master-mechanic. On the following morning he found that official at his
desk and told his story. He had just arrived from England with a wife
and three children and a few dollars. "That's all right," said the
master-mechanic; "I'll give you a job on Monday morning."
This was Saturday, and during the day the first foreman with whom the
Englishman had talked wired that if he would return to E. he could find
work. The young man showed this wire to the master-mechanic. "I should
like to work for you," said he; "you have been very kind to give me
employment after the foreman had refused, but my family is near this
place. They are two hundred miles or more from here."
"I understand," said the kind-hearted official, "and you'd better go
back to E."
The Englishman rubbed his chin and looked out of the window. The train
standing at the station and about to pull out would carry him back to
the junction, but he made no effort to catch it, and the
master-mechanic, seeing this, caught the drift of the young man's mind.
"Have you transportation?" he asked. The stranger, smiling, shook his
head. Turning to his desk, the master-mechanic wrote a pass to the
junction and a telegram requesting transportation over the Iowa Central
from the junction to the town of E.
That Sunday the young man told his young wife that the new country was
"all right." Everybody trusted everybody else. An official would give a
stranger free transportation; a station agent could give you a pass, and
even an engine-driver could carry a man without asking permission.
He didn't know that all these men save the master-mechanic had violated
the rules of the road and endangered their own positions and the chance
of promotion by helping him; but he felt he was among good, kind people,
and thanked them just the same.
On Monday morning he went to work in the little shop. In a little while
he was one of the trustworthy men employed in the place. "How do you
square a locomotive?" he asked the foreman. "Here," said the foreman;
"from this point to that."
That was all the Englishman asked. He stretched a line between the given
points and went to work.
Two years from this the town of M. offered to donate to the railroad
company $47,000 if the new machine shop could be located there, steam up
and machinery running, on the first day of January of the following
year.
The general master-mechanic entrusted the work of putting in the
machinery, after the walls had been built and the place roofed over, to
the division master-mechanic, who looked to the local foreman to finish
the job in time to win the subsidy.
The best months of the year went by before work was begun. Frost came,
and the few men tinkering about were chilled by the autumn winds that
were wailing through the shutterless doors and glassless windows.
Finally the foreman sent the Englishman to M. to help put up the
machinery. He was a new man, and therefore was expected to take signals
from the oldest man on the job,--a sort of straw-boss.
The bridge boss--the local head of the wood-workers--found the
Englishman gazing about, and the two men talked together. There was no
foreman there, but the Englishman thought he ought to work anyway; so he
and the wood boss stretched a line for a line-shaft, and while the
carpenter's gang put up braces and brackets the Englishman coupled the
shaft together, and in a few days it was ready to go up. As the young
man worked and whistled away one morning, the boss carpenter came in
with a military-looking gentleman, who seemed to own the place. "Where
did you come from?" asked the new-comer of the machinist.
"From England, sir."
"Well, anybody could tell that. Where did you come from when you came
here?"
"From E."
"Well, sir, can you finish this job and have steam up here on the first
of January?"
The Englishman blushed, for he was embarrassed, and glanced at the wood
boss. Then, sweeping the almost empty shop with his eye, he said
something about a foreman who was in charge of the work. "Damn the
foreman," said the stranger; "I'm talking to you."
The young man blushed again, and said he could work twelve or fourteen
hours a day for a time if it were necessary, but he didn't like to make
any rash promises about the general result.
"Now look here," said the well-dressed man, "I want you to take charge
of this job and finish it; employ as many men as you can handle, and
blow a whistle here on New Year's morning--do you understand?"
The Englishman thought he did, but he could hardly believe it. He
glanced at the wood boss, and the wood boss nodded his head.
"I shall do my best," said the Englishman, taking courage, "but I should
like to know who gives these orders."
"I'm the General Manager," said the man; "now get a move on you," and
he turned and walked out.
It is not to be supposed that the General Manager saw anything
remarkable about the young man, save that he was six feet and had a good
face. The fact is, the wood foreman had boomed the Englishman's stock
before the Manager saw him.
