switch light twinkled green at him--and, with a little sob, he started
to drag himself back along the platform. If he could throw the switch,
it would throw the light from green to red, and--and the Limited would
take the siding. But the switch was a long way off.
Toddles half fell, half bumped from the end of the platform to the
right of way. He cried to himself with low moans as he went along. He
had the heart of a fighter, and grit to the last tissue; but he needed
it all now--needed it all to stand the pain and fight the weakness that
kept swirling over him in flashes.
On he went, on his hands and knees, slithering from tie to tie---and
from one tie to the next was a great distance. The life and death, the
despatcher's call--he seemed to hear it yet--throbbing, throbbing on
the wire.
On he went, up the track; and the green eye of the lamp, winking at
him, drew nearer. And then suddenly, clear and mellow through the
mountains, caught up and echoed far and near, came the notes of a chime
whistle ringing down the gorge.
Fear came upon Toddles then, and a great sob shook him. That was the
Limited coming now! Toddles' fingers dug into the ballast, and he
hurried--that is, in bitter pain, he tried to crawl a little faster.
And as he crawled, he kept his eyes strained up the track--she wasn't
in sight yet around the curve--not yet, anyway.
Another foot, only another foot, and he would reach the siding
switch--in time--in plenty of time. Again the sob--but now in a burst
of relief that, for the moment, made him forget his hurts. He was in
time!
He flung himself at the switch lever, tugged upon it--and then,
trembling, every ounce of remaining strength seeming to ooze from him,
he covered his face with his hands. It was _locked_--padlocked.
Came a rumble now--a distant roar, growing louder and louder,
reverberating down the canyon walls--louder and louder--nearer and
nearer. "Hold second Number Two. Hold second Number Two"--the
"seventeen," the life and death, pleading with him to hold Number Two.
And she was coming now, coming--and--and--the switch was locked. The
deadly nausea racked Toddles again; there was nothing to do
now--nothing. He couldn't stop her--couldn't stop her. He'd--he'd
tried--very hard--and--and he couldn't stop her now. He took his hands
from his face, and stole a glance up the track, afraid almost, with the
horror that was upon him, to look. She hadn't swung the curve yet, but
she would in a minute--and come pounding down the stretch at fifty
miles an hour, shoot by him like a rocket to where, somewhere ahead, in
some form, he did not know what, only knew that it was there, death and
ruin and----
"_Use your head!_" snapped Donkin's voice to his consciousness.
Toddles' eyes were on the light above his head. It blinked _red_ at
him as he stood on the track facing it; the green rays were shooting up
and down the line. He couldn't swing the switch--but the _lamp_ was
there--and there was the red side to show just by turning it. He
remembered then that the lamp fitted into a socket at the top of the
switch stand, and could be lifted off--if he could reach it!
It wasn't very high--for an ordinary-sized man--for an ordinary-sized
man had to get at it to trim and fill it daily--only Toddles wasn't an
ordinary-sized man. It was just nine or ten feet above the rails--just
a standard siding switch.
Toddles gritted his teeth, and climbed upon the base of the switch--and
nearly fainted as his ankle swung against the rod. A foot above the
base was a footrest for a man to stand on and reach up for the lamp,
and Toddles drew himself up and got his foot on it--and then at his
full height the tips of his fingers only just touched the bottom of the
lamp. Toddles cried aloud, and the tears streamed down his face now.
Oh, if he weren't hurt--if he could only shin up another foot--but--but
it was all he could do to hang there where he was.
_What was that_! He turned his head. Up the track, sweeping in a
great circle as it swung the curve, a headlight's glare cut through the
night--and Toddles "shinned" the foot. He tugged and tore at the lamp,
tugged and tore at it, loosened it, lifted it from its socket, sprawled
and wriggled with it to the ground--and turned the red side of the lamp
against second Number Two.
The quick, short blasts of a whistle answered, then the crunch and
grind and scream of biting brake-shoes--and the big mountain racer, the
1012, pulling the second section of the Limited that night, stopped
with its pilot nosing a diminutive figure in a torn and silver-buttoned
uniform, whose hair was clotted red, and whose face was covered with
blood and dirt.
Masters, the engineer, and Pete Leroy, his fireman, swung from the
gangways; Kelly, the conductor, came running up from the forward coach.
