THE MIRACLE AT GREENFIELD
MEANWHILE, back in his private car, the great man, as was his custom in
any circumstance, had made himself as comfortable as might be. It was a
luxurious car, eighty feet in length, with bath, kitchen, lounging-room,
bedrooms, dining-room—in fact, everything that a modern home could have,
on a small and compact scale. Travel in this car was as luxurious as
travel could be. And even at the wild rate of speed at which it was
jerked forward, it maintained a long, steady roll, much like that of a
ship on a calm sea. Only when one glanced out the windows at the blurred
landscape was the speed apparent, unless, indeed, one kept one’s eyes on
the needle, which flickered ceaselessly up and down on the
speed-indicator.
Both of these things the great man studiously refrained from doing, but
turning his back alike to the windows and to the indicator, he devoted
his time to going through his correspondence, dictating to his
secretary, and meditating ways and means for holding New York in the
column of the “safe and sane.”
He sat up late into the night, as the train whirled across the Illinois
prairies, smoking meditatively, a wrinkle of perplexed anxiety between
his brows, for the path to the White House was proving more thorny than
he had thought possible. Not the least of his unexpected tribulations
was this record-breaking trip half across the continent. He was
naturally a nervous man, and this hurtling through space distressed him
acutely. He felt that he was being offered as a sacrifice upon the altar
of his country, and the sensation was anything but pleasant. His only
consolation was that his meteoric trip was being featured by the papers,
both friendly and unfriendly, and would prove an excellent
advertisement—more especially since the friendly papers were taking care
to point out how lightly the great man considered his own comfort—nay,
even his life—when his country called him! He smiled grimly to himself
as he thought of those headlines, for he was thoroughly conscious that
he was not in the least heroic, but merely an ordinary man with a
faculty of making friends, a power of keeping his mouth shut when it was
wise to do so, and a gift for rounded periods when rounded periods were
demanded.
He went to bed, at last, long after midnight, and it was not until
Cincinnati had been left far behind that he arose. He took his bath,
dressed himself leisurely, and finally sat down to breakfast. Sitting
thus, with his side to the window, he could not escape the vision of the
landscape, which was rushing madly past. Involuntarily his eyes rested
for an instant on the speed-indicator, and he started as he saw that the
needle showed an hourly speed of seventy-two miles. He closed his lips
firmly together and with a hand not altogether steady started to attack
his grapefruit.
Then suddenly the car lurched heavily and the next instant it seemed to
stand on end and buckle in the middle. The great man was thrown forward
across the table, which overturned with a crash; a negro waiter, who was
just entering with a tray of dishes, was hurled through a glass
partition and disappeared with a yell of terror. Every movable thing in
the car leaped toward the front end; what was breakable broke and the
orderly interior was transformed in an instant to an appalling chaos.
Of what happened in the next minute or two, the great man never had any
very definite recollection. He staggered to his feet at last and looked
dazedly around. Had there been a wreck? Was he badly injured?
Then he realized that the car was moving, that the landscape was
slipping past as rapidly as ever. His eyes fell again upon the needle of
the indicator. It stood at sixty-eight. He glared at it for a moment,
unable to believe his senses, then collapsed into a chair and buried his
head in his hands.
And it was in that position that his secretary found him.
* * * * *
Bill Higgins, the engineer, always claimed it was because the agent at
Roxabel had held him up for an hour waiting for a box-car to be loaded.
The car was for a friend of the agent’s, Bill explained, or he never
would have held the train. It wasn’t perishable goods, either—just some
household stuff, which the friend was having moved in from Roxabel to
Loveland.
Jim Burns, the conductor, said it was the heat—a really remarkable and
enervating heat for October, presaging a great storm brewing somewhere.
What the fireman said and the brakemen is immaterial, because when their
superiors went to sleep, it was to be expected that they would do
likewise. All of which came out when Train Master Plumfield had them “on
the carpet” for the investigation which followed. What happened was
really this:
Local freight west had started out from Wadsworth early in the morning,
to make the trip in to Cincinnati, picking up such cars as were waiting
for it along the way, and delivering others to the several stations. The
day was hot—there was no question of that—and the work was heavy, for
there was an unusual number of cars to deliver and pick up. Besides
which, came the delay at Roxabel, where the agent _did_ hold the train
for a while, until the work of loading a car could be finished. The
agent swore, however, that the delay on this account did not amount to
more than fifteen minutes. At Lyndon, came an order for the freight to
proceed to the gravel-pit siding east of Greenfield, and run in there
and await the passage of a special.
“Don’t say how long we’ll have to wait,” said Burns, as he and the
engineer compared notes. “Jest wait—time ain’t no object to nobody.
We’ll be mighty lucky if we get into Cincinnati before midnight.”
“Them dispatchers don’t know their business, an’ never did!” protested
Higgins, wiping the perspiration from his red face. “It’s an outrage to
keep a train on the road the way they’re keepin’ us. The government ort
t’ hear about it.”
“It sure ort,” agreed the conductor. “Well, I guess we’re ready,” and as
the train rattled slowly out of the siding, he swung himself aboard the
caboose, looked back to see that a yard-man closed the switch, and then,
having made up his report as far as he could, calmly laid himself down
in a berth and went to sleep.
