steam now, Dad, and I'll get you home in time for a nap before
breakfast."
A minute later the special shot over the switch, and the young runner,
crowding the pistons a bit, started off the siding. When Dad, looking
back for the hind-end brakeman to lock the switch and swing on, called
all clear, Georgie pulled her out another notch, and the long train
slowly gathered headway up the slippery track.
As the speed increased the young man and the old relapsed into their
usual silence. The 244 was always a free steamer, but Georgie put her
through her paces without any apology, and it took lots of coal to
square the account.
In a few minutes they were pounding along up through the Narrows. The
track there follows the high bench between the bluffs, which sheer up on
one side, and the river-bed, thirty feet below the grade, on the other.
It is not an inviting stretch at any time with a big string of gondolas
behind. But on a wet night it is the last place on the division where an
engineer would want a side-rod to go wrong; and just there and then
Georgie's rod went very wrong indeed.
Half-way between centres the big steel bar on his side, dipping then so
fast you couldn't have seen it even in daylight, snapped like a stick of
licorice. The hind-end ripped up into the cab like the nose of a
sword-fish, tearing and smashing with appalling force and fury.
Georgie McNeal's seat burst under him as if a stick of giant-powder had
exploded. He was jammed against the cab roof like a link-pin and fell
sprawling, while the monster steel flail threshed and tore through the
cab with every lightning revolution of the great driver from which it
swung.
It was a frightful moment. Anything thought or done must be thought and
done at once. It was either to stop that train--and quickly--or to pound
along until the 244 jumped the track, and lit in the river, with thirty
cars of coal to cover it.
Instantly--so Dad Hamilton afterwards told me--instantly the boy,
scrambling to his feet, reached for his throttle--reached for it through
a rain of iron blows, and staggered back with his right arm hanging like
a broken wing from his shoulder. And back again after it--after the
throttle with his left; slipping and creeping carefully this time up the
throttle lever until, straining and twisting and dodging, he caught the
latch and pushed it tightly home, Dad whistling vigorously the while for
brakes.
Relieved of the tremendous head on the cylinder the old engine calmed
down enough to let the two men collect themselves. Rapidly as the brakes
could do it, the long train was brought up standing, and Georgie, helped
by his fireman, dropped out of the cab, and they set about
disconnecting--the engineer with his one arm--the formidable ends of the
broken rod.
It was a slow, difficult piece of work to do. In spite of their most
active efforts the rain chilled them to the marrow. The train-crew gave
them as much help as willing hands could, which wasn't much; but by
every man doing something they got things fixed, called in their flagmen
just before daybreak, and started home. When the sun rose, Georgie, grim
and silent, the throttle in his left hand, was urging the old engine
along on a dog-trot across the Blackwood flats; and so, limping in on
one side, the kid brought his train into the Zanesville yards, with Dad
Hamilton unable to make himself helpful enough, unable to show his
appreciation of the skill and the grit that the night had disclosed in
the kid engineer.
The hostler waiting in the yard sprang into the cab with amazement on
his face, and was just in time to lift a limp boy out of the old
fireman's arms and help Dad get him to the ground--for Georgie had
fainted.
When the 244 reached the shops a few minutes later they photographed
that cab. It was the worst case of rod-smashing we had ever seen; and
the West-End shops have caught some pretty tough-looking cabs in their
day.
The boy who stopped the cyclone and saved his train and crew lay
stretched on the lounge in my office waiting for the company surgeon.
And old Dad Hamilton--crabbed, irascible old Dad Hamilton--flew around
that boy exactly like an excited old rooster: first bringing ice, and
then water, and then hot coffee, and then fanning him with a time-table.
It was worth a small smash-up to see it.
The one sweep of the rod which caught Georgie's arm had broken it in two
places, and he was off duty three months. But it was a novelty to see
that boy walk down to the post-office, and hear the strikers step up and
ask how his arm was; and to see old Dad Hamilton tag around Zanesville
after him was refreshing. The kid engineer had won his spurs.
The Sky-Scraper
We stood one Sunday morning in a group watching for her to speed around
the Narrows. Many locomotives as I have seen and ridden, a new one is
always a wonder to me; chokes me up, even, it means so much. I hear men
rave over horses, and marvel at it when I think of the iron horse. I
hear them chatter of distance, and my mind turns to the annihilator. I
hear them brag of ships, and I think of the ship that ploughs the
mountains and rivers and plains. And when they talk of speed--what can I
think of but her?
As the new engine rolled into the yards my heart beat quicker. Her lines
were too imposing to call strong; they were massive, yet so simple you
could draw them, like the needle snout of a collie, to a very point.
