THE UNINVITED SPECIAL
“Doesn’t it beat the everlasting band how little sense some folks have?”
Dick and Larry, in much-worn corduroys and lace-boots, and each
with a furled red signal flag under his arm, were tramping down the
construction track of the Little Ophir Extension. On their right the
brawling torrent of the Tourmaline swirled over and among its boulders,
and across the canyon, and half-way up its steep acclivity, ran the
partly completed grade of the Overland Central.
“Just let it soak in,” Dick went on wrathfully. “Right here in the
middle of the fight with the O. C., when every hour may be worth a
thousand dollars to our company, we’ve got to stop dead and entertain a
bunch of Big Money from New York! It makes me sick!”
“Sick is right,” Larry agreed; and his wrath, if not so teeth-gnashing,
as you might say, as that of the general manager’s son, was no less
hostile to the intrusions of Big Money――in fact, since he was the son
of a workingman, it was rather more hostile than less. But of that,
more in its place.
“Somebody ought to have stopped ’em,” Dick went on. “If I’d been in
the chief’s place, I’d have dumped a few material cars over the
right-of-way down in the valley so they couldn’t get by with their old
special.”
“I guess it couldn’t be helped,” Larry grumbled. “I’ll bet your father
said and did everything he could to keep this junketing party from
butting in on us; and now, as long as they’re coming, we’ve got to make
the best of it. I only hope there aren’t any women along. That _would_
be the limit!”
There was reason for all this impatient faultfinding. Early that
morning a wire had come notifying the chief of construction that
a special train, bearing Vice-President Holcombe, a committee of
directors, and a number of guests, was coming over the uncompleted
Extension, and immediately the two juniors of the engineering staff,
Dick and Larry, had been sent afoot down the canyon to post themselves
at the two points where there was the most danger from the Overland
Central’s blasting and the flying rocks.
One of these danger points was just at hand, and Larry volunteered to
drop out and stand guard over it.
“You’ll have time to make the big rock cutting at the Cascades,” he
told his fellow flagman; and accordingly, Dickie Maxwell resumed his
tramp alone.
By this time the special train, consisting of a big, heavy
“Pacific-type” passenger engine, a dining-car and a Pullman combination
sleeping and observation car, was well on its way up the canyon,
rolling and lurching around the curves, and behaving itself, on the
rough, unsurfaced track, much like a cranky ship in a seaway. On the
fireman’s box in the high locomotive cab an audaciously pretty girl
of fourteen or fifteen――a girl with resolute brown eyes and lips that
could “register” anything from a jolly laugh to the scornful poutings
of a spoiled only daughter――clung desperately to the window sill to
keep from being dumped into the fireman’s shovel in the bumpings and
lurchings.
This girl was the daughter of the vice-president of the Nevada Short
Line, and she had insisted upon having a ride on the engine when
the train had halted at the canyon-portal water tank. Since the
vice-president himself had made the request, Bart Johnson, the grizzled
engineer of the 1016, could only grin sourly and say, “Why, sure, Mr.
Holcombe!” and wipe his hands on a piece of waste so that he could help
Miss Daughter up the high steps.
For some miles of the rocketing race up the canyon the pretty passenger
had nothing to do but to hang on and make believe that she was enjoying
the scenery. But as the train was rounding one of the jutting mountain
spurs just below a place where the river tumbled in a series of
cascades from bench to bench in its bed a thing happened; several of
them, in fact.
First, there was a burst of yellowish dust from a point up ahead on the
opposite canyon side, followed by an upspouting of big and little rocks
and a jarring thunder crash. Next, a boy with a red flag bobbed up on
the track; and the girl, being a girl, shrieked and clutched for fresh
handholds when the air-brakes were suddenly clamped on and a stop was
made.
A minute later the flag boy had climbed to the cab. His business was
with Bart Johnson, the grizzled engineer, and he despatched it briefly.
“Better back down a few car-lengths,” he advised. “There’ll be more of
the blasting pretty soon, and you can’t run by until it’s over; likely
to get a rock on top of you if you try it.” Then, as the train began to
move back out of the danger zone, he wheeled upon the girl perched upon
the fireman’s seat. “Now, then,” he said, scowling at her, “I’d like to
know what _you’re_ doing up here on this engine, Bess Holcombe!”