The train rumbled on under the hot sun. The engineer, looking ahead,
could see the waves of heat rising from the rails and the pitch oozing
from the ties. Beside him, the fire beneath the boiler spat and roared;
the sun beat down upon the great locomotive, until Higgins almost
fancied it was turning red-hot before his eyes. The fireman, stripped to
the waist, swung the fire-box door open and shut as he ladled in the
coal, stopping now and then to dash the sweat from before his eyes or to
spray himself with water from the tank. For they were travelling with
the wind, not against it, and so lost the effect of any cooling breeze.
“Blamed if you’d think she’d need so much coal,” remarked the front
brakeman, who was riding in the cab. “You’d think this heat would purty
nigh git up steam without any help.”
“You don’t know this blamed old hog,” said the fireman, referring to the
engine. “She eats up coal like a trans-Atlantic liner. I’ve thought
sometimes they wasn’t no front end to her fire-box, an’ that I was jest
shovellin’ coal out into creation. She’s a caution, she is!”
“Oh, she ain’t so bad,” put in Higgins, who like all engineers, loved
his engine in spite of her faults. “You’re jest a-talkin’, Pinkey.”
“Huh!” grunted Pinkey. “You trade jobs with me awhile an’ see.”
But to this absurd proposal the engineer returned no answer. Instead, he
tooted the whistle for a crossing, and, his hand on the throttle,
watched a nervous farmer whip a team of horses across the track.
“Blamed fool!” he muttered. “Couldn’t wait till we got past! Well,
there’s the sidin’,” he added, and stopped until the brakeman had run
ahead and thrown the switch. Then he ran slowly in.
The brakeman closed the switch, and swung himself up into the caboose.
He found the conductor and rear brakemen peacefully sleeping, and
without disturbing them, clambered up into the cupola, intending to keep
a lookout for the special, and open the switch after it had passed, so
that the freight could pass out again upon the main track and proceed
upon its way. For a few minutes, his eyes remained fixed upon the track
ahead; then his lids gradually drooped, his head nodded, and finally
fell forward upon his arms.
Forward in the engine, the engineer and fireman settled themselves upon
their respective boxes.
“How long do we have t’ wait?” inquired the latter, after a few moments.
“Blamed if I know,” answered the engineer. “That fool dispatcher didn’t
say. But it can’t be more’n ten minutes. If it had been, he’d have let
us go on to Greenfield.”
The minutes passed; and, finally, lulled by the quiet breathing of the
engine, the purr of insects, and the distant rattle of a mowing machine,
both engineer and fireman nodded off.
Twenty minutes later, the engineer awoke with a start, just in time, as
he thought, to hear the roar of a train fade away in the distance. He
glanced at his watch, then got down from his seat, and shook the fireman
with no gentle hand.
“Goin’ t’ stay here all day, Pinkey?” he asked. “An’ what’s the matter
with them blame fools back there?” he added, savagely, and seizing the
whistle cord, blew three shrill blasts. A moment later, the front
brakeman, who had started awake at the first blast, came running forward
over the train and clambered down into the cab.
“Why don’t some o’ you ijits open that there switch back there,”
demanded Higgins, “so’s I kin back out? Or do you want t’ stay here the
rest o’ your natural lives?”
“Why don’t you pull straight out?” asked the brakeman. “What’s th’ use
o’ backin’ up?”
“Why, that there switch has been out o’ fix fer three months,” answered
Higgins, savagely. “I’ve reported it a dozen times, but much good it
does. Burns knows it. He knows we’ve got t’ back out. Why don’t he wake
up? Is he deef?” and he jerked the whistle fiercely again.
Conductor and brakeman in the caboose were having a discussion of much
the same tenor. Then Burns remembered about the broken switch.
“We’ve got t’ back out,” he said. “Higgins ’s right. Git her open,” and
as the brakeman threw the switch, he signalled the engineer to back up.
The front brakeman, meanwhile, being of an inquiring disposition, had
dropped off the engine and walked forward to the other switch, to see
just what the matter was with it. To his surprise, he found it in
perfect working order, for the section gang had repaired it the
afternoon before. Chuckling to himself, he opened and closed it two or
three times, thinking what a good joke he had on Burns and Higgins.
Then, looking back, he saw that his train had passed out upon the main
track and was steaming toward him.
[Illustration: “THE NEXT INSTANT IT FLASHED INTO VIEW AROUND THE
CURVE.”]
He closed the switch and was just about to lock it, when he heard
another sound that made his heart stand still—the roar of a train
approaching from the west. The next instant it flashed into view around
the curve, running, as the brakeman afterwards expressed it, about three
hundred miles a minute.
Without conscious thought, but seizing the one chance in a thousand to
avoid a terrible accident, he threw the switch open again and then
sprang aside as the special swept in upon the siding. He heard the
screaming of the brakes and saw the train fairly buckling upon itself in
an almost human effort to stop. But stop it could not, and out upon the
main track again it swept, through the switch at the farther end of the
siding, which the brakeman there had sense enough to open, and on toward
Wadsworth.
Staring after it, they saw it pick up speed again, and disappear.
And it was a mighty solemn train crew that took that local freight in to
Greenfield.
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