Kelly shoved his lamp into Toddles' face--and whistled low under his
breath.
"Toddles!" he gasped; and then, quick as a steel trap: "What's wrong?"
"I don't know," said Toddles weakly. "There's--there's something
wrong. Get into the clear--on the siding."
"Something wrong," repeated Kelly, "and you don't----"
But Masters cut the conductor short with a grab at the other's arm that
was like the shutting of a vise--and then bolted for his engine like a
gopher for its hole. From, down the track came the heavy, grumbling
roar of a freight. Everybody flew then, and there was quick work done
in the next half minute--and none too quickly done--the Limited was no
more than on the siding when the fast freight rolled her long string of
flats, boxes and gondolas thundering by.
And while she passed, Toddles, on the platform, stammered out his story
to Kelly.
Kelly didn't say anything--then. With the express messenger and a
brakeman carrying Toddles, Kelly kicked in the station door, and set
his lamp down on the operator's table.
"Hold me up," whispered Toddles--and, while they held him, he made the
despatcher's call.
Big Cloud answered him on the instant. Haltingly, Toddles reported the
second section "in" and the freight "out"--only he did it very slowly,
and he couldn't think very much more, for things were going black. He
got an order for the Limited to run to Blind River and told Kelly, and
got the "complete"--and then Big Cloud asked who was on the wire, and
Toddles answered that in a mechanical sort of a way without quite
knowing what he was doing--and went limp in Kelly's arms.
And as Toddles answered, back in Big Cloud, Regan, the sweat still
standing out in great beads on his forehead, fierce now in the
revulsion of relief, glared over Donkin's left shoulder, as Donkin's
left hand scribbled on a pad what was coming over the wire.
Regan glared fiercely--then he spluttered:
"Who in hell's Christopher Hyslop Hoogan--h'm?"
Donkin's lips had a queer smile on them.
"Toddles," he said.
Regan sat down heavily in his chair.
"_What?_" demanded the super.
"Toddles," said Donkin. "I've been trying to drum a little railroading
into him--on the key."
Regan wiped his face. He looked helplessly from Donkin to the super,
and then back again at Donkin.
"But--but what's he doing at Cassil's Siding? How'd he get there--h'm?
H'm? How'd he get there?"
"I don't know," said Donkin, his fingers rattling the Cassil's Siding
call again. "He doesn't answer any more. We'll have to wait for the
story till they make Blind River, I guess."
And so they waited. And presently at Blind River, Kelly, dictating to
the operator--not Beale, Beale's day man--told the story. It lost
nothing in the telling--Kelly wasn't that kind of a man--he told them
what Toddles had done, and he left nothing out; and he added that they
had Toddles on a mattress in the baggage car, with a doctor they had
discovered amongst the passengers looking after him.
At the end, Carleton tamped down the dottle in the bowl of his pipe
thoughtfully with his forefinger--and glanced at Donkin.
"Got along far enough to take a station key somewhere?" he inquired
casually. "He's made a pretty good job of it as the night operator at
Cassil's."
Donkin was smiling.
"Not yet," he said.
"No?" Carleton's eyebrows went up. "Well, let him come in here with
you, then, till he has; and when you say he's ready, we'll see what we
can do. I guess it's coming to him; and I guess"--he shifted his
glance to the master mechanic--"I guess we'll go down and meet Number
Two when she comes in, Tommy."
Regan grinned.
"With our hats in our hands," said the big-hearted master mechanic.
Donkin shook his head.
"Don't you do it," he said. "I don't want him to get a swelled head."
Carleton stared; and Regan's hand, reaching into his back pocket for
his chewing, stopped midway.
Donkin was still smiling.
"I'm going to make a railroad man out of Toddles," he said.
II
OWSLEY AND THE 1601
His name was Owsley--Jake Owsley--and he was a railroad man before ever
he came to Big Cloud and the Hill Division--before ever the Hill
Division was even advanced to the blue-print stage, before steel had
ever spider-webbed the stubborn Rockies, before the Herculean task of
bridging a continent was more than a thought in even the most ambitious
minds.