“I guess I’ve got a right to be here, if I want to, Dick Maxwell!” was
the pert reply. “_You_ don’t own this engine.”
“No; if I did, you’d hike back into the train, mighty quick――only you
haven’t any business being there, either.”
“My-oh!” scoffed the pretty one, looking him up and down. “How we
engineers do pile on the nice, large dignities, don’t we? I’m here
because Daddy said I might. Now what have you got to say?”
“Oh, nothing, I suppose. But, just the same, this is no place for a
girl――in this canyon, I mean.”
“Why isn’t it?”
“You’ve just seen one reason. With those O. C. people blasting on
the other side of the river, it’s as much as ever we can do to get a
car-load of material in without having it blown up――to say nothing of a
junketing train of excursionists!”
The girl made a mocking little grimace.
“Your general manager father _did_ try to make us give the trip up,”
she admitted. “But old Mr. Hazzard and some of the others insisted that
there couldn’t be any danger. Is there any danger, Dick?”
“Huh――I should say danger! We’ve had three material trains wrecked――one
of ’em right up there in that next curve ahead――and any amount of
narrow escapes, besides. Those fellows over there don’t care a hoot
what they do to us, so long as they get their track into Little Ophir
ahead of ours. Are there any more women on this train?”
“Lots of ’em.”
Dick made no comment on this additional devastating fact. After the
blasting stopped the special crept on, and at the end of a short mile
a halt was made to pick up another flag boy, namely, big-muscled,
curly-headed Larry Donovan.
“Who is this?” asked the girl as Larry was climbing to the cab.
“My ‘bunkie,’ Larry Donovan,” Dick made answer. “We’re both ‘cubs’ in
the engineering squad. Mr. Ackerman sent us down here to watch for your
train.”
When Larry swung up to the cab it was to tell Johnson that the firing
on the O. C. grade above had stopped, and that it was safe to go on.
After the train got in motion, Dick took Larry by the shoulders and
twisted him forcibly around to face the pretty girl.
“Bess,” he said, “this is my chum, Larry Donovan, and he’s a heap
better fellow than he looks. Larry, this is Bess Holcombe――you needn’t
shake hands, either of you, if you don’t want to.”
Larry’s face turned a dull red under its sunburn. As yet, he had
small use for girls, pretty or otherwise; and if he had had, the
joking introduction, and the fact that Miss Bess Holcombe’s father
was vice-president of the company, would have made him take refuge in
workman gruffness. What he mumbled in reply was a sort of sour “Please’
t’ meet you,” and the way he said it made the “pleased” part of it the
merest figure of speech.
“Donovan?” said the girl sweetly; “that is――er――a German name, isn’t
it?” Miss Bess Holcombe never missed a chance to make an embarrassed
boy still more embarrassed, if she could help it.
“No,” Larry blurted out; “it’s Irish.” And then he turned his back on
her and began to talk to Bart Johnson, telling him where he was to run
slowly, and what he was coming to around the curves ahead.
“Dear me!” said the girl, in an aside to Dick, “what a bear of a boy!
He’s――he’s a workingman, isn’t he?”
Dick bridled at once.
“See here, Bess,” he frowned; “down in Brewster, or back in New York
where you live, you can draw all the little, no-account social lines
you want to. But up here in the mountains a man’s a man, according to
how well he holds up his end in the day’s work. Larry’s father is a
crossing watchman in Brewster, if you want to know――though he was one
of the best locomotive engineers the company had before he lost an arm
sticking to his engine to keep a train-load of passengers from going
into the ditch――and Larry earned his way through High School by working
nights in the company shops. If you think that’s anything against him,
you’ve got to fight it out with me.”
The girl’s laugh showed a mouthful of pretty teeth.
“You needn’t be so spiteful about it,” she retorted. “I’m not going
to quarrel with your――‘bunkie?’――was that what you called him?” Then:
“What are we stopping here for?”
The answer set itself out in action. As the big engine slowed down,
Larry dropped from the step and ran on to disappear around the next
curve in the canyon. Presently he came in sight again to give the
“come-ahead” signal.