Every bearing looked precise, every joint looked supple, as she swept
magnificently up and checked herself, panting, in front of us.
Foley was in the cab. He had been east on a lay-off, and so happened to
bring in the new monster, wild, from the river shops.
She was built in Pennsylvania, but the fellows on the Missouri end of
our line thought nothing could ever safely be put into our hands until
they had stopped it _en route_ and looked it over.
"How does she run, Foley?" asked Neighbor, gloating silently over the
toy.
"Cool as an ice-box," said Foley, swinging down. "She's a regular summer
resort. Little stiff on the hills yet."
"We'll take that out of her," mused Neighbor, climbing into the cab to
look her over. "Boys, this is up in a balloon," he added, pushing his
big head through the cab-window and peering down at the ninety-inch
drivers under him.
"I grew dizzy once or twice looking for the ponies," declared Foley,
biting off a piece of tobacco as he hitched at his overalls. "She looms
like a sky-scraper. Say, Neighbor, I'm to get her myself, ain't I?"
asked Foley, with his usual nerve.
"When McNeal gets through with her, yes," returned Neighbor, gruffly,
giving her a thimble of steam and trying the air.
"What!" cried Foley, affecting surprise. "You going to give her to the
kid?"
"I am," returned the master-mechanic unfeelingly, and he kept his word.
Georgie McNeal, just reporting for work after the session in his cab
with the loose end of a connecting-rod, was invited to take out the
Sky-Scraper--488, Class H--as she was listed, and Dad Hamilton of course
took the scoop to fire her.
"They get everything good that's going," grumbled Foley.
"They are good people," retorted Neighbor. He also assigned a helper to
the old fireman. It was a new thing with us then, a fellow with a
slice-bar to tickle the grate, and Dad, of course, kicked. He always
kicked. If they had raised his salary he would have kicked. Neighbor
wasted no words. He simply sent the helper back to wiping until the old
fireman should cry enough.
Very likely you know that a new engine must be regularly broken, as a
horse is broken, before it is ready for steady hard work. And as
Georgie McNeal was not very strong yet, he was appointed to do the
breaking.
For two months it was a picnic. Light runs and easy lay-overs. After the
smash at the Narrows, Hamilton had sort of taken the kid engineer under
his wing; and it was pretty generally understood that any one who
elbowed Georgie McNeal must reckon with his doughty old fireman. So the
two used to march up and down street together, as much like chums as a
very young engineer and a very old fireman possibly could be. They
talked together, walked together, and ate together. Foley was as jealous
as a cat of Hamilton, because he had brought Georgie out West, and felt
a sort of guardian interest in that quarter himself. Really, anybody
would love Georgie McNeal; old Dad Hamilton was proof enough of that.
One evening, just after pay-day, I saw the pair in the post-office lobby
getting their checks cashed. Presently the two stepped over to the
money-order window; a moment later each came away with a money-order.
"Is that where you leave your wealth, Georgie?" I asked, as he came up
to speak to me.
"Part of it goes there every month, Mr. Reed," he smiled. "Checks are
running light, too, now--eh, Dad?"
"A young fellow like you ought to be putting money away in the bank,"
said I.
"Well, you see I have a bank back in Pennsylvania--a bank that is now
sixty years old, and getting gray-headed. I haven't sent her much since
I've been on the relief, so I'm trying to make up a little now for my
old mammie."
"Where does yours go, Dad?" I asked.
"Me?" answered the old man, evasively, "I've got a boy back East;
getting to be a big one, too. He's in school. When are you going to give
us a passenger run with the Sky-Scraper, Neighbor?" asked Hamilton,
turning to the master-mechanic.
"Soon as we get this wheat, up on the high line, out of the way,"
replied Neighbor. "We haven't half engines enough to move it, and I get
a wire about every six hours to move it faster. Every siding's blocked,
clear to Belgrade. How many of those sixty-thousand-pound cars can you
take over Beverly Hill with your Sky-Scraper?"
He was asking both men. The engineer looked at his chum.
"I reckon maybe thirty-five or forty," said McNeal. "Eh, Dad?"
"Maybe, son," growled Hamilton; "and break my back doing it?"
"I gave you a helper once and you kicked him off the tender," retorted
Neighbor.
"Don't want anybody raking ashes for me--not while I'm drawing full
time," Dad frowned.
But the upshot of it was that we put the Sky-Scraper at hauling wheat,
and within a week she was doing the work of a double-header.