The path of the Englishman was not strewn with flowers for the next few
months. Any number of men who had been on the road when he was in the
English navy-yards felt that they ought to have had this little
promotion. The local foremen along the line saw in the young Englishman
the future foreman of the new shops, and no man went out of his way to
help the stranger. But in spite of all obstacles, the shop grew from day
to day, from week to week; so that as the old year drew to a close the
machinery was getting into place. The young foreman, while a hard
worker, was always pleasant in his intercourse with the employees, and
in a little while he had hosts of friends. There is always a lot of
extra work at the end of a big job, and now when Christmas came there
was still much to do. The men worked night and day. The boiler that was
to come from Chicago had been expected for some time. Everything was in
readiness, and it could be set up in a day; but it did not come.
Tracer-letters that had gone after it were followed by telegrams;
finally it was located in a wreck out in a cornfield in Illinois on the
last day of the year.
A great many of the officials were away, and the service was generally
demoralized during the holidays, so that the appropriation for which the
Englishman was working at M. had for the moment been forgotten; the
shops were completed, the machinery was in, but there was no boiler to
boil water to make steam.
That night, when the people of M. were watching the old year out and the
new year in, the young Englishman with a force of men was wrecking the
pump-house down by the station. The little upright boiler was torn out
and placed in the machine shops, and with it a little engine was driven
that turned the long line-shaft.
At dawn they ran a long pipe through the roof, screwed a locomotive
whistle on the top of it, and at six o'clock on New Year's morning the
new whistle on the new shops at M. in Iowa, blew in the new year.
Incidentally, it blew the town in for $47,000.
This would be a good place to end this story, but the temptation is
great to tell the rest.
When the shops were opened, the young Englishman was foreman. This was
only about twenty-five years ago. In a little while they promoted him.
In 1887 he went to the Wisconsin Central. In 1890 he was made
Superintendent of machinery of the Santa Fé route,--one of the longest
roads on earth. It begins at Chicago, strong like a man's wrist, with a
finger each on Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, and El Paso, and a
thumb touching the Gulf at Galveston.
The mileage of the system, at that time, was equal to one-half that of
Great Britain; and upon the companies' payrolls were ten thousand more
men than were then in the army of the United States. Fifteen hundred men
and boys walk into the main shops at Topeka every morning. They work
four hours, eat luncheon, listen to a lecture or short sermon in the
meeting-place above the shops, work another four hours, and walk out
three thousand dollars better off than they would have been if they had
not worked.
These shops make a little city of themselves. There is a perfect water
system, fire-brigade with fire stations where the firemen sleep, police,
and a dog-catcher.
Here they build anything of wood, iron, brass, or steel that the company
needs, from a ninety-ton locomotive to a single-barrelled mouse-trap,
all under the eye of the Englishman who came to America with a good wife
and three babies, a good head and two hands. This man's name is John
Player. He is the inventor of the Player truck, the Player hand-car, the
Player frog, and many other useful appliances.
This simple story of an unpretentious man came out in broken sections as
the special sped along the smooth track, while the General Manager
talked with the resident director and the General Superintendent talked
with his assistant, who, not long ago, was the conductor of a work-train
upon which the G.S. was employed as brakeman. I was two days stealing
this story, between the blushes of the mechanical Superintendent.
He related, also, that a man wearing high-cut trousers and milk on his
boot had entered his office when he had got to his first position as
master-mechanic and held out a hand, smiling, "Vell, you don't know me
yet, ain't it? I'm Martin the fireman; I quit ranchin' already, an' I
want a jobs."
Martin got a job at once. He got killed, also, in a little while; but
that is part of the business on a new road.
Near the shops at Topeka stands the railroad Young Men's Christian
Association building. They were enlarging it when I was there. There are
no "saloons" in Kansas, so Player and his company help the men to
provide other amusements.