“Another place where the O. C. has been doing a lot of shooting,” Dick
explained, “and Larry went to see if it would be safe for us to try
to pass.” Then he did a bit of the “gruff and workmanlike” on his own
account. “You don’t know what a nuisance it is to have this junketing
train of yours lugged up here in our way when every minute of our time
is worth a million dollars!”
“Why, Dick! you almost make it sound as if we were unwelcome!” was the
girl’s quick protest.
“You are; just about as unwelcome as a Dakota blizzard in the middle
of July. There isn’t anybody on the force, from the chief down, who
has any time to waste on the social dewdabs, or for carting you people
around on a sight-seeing tour. How long are you going to stay?”
“Gracious! I don’t know! If your chief makes it as chilly for us as
you’re trying to make it for me, I shouldn’t suppose we’d stay five
minutes! I’m sure _I_ shouldn’t.”
“Well you might as well know it just as it is, and I wouldn’t shed any
tears if you should tell your father. Nobody else will tell him, of
course; but I’m giving you the raw facts.”
“I should say you are!” said the girl with a toss of her head. “You
don’t seem any more like the Dick Maxwell I knew when we were at Lake
Topaz last summer than――――”
“Maybe I’m not,” Dick broke in. “This is a man’s job up here.”
“Well, supposing it is; is that any reason why we shouldn’t come and
look on, if we want to?”
Dick despaired of ever being able to make a mere girl understand, but
he did his best.
“I should think you’d know without being told. Here we are, in the
hottest part of a hot fight with the O. C., with everything cluttered
up and in the way, and with everybody working twenty-six hours out of
the twenty-four, trying to get somewhere. And right in the thick of it
we’ve got to stop and find room for a train of joy-wagons, and let the
work go to pot while we’re being nice to a lot of Big Money bosses!”
Somewhat to Dick’s disappointment, the girl took this wrathful outburst
with perfect calm.
“I like your Larry Donovan much better than I do you, Dickie Maxwell,”
she remarked coolly. “He may have been thinking all these things you’ve
been saying, but he was at least polite enough not to slap me in the
face with them.”
“You bet he was thinking them,” said Dick sourly. “Any fellow would.”
Then, as the train slowed around a curve so short that it made the
wheel flanges shriek in protest: “Pine Gulch, our headquarters camp, is
just ahead. If you’ve got as much good sense as I thought you had last
summer, you’ll try to persuade your father not to ask us to take this
train any farther up the canyon.”
At the Pine Gulch stop the two boys――Larry had been riding the front
platform of the dining-car since he had flagged for the last point of
hazard――stood aside and looked on while the inspection party debarked
and was met by Mr. Ackerman; met and welcomed, of course, as Large
Money, when it happens to own a lot of railroad stock, must be.
“Just the same,” Dick said to Larry, “I’ll bet the chief is saying
things to himself.”
“I guess so,” Larry returned. “I wouldn’t blame him. What are they
going to do now?”
The “what” explained itself in due course. Preparations were making to
place the excursion train upon the only available and already crowded
side-track――which meant that it was going to stop at Pine Gulch, for
the present, at least.
“That’s good, as far as it goes,” Dick admitted morosely. “If only they
won’t ask to be chased up to the working ‘front,’ maybe we’ll have some
little chance. Let’s go over to the mess tent and see if Dogsy’s saved
us anything to chew on. It’s away past noon.”
While they were eating, the boys saw the excursionists――there
were something like a score of them, including the girl and four
women――climbing the steps of the dining-car in response to a
white-jacketed waiter’s summons. On the high track opposite the little
park-like valley in which the headquarters camp lay, a laboring O. C.
engine, pushing a couple of flat-cars loaded with men and steel rails,
was storming up the grade.
“More steel going to the O. C. front,” Dick commented.
“Yes,” Larry agreed; “and I’ll bet they’re laughing in their sleeves
right now over our new handicap. Did you tell that girl some of the
things she ought to know?”
“I sure did; and I hope I rubbed it in hard enough so that she’ll tell
her father.”
Larry’s grin was handsomely appreciative.
“You’re one great little old diplomat, Dick. Suffering cats! I
wouldn’t have thought of a dodge like that in a hundred years. Here’s
hoping it makes ’em turn around and go back home where they belong.