It was May, and a thousand miles east of us, in Chicago, there was
trouble in the wheat-pit on the Board of Trade. You would hardly suspect
what queer things that wheat scramble gave rise to, affecting Georgie
McNeal and old man Hamilton and a lot of other fellows away out on a
railroad division on the Western plains; but this was the way of it:
A man sitting in a little office on La Salle Street wrote a few words on
a very ordinary-looking sheet of paper, and touched a button. That
brought a colored boy, and he took the paper out to a young man who sat
at the eastern end of a private wire.
The next thing we knew, orders began to come in hot from the president's
office--the president of the road, if you please--to get that wheat on
the high line into Chicago, and to get it there quickly.
Trainmen, elevator-men, superintendents of motive power, were spurred
with special orders and special bulletins. Farmers, startled by the
great prices offering, hauled night and day. Every old tub we had in the
shops and on the scrap was overhauled and hustled into the service. The
division danced with excitement. Every bushel of wheat on it must be in
Chicago by the morning of May 31st.
For two weeks we worked everything to the limit; the Sky-Scraper led any
two engines on the line. Even Dad Hamilton was glad to cry enough, and
take a helper. We doubled them every day, and the way the wheat flew
over the line towards the lower end of Lake Michigan was appalling to
speculators. It was a battle between two commercial giants--and a battle
to the death. It shook not alone the country, it shook the world; but
that was nothing to us; our orders were simply to move the wheat. And
the wheat moved.
The last week found us pretty well cleaned up; but the high price
brought grain out of cellars and wells, the buyers said--at least, it
brought all the hoarded wheat, and much of the seed wheat, and the 28th
day of the month found fifty cars of wheat still in the Zanesville
yards. I was at Harvard working on a time-card when the word came, and
behind it a special from the general manager, stating there was a
thousand dollars premium in it for the company, besides tariff, if we
got that wheat into Chicago by Saturday morning.
The train end of it didn't bother me any; it was the motive power that
kept us studying. However, we figured that by running McNeal with the
Sky-Scraper back wild we could put all the wheat behind her in one
train. As it happened, Neighbor was at Harvard, too.
"Can they ever get over Beverly with fifty, Neighbor?" I asked,
doubtfully.
"We'll never know till they try it," growled Neighbor. "There's a
thousand for the company if they do, that's all. How'll you run them?
Give them plenty of sea-room; they'll have to gallop to make it."
Cool and reckless planning, taking the daring chances, straining the
flesh and blood, driving the steel loaded to the snapping-point; that
was what it meant. But the company wanted results; wanted the prestige,
and the premium, too. To gain them we were expected to stretch our
little resources to the uttermost.
I studied a minute, then turned to the dispatcher.
"Tell Norman to send them out as second 4; that gives the right of way
over every wheel against them. If they can't make it on that kind of
schedule, it isn't in the track."
It was extraordinary business, rather, sending a train of wheat through
on a passenger schedule, practically, as the second section of our
east-bound flyer; but we took hair-lifting chances on the plains.
It was noon when the orders were flashed. At three o'clock No. 4 was due
to leave Zanesville. For three hours I kept the wires busy warning all
operators and trainmen, even switch-engines and yard-masters, of the
wheat special--second 4.
The Flyer, the first section and regular passenger-train, was checked
out of Zanesville on time. Second 4, which meant Georgie McNeal, Dad,
the Sky-Scraper, and fifty loads of wheat, reported out at 3.10. While
we worked on our time-card, Neighbor, in the dispatcher's office across
the hall, figured out that the wheat-train would enrich the company just
eleven thousand dollars, tolls and premium. "If it doesn't break in two
on Beverly Hill," growled Neighbor, with a qualm.
On the dispatcher's sheet, which is a sort of panorama, I watched the
big train whirl past station after station, drawing steadily nearer to
us, and doing it, the marvel, on full passenger time. It was a great
feat, and Georgie McNeal, whose nerve and brain were guiding the
tremendous load, was breaking records with every mile-stone.
They were due in Harvard at nine o'clock. The first 4, our Flyer,
pulled in and out on time, meeting 55, the west-bound overland freight,
at the second station east of Harvard--Redbud.
Neighbor and I sat with the dispatchers, up in their office, smoking.
The wheat-train was now due from the west, and, looking at my watch, I
stepped to the western window. Almost immediately I heard the long
peculiarly hollow blast of the Sky-Scraper whistling for the upper yard.
"She's coming," I exclaimed.
The boys crowded to the window; but Neighbor happened to glance to the
east.