ON THE LIMITED
One Sabbath evening, not long ago, I went down to the depot in an
Ontario town to take the International Limited for Montreal. She was on
the blackboard five minutes in disgrace. "Huh!" grunted a commercial
traveller. It was Sunday in the aforesaid Ontario town, and would be
Sunday in Toronto, toward which he was travelling. Even if we were on
time we should not arrive until 9.30--too late for church, too early to
go to bed, and the saloons all closed and barred. And yet this restless
traveller fretted and grieved because we promised to get into Toronto
five minutes late. Alas for the calculation of the train despatchers,
she was seven minutes overdue when she swept in and stood for us to
mount. The get-away was good, but at the eastern yard limits we lost
again. The people from the Pullmans piled into the café car and
overflowed into the library and parlor cars. The restless traveller
snapped his watch again, caught the sleeve of a passing trainman, and
asked "'S matter?" and the conductor answered, "Waiting for No. 5." Five
minutes passed and not a wheel turned; six, eight, ten minutes, and no
sound of the coming west-bound express. Up ahead we could hear the
flutter and flap of the blow-off; for the black flier was as restless as
the fat drummer who was snapping his watch, grunting "Huh," and washing
suppressed profanity down with _café noir_.
Eighteen minutes and No. 5 passed. When the great black steed of steam
got them swinging again we were twenty-five minutes to the bad. And how
that driver did hit the curves! The impatient traveller snapped his
watch again and said, refusing to be comforted, "She'll never make it."
Mayhap the fat and fretful drummer managed to communicate with the
engine-driver, or maybe the latter was unhappily married or had an
insurance policy; and it is also possible that he is just the devil to
drive. Anyway, he whipped that fine train of Pullmans, café, and parlor
cars through those peaceful, lamplighted, Sabbath-keeping Ontario towns
as though the whole show had cost not more than seven dollars, and his
own life less.
On a long lounge in the library car a well-nourished lawyer lay sleeping
in a way that I had not dreamed a political lawyer could sleep. One
gamey M.P.--double P, I was told--had been robbing this same lawyer of a
good deal of rest recently, and he was trying at a mile a minute to
catch up with his sleep. I could feel the sleeper slam her flanges
against the ball of the rail as we rounded the perfectly pitched curves,
and the little semi-quaver that tells the trained traveller that the man
up ahead is moving the mile-posts, at least one every minute. At the
first stop, twenty-five miles out, the fat drummer snapped his watch
again, but he did not say, "Huh." We had made up five minutes.
A few passengers swung down here, and a few others swung up; and off we
dashed, drilling the darkness. I looked in on the lawyer again, for I
would have speech with him; but he was still sleeping the sleep of the
virtuous, with the electric light full on his upturned baby face, that
reminds me constantly of the late Tom Reed.
A woman I know was putting one of her babies to bed in lower 2, when we
wiggled through a reverse curve that was like shooting White Horse
Rapids in a Peterboro. The child intended for lower 2 went over into 4.
"Never mind," said its mother, "we have enough to go around;" and so she
left that one in 4 and put the next one in 2, and so on.
At the next stop where you "Y" and back into the town, the people,
impatient, were lined up, ready to board the Limited. When we swung over
the switches again, we were only ten minutes late.
As often as the daring driver eased off for a down grade I could hear
the hiss of steam through the safety-valve above the back of the black
flier, and I could feel the flanges against the ball of the rail, and
the little tell-tale semi-quaver of the car.
By now the babies were all abed; and from bunk to bunk she tucked them
in, kissed them good-night, and then cuddled down beside the last one, a
fair-haired girl who seemed to have caught and kept, in her hair and in
her eyes, the sunshine of the three short summers through which she had
passed.
Once more I went and stood by the lounge where the lawyer lay, but I had
not the nerve to wake him.
The silver moon rose and lit the ripples on the lake that lay below my
window as the last of the diners came from the café car. Along the shore
of the sleeping lake our engine swept like a great, black, wingless bird
of night. Presently I felt the frogs of South Parkdale; and when, from
her hot throat she called "Toronto," the fat and fretful traveller
opened his great gold watch. He did not snap it now, but looked into its
open face and almost smiled; for we were touching Toronto on the tick of
time.
I stepped from the car, for I was interested in the fat drummer. I
wanted to see him meet her, and hold her hand, and tell her what a
really, truly, good husband he had been, and how he had hurried home. As
he came down the short stair a friend faced him and said "Good-night,"
where we say "Good-evening." "Hello, Bill," said the fat drummer. They
shook hands languidly. The fat man yawned and asked, "Anything doing?"