I’ll say we haven’t any special use for ’em up here in this canyon.”
After dinner the two boys went over to the field office, and upon
approaching it they found that the chief had company. So they waited
at the door. Mr. Ackerman’s caller was a member of the sight-seeing
party; a thin, frock-coated little gentleman with graying “toothbrush”
side-whiskers, sort of angry eyes, and a high, rasping voice.
“That’s Mr. Oliver Hazzard, chairman of the Executive Board in
New York,” said Dick, behind his hand, and Larry nodded complete
understanding.
There wasn’t anything of a private nature about the conversation that
was going on in the field office. The frock-coated gentleman was
insisting that the special train be taken on to the real building
“front,” and the chief engineer was deferentially and respectfully
interposing one objection after another――apparently without the
slightest success.
“Do you mean to say that you are building a railroad that isn’t fit to
be used, Mr.――ah――Ackerman?” came in the high, irritable voice. “This
Extension is costing us a mint of money, and it is――ah――presumably
designed to carry passengers. In view of that fact, I see no reason why
we should not be permitted to――ah――inspect it.”
“I have given you the facts, Mr. Hazzard,” was the sober reply.
“The track, in its present incomplete condition, is not safe for
your Pullman to run over. If you and the men of your party will be
content to go up on a flat-car, with one of the lighter construction
engines――――”
“Nothing of the kind, Mr. Ackerman――nothing of the kind! We can leave
the dining-car here, if you insist upon it; but we shall go in our
own car in comfort, as we expect our patrons to do after the road is
completed.”
Larry, who was watching the big chief out of the corner of his eye, saw
the harassed official’s shoulders lift in a little shrug of impatient
discouragement.
“Of course, if you order it, I have nothing more to say,” he yielded.
Then, stepping to the door, he asked a question of the two boys. “Where
is Goldrick? Have either of you seen him since dinner-time?”
Dick answered for both.
“No, sir; I don’t think he has been here since the special came in.”
“No matter; you two will do as well. Find Brannigan, and tell him to
take the 717 and go out ahead of the special as a pilot. You go along
and flag him past the danger spots. I don’t need to tell you to be
careful. If you see anything at all to make you think it won’t be safe
for the special to follow, one of you must run back and flag us at
once.”
Having their orders thus detailed for them, Larry and Dick hastened to
find Brannigan, the wizened little Irishman who handled the 717 on the
material trains. The engine itself was standing, steamed up, on a short
spur track at the lower end of the little yard, and the engineer and
fireman were in the cab.
Dick climbed to the footboard to pass the chief’s verbal order
along, while Larry set the switch for the engine――which was headed
up-canyon――to back out on the main track. As they were making the
shift they saw Bart Johnson, on his huge passenger-puller, preparing to
cut the dining-car out of the special train; and as the 717, with the
two boys in the cab, passed on up the line to begin the piloting, the
special, reduced now to the big engine and the Pullman, was ready to
follow.
For a few miles nothing exciting happened. Now and again, Larry and
Dick, hanging out of the cab window on the danger side, could hear
above the racket of the engine the niggling chatter of the air-drills
on the Overland Central grade above and opposite; but this was a signal
of safety. So long as the drills were going there would be no blasting.
“I’ve been wondering if that girl and the women are back there in that
Pullman,” Larry said, in one of the safe stretches.
“You can bet to win that Bess Holcombe is there, at least,” Dick
replied. “I knocked around a good bit with her last summer up at Lake
Topaz, and she doesn’t know what it means to be scared of anything.
Right nice girl, most of the time, though she can be awfully mean and
nippy when she wants to.”
“Well, neither she nor the other women have any business in the place
where we’re going,” Larry put in.
“That’s exactly what I told her. But, for that matter, none of these
New York ‘look-sees’ have any business there.”
As it came about, there were no hindrances on the run up the canyon
from Pine Gulch. After a few miles of the turnings and twistings in
the echoing gorge, and past the great shale slide with its bulkheading
of piles and planking, the canyon widened to become a high-pitched,
upland valley; and at the upper end of this valley, where more of the
“narrows” began, lay the actual working front.