Owsley was an engineer, and he came from the East, when they broke
ground at Big Cloud for a start toward the western goal through the
mighty range, a comparatively young man--thirty, or thereabouts. Then,
inch by inch and foot by foot, Owsley, with his ballast cars and his
boxes and his flats bumping material behind him, followed the
construction gangs as they burrowed and blasted and trestled their way
along--day in, day out, month in, month out, until the years went by,
and they were through the Rockies, with the Coast and the blue of the
Pacific in sight.
First over every bridge and culvert, first through every cut, first
through every tunnel shorn in the bitter gray rock of the mountain
sides, the pilot of Owsley's engine nosed its way; and, when the rough
of the work was over, and in the hysteria of celebration, the toll of
lives, the hardships and the cost were forgotten for the moment, and
the directors and their guests crowded the cab and perched on running
boards and footplates till you couldn't see the bunting they'd draped
the engine with, and the mahogany coaches behind looked like the
striped sticks of candy the kids buy on account of more bunting, and
then some, and the local band they'd brought along from Big Cloud got
the mouthpieces of their trombones and cornets mixed up with the necks
of champagne bottles, and the Indian braves squatted gravely at
different points along the trackside and thought their white brothers
had gone mad, Owsley was at the throttle for the first through run over
the division--it was Owsley's due.
Then other years went by, and the steel was shaken down into the
permanent right of way that is an engineering marvel to-day, and Owsley
still held a throttle on a through run--just kept growing a little
older, that was all--but one of the best of them, for all
that--steadier than the younger men, wise in experience, and with a
love for his engine that was like the love of a man for a woman.
It's a strange thing, perhaps, a love like that; but, strange or not,
there was never an engineer worth his salt who hasn't had it--some more
than others, of course--as some men's love for a woman is deeper than
others. With Owsley it came pretty near being the whole thing, and it
was queer enough to see him when they'd change his engine to give him a
newer and more improved type for a running mate. He'd refuse
point-blank at first to be separated from the obsolete engine, that was
either carded for some local jerk-water, mixed-freight run, or for a
construction job somewhere.
"Leave her with me," he'd say to Regan, the master mechanic. "Leave me
with her. You can give my run to some one else, Regan, d'ye mind?
It's little I care for the swell run; me and the old girl sticks. I'll
have nothing else."
But the bluff, fat, big-hearted, good-natured, little master mechanic,
knew his man--and he knew an engineer when he saw one. Regan would no
more have thought of letting Owsley get away from the Imperial's
throttle than he would have thought of putting call boys in the cabs to
run his engines.
"H'm!" he would say, blinking fast at Owsley. "Feel that way, do you?
Well, then, mabbe it's about time you quit altogether. I didn't offer
you your choice, did I? You take the Imperial with what I give you to
take her with--or take nothing. Think it over!"
And Owsley, perforce, had to "think it over"--and, perforce, he stayed
on the limited run.
Came then the day when changes in engine types were not so frequent,
and a fair maximum in machine-design efficiency had been obtained--and
Owsley came to love, more than he had ever loved any engine before, his
big, powerful, 1600-class racer, with its four pairs of massive
drivers, that took the curves with the grace of a circling bird, that
laughed in glee at anything lower than a three per cent grade, and
tackled the "fives" with no more than a grunt of disdain--Owsley and
the 1601, right from the start, clipped fifty-five minutes off the
running time of the Imperial Limited through the Rockies, where before
it had been nip and tuck to make the old schedule anywhere near the dot.
For three years it was Owsley and the 1601; for three years east and
west through the mountains--and a smile in the roundhouse at him as he
nursed and cuddled and groomed his big flyer, in from a run. Not
now--they don't smile now about it. It was Owsley and the 1601 for
three years--and at the end it was still Owsley and the 1601. The two
are coupled together--they never speak of one on the Hill Division
without the other--Owsley and the 1601.
Owsley! One of the old guard who answered the roll call at the birth
of the Hill Division! Forty years a railroader--call boy at
ten--twenty years of service, counting the construction period, on the
Hill Division! Straight and upright as a young sapling at fifty-odd,
with a swing through the gangway that the younger men tried to imitate;
hair short-cropped, a little grizzled; gray, steady eyes; a beard whose
color, once brown, was nondescript, kind of shading tawny and gray in
streaks; a slim, little man, overalled and jumpered, with greasy,
peaked cap--and, wifeless, without kith or kin save his engine, the
star boarder at Mrs. McCann's short-order house. Liked by everybody,
known by everybody on the division down to the last Polack construction
hand, quiet, no bluster about him, full of good-humored fun, ready to
take his part or do his share in anything going, from a lodge minstrel
show to sitting up all night and playing trained nurse to anybody that
needed one--that was Owsley.