"Not the littlest," said Bill. "Then," said Jim (the fat man), "let us
go up to the King Edward, sit down, and have a good, quiet smoke."
THE CONQUEST OF ALASKA
Immediately under the man with the money, who lived in London, there was
the President in Chicago; then came the chief engineer in Seattle, the
locating engineer in Skagway, the contractor in the grading camp, and
Hugh Foy, the "boss" of the builders. Yet in spite of all this
overhanging stratification, Foy was a big man. To be sure, none of these
men had happened to get their positions by mere chance. They were men of
character and fortitude, capable of great sacrifice.
Mr. Close, in London, knew that his partner, Mr. Graves, in Chicago,
would be a good man at the head of so cold and hopeless an enterprise as
a Klondike Railway; and Mr. Graves knew that Erastus Corning Hawkins,
who had put through some of the biggest engineering schemes in the West,
was the man to build the road. The latter selected, as locating
engineer, John Hislop, the hero, one of the few survivors of that wild
and daring expedition that undertook, some twenty years ago, to survey a
route for a railroad whose trains were to traverse the Grand Cañon of
Colorado, where, save for the song of the cataract, there is only shade
and silence and perpetual starlight. Heney, a wiry, compact, plucky
Canadian contractor, made oral agreement with the chief engineer and,
with Hugh Foy as his superintendent of construction, began to grade what
they called the White Pass and Yukon Railway. Beginning where the
bone-washing Skagway tells her troubles to the tide-waters at the elbow
of that beautiful arm of the Pacific Ocean called Lynn Canal, they
graded out through the scattered settlement where a city stands to-day,
cut through a dense forest of spruce, and began to climb the hill.
When the news of ground-breaking had gone out to Seattle and Chicago,
and thence to London, conservative capitalists, who had suspected Close
Brothers and Company and all their associates in this wild scheme of
temporary insanity, concluded that the sore affliction had come to stay.
But the dauntless builders on the busy field where the grading camp was
in action kept grubbing and grading, climbing and staking, blasting and
building, undiscouraged and undismayed. Under the eaves of a dripping
glacier, Hawkins, Hislop, and Heney crept; and, as they measured off the
miles and fixed the grade by blue chalk-marks where stakes could not be
driven, Foy followed with his army of blasters and builders. When the
pathfinders came to a deep side cañon, they tumbled down, clambered up
on the opposite side, found their bearings, and began again. At one
place the main wall was so steep that the engineer was compelled to
climb to the top, let a man down by a rope, so that he could mark the
face of the cliff for the blasters, and then haul him up again.
It was springtime when they began, and through the long days of that
short summer the engineers explored and mapped and located; and ever,
close behind them, they could hear the steady roar of Foy's fireworks as
the skilled blasters burst big boulders or shattered the shoulders of
great crags that blocked the trail of the iron horse. Ever and anon,
when the climbers and builders peered down into the ragged cañon, they
saw a long line of pack-animals, bipeds and quadrupeds,--some hoofed and
some horned, some bleeding, some blind,--stumbling and staggering,
fainting and falling, the fittest fighting for the trail and gaining the
summit, whence the clear, green waters of the mighty Yukon would carry
them down to Dawson,--the Mecca of all these gold-mad men. As often as
the road-makers glanced at the pack-trains, they saw hundreds of
thousands of dollars' worth of traffic going past or waiting
transportation at Skagway, and each strained every nerve to complete the
work while the sun shone.
By midsummer they began to appreciate the fact that this was to be a
hard job. When the flowers faded on the southern slopes, they were not
more than half-way up the hill. Each day the sun swung lower across the
canals, all the to-morrows were shorter than the yesterdays, and there
was not a man among them with a shade of sentiment, or a sense of the
beautiful, but sighed when the flowers died. Yes, they had learned to
love this maiden, Summer, that had tripped up from the south, smiled on
them, sung for a season, sighed, smiled once more, and then danced down
the Lynn again.
"I'll come back," she seemed to say, peeping over the shoulder of a
glacier that stood at the stage entrance; "I'll come back, but ere I
come again there'll be strange scenes and sounds on this rude stage so
new to you. First, you will have a short season of melodrama by a
melancholy chap called Autumn, gloriously garbed in green and gold, with
splashes and dashes of lavender and lace, but sad, sweetly sad, and
sighing always, for life is such a little while."