Taking it for granted that he would have to pilot the special back to
Pine Gulch after the visitors had made their inspection, Brannigan ran
the 717 in on the lower end of one of the two side-tracks which were
laid about half a mile below the cliff-sentineled upper gorge where the
rockmen were drilling and blasting.
Presently the one-car special came along on the middle or main track,
stopped opposite the side-tracked pilot engine, and the men of the
sight-seeing party got off. There was some little emphatic talk, and
then Mr. Ackerman came over to the 717.
“The gentlemen want to go on up to the rock cutting,” he said to
Brannigan, who was standing in his engine gangway. “I’ve told them that
it isn’t safe to take the Pullman and that heavy passenger machine any
farther over the unballasted track. We’ll take the men of the party on
an empty flat-car, and leave the women here in the Pullman. You know
the track and what it will stand――and the grade――and Johnson doesn’t.
Since you’ll have to push the flat ahead of you, I want you to go up
and take Johnson’s engine and get the flat out of this string of loads.”
The switching problem thus set for Brannigan was not complicated,
though it involved a number of movements. At its beginning the
passenger locomotive and its car stood on the middle or main track.
On the left was an open siding, connecting at both ends with the
main track; and this siding was empty. On the right was the other
side-track, also connecting at both ends with the main line. Upon this
right-hand siding there were, first, at the lower end, Brannigan’s
engine, the 717, and ahead of it a string of four cross-tie cars, the
upper one of which had already been unloaded.
Under these conditions the first thing to be done was to side-track
the Pullman on the left-hand, or empty, siding; next, to pull out the
unloaded flat-car from the upper end of the other siding with the
passenger engine, and to back it down upon the main track between the
two sidings. When this should be done, the heavy passenger machine
could be run ahead and backed down on the left-hand track to be
recoupled to its Pullman; after which, Brannigan could take his own
lighter engine, back it out to the main line over the lower switch,
come up to a coupling behind the placed flat-car, and so be ready to
push it on up to the rock cutting.
For the switching job Brannigan and his fireman crossed over and
climbed upon the passenger engine, taking charge of it temporarily
while Johnson and his fireman stood aside in the cab. Mr. Ackerman
walked on up the track to where the men of the inspection party were
waiting for the shift to be made. This left Dick and Larry alone in the
cab of the 717, and since there was nothing further for them to do at
the moment, they stayed there.
Out of the cab window they could look up ahead and see the various
phases of the shift as they were made. Carefully Brannigan pulled
the sleeping-car over the upper switches and backed it down on the
left-hand side-track. Then he uncoupled and ran up to get the empty
flat-car out of the other siding.
“I don’t much like the looks of that flimsy chock that Johnnie Shovel
stuck under the Pullman’s wheels for a ‘safety’,” said the mechanically
minded Larry, looking across to the sleeping-car where Bess Holcombe
had a window open through which she, also, was watching the switching
operations. “I’ve a good notion to slip over there and stick in a
bigger chunk of wood. That little tree-limb that’s there now wouldn’t
hold anything on this grade.”
“It isn’t much of a ‘scotch’,” Dick admitted. “But I guess it’s all
right; the air-brakes’ll hold her.”
Larry shook his head.
“I don’t like it,” he repeated. “This grade is a lot steeper than it
looks, and there’s nobody on that car with those women but the negro
porter. Ten to one he wouldn’t know enough to pull the cord and reset
the brakes if the car should start to run away.”
“Pshaw! it isn’t going to run away,” said Dick easily; and then, with
another look up ahead: “Say! something’s gone wrong with that big
passenger-puller!”
Something had gone wrong; very wrong, indeed. Brannigan had coupled
to the empty flat-car and was pulling it out as gingerly as if he
were running over eggs instead of a hurriedly placed construction
side-track. But for all his care the light rail had buckled and turned
over beneath the ponderous “Pacific-type,” and the big locomotive was
on the ground.
Both boys saw the small accident from their place at the 717’s cab
window, and, naturally, their first impulse was to swing down and run
up the track to help with the reënrailment. But it was just then that
a much more shocking accident began to stage itself right before their
eyes. As they were in the act of dropping from the 717’s step, Larry
grabbed Dick and pointed to the other siding.
“Look!” he yelled; “_that Pullman’s getting away_!”