Oh, you, in your millions, who ride in trains by day and night, do you
ever give a thought to the men into whose keeping you hand your lives?
Does it ever occur to you that they are not just part of the equipment
of iron and wood and steel and rolling things to be accepted callously,
as bought and paid for with the strip of ticket that you hold, animate
only that you may voice your grumblings and your discontent at some
delay that saves you probably from being hurled into eternity while you
chafe impatiently and childishly at something you know nothing
about--that they, like you, are human too, with hopes achieved and
aspirations shattered, and plans and interests in life? Have you ever
thought that there was a human side to railroading, and that--but we
were speaking of Owsley, Jake Owsley, perhaps you'll understand a
little better farther on along the right of way.
Elbow Bend, were it not for the insurmountable obstacles that Dame
Nature had seen fit to place there--the bed of the Glacier River on one
side and a sheer rock base of mountain on the other--would have been a
black mark against the record of the engineering corps who built the
station. Speaking generally, it's not good railroad practice to put a
station on a curve--when it can be helped. Elbow Bend, the whole of
it, main line and siding, made a curve--that's how it got its name.
And yet, in a way, it wasn't the curve that was to blame; though, too,
in a way, it was--Owsley had a patched eye that night from a bit of
steel that had got into it in the afternoon, nothing much, but a patch
on it to keep the cold and the sweep of the wind out.
It was the eastbound run, and, to make up for the loss of time a slow
order over new construction work back a dozen miles or so had cost him,
the 1601 was hitting a pretty fast clip as he whistled for Elbow Bend.
Owsley checked just a little as he nosed the curve--the Imperial
Limited made no stop at Elbow Bend--and then, as the 1601 sort of got
her footing, so to speak, on the long bend, he opened her out again,
and the storm of exhausts from her short, stubby stack went echoing
through the mountains like the play of artillery.
The light of the west-end siding switch flashed by like a scintillating
gem in the darkness. Brannigan, Owsley's fireman, pulled his door,
shooting the cab and the heavens full of leaping, fiery red, and swung
to the tender for a shovelful of coal. Owsley, crouched a little
forward in his seat, his body braced against the cant of the mogul on
the curve, was "feeling" the throttle with careful hand, as he peered
ahead through the cab glass. Came the station lights; the black bulk
of a locomotive, cascading steam from her safety, on the siding; and
then the thundering reverberation as the 1601 began to sweep past a
long, curving line of boxes, flats and gondolas, the end of which
Owsley could not see--for the curve.
Owsley relaxed a little. That was right--Extra No. 49, west, was to
cross him at Elbow Bend--and she was on the siding as she should be.
His headlight, streaming out at a tangent to the curve, played its ray
kaleidoscopically along the sides of the string of freights, now edging
the roof of a box car, now opening a hole to the gray rock of the cut
when a flat or two intervened--and then, sudden, quick as doom, with a
yell from his fireman ringing in his ears, Owsley, his jaws clamping
like a steel trap, flung his arm forward, jamming the throttle shut,
while with the other hand he grabbed at the "air."
Owsley had seen it, too--as quick as Brannigan--a figure, arms waving
frantically, for a fleeting second strangely silhouetted in the dancing
headlight's glare on the roof of one of the box cars. A wild shout
from the man, fluttering, indistinguishable, reached them as they
roared by--then the grind and scream of brake-shoes as the "air" went
on--the answering shudder vibrating through the cab of the big
racer--the meeting clash of buffer plates echoing down the length of
the train behind--and a queer obstructing blackness dead ahead ere the
headlight, tardy in its sweep, could point the way--but Owsley knew
now--too late.
Brannigan screamed in his ear.
"She ain't in the clear!" he screamed. "It's a swipe! She ain't in
the clear!" he screamed again--and took a flying leap through the
off-side gangway.
