I ordered out the wrecking gang and a plough battery for the
run down.
"It was a fearful night to make up a train in a hurry--as much as a
man's life was worth to work even slow in the yard a night like that.
But what limit is set to a switchman's courage I have never known,
because I've never known one to balk at a yardmaster's order.
"I went to work clearing the line, and forgot all about everything
outside the train-sheet till a car-tink came running in with word that
a man was hurt in the yard.
"Some men get used to it; I never do. As much as I have seen of
railroad life, the word that a man's hurt always hits me in the same
place. Slipping into an ulster, I pulled a storm-cap over my ears and
hurried down stairs buttoning my coat. The arc-lights, blinded in the
storm, swung wild across the long yard, and the wind sung with a scream
through the telegraph wires. Stumbling ahead, the big car-tink, facing
the storm, led me to where between the red and the green lamps a dozen
men hovered close to the gangway of a switch engine. The man hurt lay
under the forward truck of the tender.
"They had just got the wrecking train made up, and this man, running
forward after setting a switch, had flipped the tender of the backing
engine and slipped from the footboard. When I bent over him, I saw he
was against it. He knew it, too, for the minute they shut off and got
to him he kept perfectly still, asking only for a priest.
"I tried every way I could think of to get him free from the wheels.
Two of us crawled under the tender to try to figure it out. But he lay
so jammed between the front wheel and the hind one, and tender trucks
are so small and the wheels so close together that to save our lives we
could neither pull ahead nor back the engine without further mutilating
him.
"As I talked to him I took his hand and tried to explain that to free
him we should have to jack up the truck. He heard, he understood, but
his eyes, glittering like the eyes of a wounded animal with shock,
wandered uneasily while I spoke, and when I had done, he closed them to
grapple with the pain. Presently a hand touched my shoulder; the
priest had come, and throwing open his coat knelt beside us. He was a
spare old man--none too good a subject himself, I thought, for much
exposure like that--but he did not seem to mind. He dropped on his
knees and, with both hands in the snow, put his head in behind the
wheel close to the man's face. What they said to each other lasted
only a moment, and all the while the boys were keying like madmen at
the jacks to ease the wheel that had crushed the switchman's thigh.
When they got the truck partly free, they lifted the injured man back a
little where we could all see his face. They were ready to do more,
but the priest, wiping the water and snow from the failing man's lips
and forehead, put up his fingers to check them.
"The wind, howling around the freight-cars strung about us, sucked the
guarded lantern flames up into blue and green flickers in the globes;
they lighted the priest's face as he took off his hat and laid it
beside him, and lighted the switchman's eyes looking steadily up from
the rail. The snow, curling and eddying across the little blaze of
lamps, whitened everything alike, tender and wheel and rail, the
jackscrews, the bars, and the shoulders and caps of the men. The
priest bent forward again and touched the lips and the forehead of the
switchman with his thumb: then straightening on his knees he paused a
moment, his eyes lifted up, raised his hand and slowly signing through
the blinding flakes the form of the cross, gave him the sacrament of
the dying.
"I have forgotten the man's name. I have never seen the old priest,
before or since. But, sometime, a painter will turn to the railroad
life. When he does, I may see from his hand such a picture as I saw at
that moment--the night, the storm, the scant hair of the priest blown
in the gale, the men bared about him; the hush of the death moment; the
wrinkled hand raised in the last benediction."