There was no doubt about it. By some disastrous mischance the
air-brakes had leaked and loosened their grip on the wheels; the
inconsequent bit of wood that Brannigan’s fireman had thrust under a
wheel had crushed to powder; and the heavy steel car with its human
load was slipping away down the siding, gaining momentum as it went.
Now a runaway car on a crooked track, every mile of which is a
down-grade, is about the deadliest thing that can ever happen on a
mountain railroad. At sight of the moving Pullman the men of the
excursion party, with Mr. Ackerman setting the pace, made a frantic
dash to catch it. But they were too far away. And the two engine crews,
busy with the derailed passenger machine, were still farther away.
“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Dick groaned. “There’s a split switch at the end
of that siding――they’ll get out on the main line and get clear away,
and everybody’ll be killed!”
But Larry, cooler-headed, still had some portion of his wits about him.
He saw at once that there was no hope of trying to catch the runaway
on foot. And it was not for nothing that his boyhood had been spent on
and around locomotives with his engineer father, or that, as a shop
and round-house helper, he had had more or less chance to learn the
handling of engines under steam.
“Take a grip on yourself!” he shouted at Dick. “There’s only one
chance――get over here and be ready to jump off and set the switch
for me! We’re going to chase that car!” And taking Dick’s help for
granted, he snapped the 717’s reversing-lever into the backward motion
and let the air whistle into the relieving pipe of the tender brakes.
The engine responded quickly to the pull of the down-grade. Dick
hung on the right-hand step, ready to drop off and run on ahead to
the switch. Instead of a “three-way” where the two sidings came in
together, there were two separate switches, one for each side-track;
a “split” or safety switch for the left-hand lead, and an ordinary
“cut-rail” for the right-hand. The Pullman had already gone out over
the safety switch, its great weight crowding the split rail over as it
passed. But the air brakes were still retarding it a little.
Larry saw Dick drop from the engine step, run for the switch, and jerk
the lever over to the outlet position for the 717. He had a fleeting
hope that Dick would stay where he was; one life was enough to be
risked in the perilous chase ahead. But as the engine was passing, Dick
swung on.
“Let’s go!” he cried; and Larry, releasing the brake, let the light
engine shoot away in chase of the vanishing Pullman.
As both of the boys well knew, success hung upon the slenderest of
chances. Would the slipping Pullman brakes hold long enough to enable
them to overtake the derelict and couple on? Or would they let go
entirely and so send the big car rocketing to certain destruction at a
speed that the handlers of the pursuing engine would not dare to equal?
That remained to be seen. From much riding back and forth over the
line on the material trains Larry knew pretty well what down-dropping
speed could be taken, and he was giving the 717 every wheel-turn he
dared on the uneven, crooking track. At the second reversed curve
he got a glimpse of the runaway careening around the next curve
ahead. It was enough to show him that the leaking brakes were still
holding――partially.
“We’ll make it yet!” he shouted at Dick. Then: “Crawl out on the tender
and look down at our coupling――see if the knuckle is open!”
This was vitally important. When a coupling is to be made, if either
of the two knuckles of the standard car-coupler is left standing open
the couplings will engage and lock when they come together. But if both
the coupling on the Pullman and that on the 717 were closed, it would
be impossible to make the coupling hitch at a mere touch in mid flight.
And the touch would be all they could count upon in the mad chase.
Dick made his journey over the jumping, lunging tender, got his glimpse
of the coupling drawhead, and came sliding back over the coal.
“It’s all right!” he reported; and Larry once more got a good breath――a
breath of thankful relief that sent the tears to his eyes.
“Listen, Dick,” he gasped. “I’m praying that those brakes will hold
till she gets on the bit of straight track at the big shale slide.
I don’t dare try to catch her on these curves. Yell at me when you
see the slide, and then hold your hair on. It’ll have to be there or
nowhere!”
When Dick’s warning yell came, Larry stuck his head out of the cab
window for one swift glance down the track. The runaway was just
entering the half-mile tangent at the slide, swaying and lurching like
a drunken thing.
“_Now!_” he bellowed, and with a jerk at the throttle lever he added
the pull of a hundred and eighty pounds of steam to the urgings of the
down-grade.