Owsley never turned his head--only held there, grim-faced,
tight-lipped, facing what was to come--facing it with clear head, quick
brain, doing what he could to lessen the disaster, as forty years had
schooled him to face emergency. Owsley--for forty years with his
record, until that moment, as clean and unsmirched as the day he
started as a kid calling train crews back in the little division town
on the Penn in the far East! Strange it should come to Owsley, the one
man of all you'd never think it would! It's hard to understand the
running orders of the Great Trainmaster sometimes--isn't it? And
sometimes it doesn't help much to realize that we never will understand
this side of the Great Divide--does it?
The headlight caught it now--seemed to gloat upon it in a flood of
blazing, insolent light--the rear cars of the freight crawling
frantically from the main line to the siding--then the pitiful yellow
from the cupola of the caboose, the light from below filtering up
through the windows. It seared into Owsley's brain lightning quick,
but vivid in every detail in a horrible, fascinating way. It was a
second, the fraction of a second since Brannigan had jumped--it might
have been an hour.
The front of the caboose seemed to leap suddenly at the 1601, seemed to
rise up in the air and hurl itself at the straining engine as though in
impotent fury at unwarranted attack. There was a terrific crash, the
groan and rend of timber, the sickening grind and crunch as the van
went to matchwood--the debris hurtling along the running boards,
shattering the cab glass in flying splinters--and Owsley dropped where
he stood--like a log. And the pony truck caught the tongue of the open
switch, and, with a vicious, nasty lurch, the 1601 wrenched herself
loose from her string of coaches, staggered like a lost and drunken
soul a few yards along the ties--and turned turtle in the ditch.
It was a bad spill, but it might have been worse, a great deal worse--a
box car and the van for the junk heap, and the 1601 for the shops to
repair fractures--and nobody hurt except Owsley.
But they couldn't make head or tail of the cause of it. Everybody went
on the carpet for it--and still it was a mystery. The main line was
clear at the west end of the siding, and the switch was right;
everybody was agreed on that, and it showed that way on the face of
it--and that was as it should have been. The operator at Elbow Bend
swore that he had shown his red, and that it was showing when the
Limited swept by. He said he knew it was going to be a close shave
whether the freight, a little late and crowding the Limited's running
time, would be clear of the main line without delaying the express, and
he had shown his red before ever he had heard her whistle--his red was
showing. The engine crew and the train crew of Extra No. 49, west,
backed the operator up--the red was showing.
Brannigan, the fireman, didn't count as a witness. The only light he'd
seen at all was the west-end switch light, the curve had hidden
anything ahead until after he'd pulled his door and turned to the
tender for coal, and by then they were past the station. And Owsley,
pretty badly smashed up, and in bed down in Mrs. McCann's short-order
house, talked kind of queer when he got around to where he could talk
at all. They asked him what color light the station semaphore was
showing, and Owsley said white--white as the moon. That's what he
said--white as the moon. And they weren't quite sure he understood
what they were driving at.
For a week that's all they could make out of it, and then, with Regan
scratching his head over it one day in confab with Carleton, the
superintendent, it came more by chance than anything else.
"Blamed if I know what to make of it!" he growled. "Ordinary, six
men's words would be the end of it, but Owsley's the best man that ever
latched a throttle in our cabs, and for twenty years his record's
cleaner than a baby's. What he says now don't count, because he ain't
right again yet; but what you can't get away from is the fact that
Owsley's not the man to have slipped a signal. Either the six of them
are doing him cold to save their own skins, or there's something queer
about it."
Carleton, "Royal" Carleton, in his grave, quiet way, shook his head.
"We've been trying hard enough to get to the bottom of it, Tommy," he
said. "I wish to the Lord we could. I don't think the men are
lying--they tell a pretty straight story. I've been wondering about
that patch Owsley had on his eye, and----"
"What's that got to do with it?" cut in the blunt little master
mechanic, who made no bones about his fondness for the engineer. "He
isn't blind in the other, is he?"
Carleton stared at the master mechanic for a moment, pulling
ruminatively at his brier; then--they were in the super's office at the
time--his fist came down with a sudden bang upon the desk.
"I believe you've got it, Tommy!" he exclaimed.
"Believe I've got it!" echoed Regan, and his hand half-way to his mouth
with his plug of chewing stopped in mid-air. "Got what? I said he
wasn't blind in the other, and neither he is--you know that as well as
I do."