With a sadder smile, she kissed her rosy fingers and was gone,--gone
with her gorgeous garments, her ferns and flowers, her low, soft sighs
and sunny skies, and there was not a man that was a man but missed her
when she was gone.
The autumn scene, though sombre and sad, was far from depressing, but
they all felt the change. John Hislop seemed to feel it more than all
the rest; for besides being deeply religious, he was deeply in love. His
nearest and dearest friend, Heney--happy, hilarious Heney--knew, and he
swore softly whenever a steamer landed without a message from
Minneapolis,--the long-looked-for letter that would make Hislop better
or worse. It came at length, and Hislop was happy. With his horse, his
dog, and a sandwich,--but never a gun,--he would make long excursions
down toward Lake Linderman, to Bennett, or over Atlin way. When the
country became too rough for the horse, he would be left picketed near a
stream with a faithful dog to look after him while the pathfinder
climbed up among the eagles.
In the meantime Foy kept pounding away. Occasionally a soiled pedestrian
would slide down the slope, tell a wild tale of rich strikes, and a
hundred men would quit work and head for the highlands. Foy would storm
and swear and coax by turns, but to no purpose; for they were like so
many steers, and as easily stampeded. When the Atlin boom struck the
camp, Foy lost five hundred men in as many minutes. Scores of graders
dropped their tools and started off on a trot. The prospector who had
told the fable had thrown his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the
general direction. Nobody had thought to ask how far. Many forgot to
let go; and Heney's picks and shovels, worth over a dollar apiece, went
away with the stampeders. As the wild mob swept on, the tethered
blasters cut the cables that guyed them to the hills, and each loped
away with a piece of rope around one ankle.
Panting, they passed over the range, these gold-crazed Coxeys, without a
bun or a blanket, a crust or a crumb, many without a cent or even a
sweat-mark where a cent had slept in their soiled overalls.
When Foy had exhausted the English, Irish, and Alaskan languages in
wishing the men luck in various degrees, he rounded up the remnant of
his army and began again. In a day or two the stampeders began to limp
back hungry and weary, and every one who brought a pick or a shovel was
re-employed. But hundreds kept on toward Lake Bennett, and thence by
water up Windy Arm to the Atlin country, and many of them have not yet
returned to claim their time-checks.
The autumn waned. The happy wives of young engineers, who had been
tented along the line during the summer, watched the wildflowers fade
with a feeling of loneliness and deep longing for their stout-hearted,
strong-limbed husbands, who were away up in the cloud-veiled hills; and
they longed, too, for other loved ones in the lowlands of their
childhood. Foy's blasters and builders buttoned their coats and buckled
down to keep warm. Below, they could hear loud peals of profanity as the
trailers, packers, and pilgrims pounded their dumb slaves over the
trail. Above, the wind cried and moaned among the crags, constantly
reminding them that winter was near at hand. The nights were longer than
the days. The working day was cut from ten to eight hours, but the pay
of the men had been raised from thirty to thirty-five cents an hour.
One day a black cloud curtained the cañon, and the workmen looked up
from their picks and drills to find that it was November and night. The
whole theatre, stage and all, had grown suddenly dark; but they knew, by
the strange, weird noise in the wings, that the great tragedy of winter
was on. Hislop's horse and dog went down the trail. Hawkins and Hislop
and Heney walked up and down among the men, as commanding officers show
themselves on the eve of battle. Foy chaffed the laborers and gave them
more rope; but no amount of levity could prevail against the universal
feeling of dread that seemed to settle upon the whole army. This weird
Alaska, so wild and grand, so cool and sweet and sunny in summer, so
strangely sad in autumn,--this many-mooded, little known Alaska that
seemed doomed ever to be misunderstood, either over-lauded or lied
about,--what would she do to them? How cruel, how cold, how weird, how
wickedly wild her winters must be! Most men are brave, and an army of
brave men will breast great peril when God's lamp lights the field; but
the stoutest heart dreads the darkness. These men were sore afraid, all
of them; and yet no one was willing to be the first to fall out, so they
stood their ground. They worked with a will born of desperation.