It was all over in a minute――in a second, as it seemed to Dickie
Maxwell clutching for handholds as the 717 leaped backward around the
final curve. With a rush and a roar the flying locomotive shot down
the straight line upon the masterless Pullman. At the distance of a
car-length Dick saw Bess Holcombe in the rear vestibule of the sleeper.
She was clinging to the door jamb and trying to make her way out to
the hand-rail. Madly he motioned her back, and as she disappeared the
clashing touch was made.
[Illustration: With a rush and a roar the flying locomotive shot down
upon the masterless Pullman]
Larry Donovan thought that if he should live to be a hundred years old
he should never again have such a keen thrill of agonizing suspense as
that which came when he gently applied the engine brakes to put the
coupling touch to the test. And when he found that he really had hold
of the runaway and was checking its speed and his own, he came as near
fainting as a healthy young athlete could and miss it.
“Oh, thank God!” he choked; and then: “Get back into that Pullman,
Dick, and tell those women folks that it’s all right――they’re safe.”
The return run with the rescued car was quickly made, and Larry made it
alone, leaving the driving step only once, to throw a few shovelfuls of
coal into the firebox of the 717. The trial――the kind of trial he most
dreaded――lay just ahead, and he was cudgeling his brain to find some
way of dodging it, telling himself that he’d rather take a whipping
than to face the crowd of crazily grateful people who would probably
pounce upon him when the engine and car reached the valley sidings.
As he was rounding the curve of approach to the valley, Larry
saw Brannigan setting the lower switch to let him in on the open
side-track. Quick as a flash the way of escape was suggested. Larry
flung his cap out of the cab window, and upon reaching the switch he
shut off the steam and brought the 717 to a stand.
“Climb up here, Mike, and take your engine,” he called to the little
Irishman; “I’ve got to go back after my cap.” And in such simple
fashion the dodge was made; for, after the dropped cap was found, Larry
took to the woods, and was seen no more until long after the uninvited
special had gone on its way back to civilization.
Late that evening, weary from a long tramp over the hills, he stole
into camp at Pine Gulch to present himself at the chief’s office and to
get what was coming to him.
“What you did this afternoon was a fine thing――a heroic thing, Larry,”
said the grave-eyed chief, after a hand-grip which meant more than any
words could express, “and I know you did it as a part of the day’s
work, as any young fellow should. It was a man’s job, and you did it
like a man. But what you did afterward.... Why didn’t you come on in
with the car and let those people thank you, Larry?”
Larry’s face hardened.
“I didn’t want any of their thanks,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” interposed the chief soberly. “You want to make a
success in life don’t you?”
“Why, yes, sir; that’s what I’m trying to do.”
“Well, being a good engineer, or a good anything, means that you must
be a well-rounded man, Larry; approachable on the side of your human
relations as well as capable on the technical side. You had a bit of
contempt for those people to-day partly because you resented their
coming here at a time when we could ill afford to entertain them, but
partly, also, because you felt that you were not in their class. Isn’t
that so?”
Larry hung his head and said nothing.
“That is where you are making your mistake,” the chief went on. “If
you wish to be a really big man, you must get rid of that class
consciousness that you have brought up with you from the shops and the
train service. Big Money needn’t make its possessors any more or less
human than other people, and it doesn’t, usually. Those people to-day
were really hurt because you denied them the common human privilege of
thanking you for a thing that was far beyond all thanks. Will you try
to remember that?”
“Yes, sir; I’ll try,” said Larry, and he was sincere enough in making
the promise.
But later, after he had escaped and had found Dick Maxwell, the class
consciousness that Mr. Ackerman had spoken of rose up in all its
poverty-pride and once more had its innings. Dick had ridden as far as
Pine Gulch on the special train, out-going, and Bess Holcombe had told
him that the men of the party were making up a purse for the rescuer of
the runaway Pullman.
“They can keep their money,” said Larry sullenly; “I don’t want any of
it,”――this after Dick had told him.
And――such is the perversity of poor human nature――on a night when he
should have gone to bed thankful that the day had afforded him a
chance to save life, he rolled himself in his blankets and turned his
face to wall with a strange bitterness for a bedfellow and a feeling
that perhaps, after all, he had made a mistake in leaving the Brewster
round-house and his job of wiping engines.