"What's that coming in from the junction, Bailey?" he exclaimed, turning
to the local dispatcher. We looked and saw a headlight in the east.
"That's 55."
"Where do they meet?"
"55 takes the long siding in from the junction"--which was two miles
east--"and she ought to be on it right now," added the dispatcher,
anxiously, looking over the master-mechanic's shoulder.
Neighbor jumped as if a bullet had struck him. "She'll never take a
siding to-night. She's coming down the main track. What's her orders?"
he demanded, furiously.
"Meeting orders for first 4 at Redbud, second 4 here, 78 at Glencoe.
Great Jupiter!" cried the dispatcher, and his face went sick and scared,
"they've forgotten second 4."
"They'll think of her a long time dead," roared the master-mechanic,
savagely, jumping to the west window. "Throw your red lights! There's
the Sky-Scraper now!"
Her head shot that instant around the coal chutes, less than a mile
away, and 55 going dead against her. I stood like one palsied, my eyes
glued on the burning eye of the big engine. As she whipped past a street
arc-light I caught a glimpse of Georgie McNeal's head out of the cab
window. He always rode bare-headed if the night was warm, and I knew it
was he; but suddenly, like a flash, his head went in. I knew why as well
as if my eyes were his eyes and my thoughts his thoughts. He had seen
red signals where he had every right to look for white.
But red signals now--to stop _her_--to pull her flat on her haunches
like a bronco? Shake a weather flag at a cyclone!
I saw the fire stream from her drivers; I knew they were churning in the
sand; I knew he had twenty air cars behind him sliding. What of it?
Two thousand tons were sweeping forward like an avalanche. What did
brains or pluck count for now with 55 dancing along like a school-girl
right into the teeth of it?
I don't know how the other men felt. As for me, my breath choked in my
throat, my knees shook, and a deadly nausea seized me. Unable to avert
the horrible blunder, I saw its hideous results.
Darkness hid the worst of the sight; it was the sound that appalled.
Children asleep in sod shanties miles from where the two engines reared
in awful shock jumped in their cribs at that crash. 55's little engine
barely checked the Sky-Scraper. She split it like a banana. She bucked
like a frantic horse, and leaped fearfully ahead. There was a blinding
explosion, a sudden awful burst of steam; the windows crashed about our
ears, and we were dashed to the wall and floor like lead-pencils. A
baggage-truck, whipped up from the platform below, came through the
heavy sash and down on the dispatcher's table like a brickbat, and as we
scrambled to our feet a shower of wheat suffocated us. The floor heaved;
freight-cars slid into the depot like battering-rams. In the height of
the confusion an oil-tank in the yard took fire and threw a yellow glare
on the ghastly scene.
I saw men get up and fall again to their knees; I was shivering, and wet
with sweat. The stairway was crushed into kindling-wood. I climbed out a
back window, down on the roof of the freight platform, and so to the
ground. There was a running to and fro, useless and aimless; men were
beside themselves. They plunged through wheat up to their knees at every
step. All at once, above the frantic hissing of the buried Sky-Scraper
and the wild calling of the car tinks, I heard the stentorian tones of
Neighbor, mounted on a twisted truck, organizing the men at hand into a
wrecking-gang. Soon people began running up the yard to where the
Sky-Scraper lay, like another Samson, prostrate in the midst of the
destruction it had wrought. Foremost among the excited men, covered
with dirt and blood, staggered Dad Hamilton.
"Where's McNeal?" cried Neighbor.
Hamilton pointed to the wreck.
"Why didn't he jump?" yelled Neighbor.
Hamilton pointed at the twisted signal-tower; the red light still burned
in it.
"You changed the signals on him," he cried, savagely. "What does it
mean? We had rights against everything. What does it mean?" he raved, in
a frenzy.
Neighbor answered him never a word; he only put his hand on Dad's
shoulder.
"Find him first! Find him!" he repeated, with a strain in his voice I
never heard till then; and the two giants hurried away together. When I
reached the Sky-Scraper, buried in the thick of the smash, roaring like
a volcano, the pair were already into the jam like a brace of ferrets,
hunting for the engine crews. It seemed an hour, though it was much
less, before they found any one; then they brought out 55's fireman.
Neighbor found him. But his back was broken. Back again they wormed
through twisted trucks, under splintered beams--in and around and
over--choked with heat, blinded by steam, shouting as they groped,
listening for word or cry or gasp.
Soon we heard Dad's voice in a different cry--one that meant everything;
and the wreckers, turning like beavers through a dozen blind trails,
gathered all close to the big fireman. He was under a great piece of the
cab where none could follow, and he was crying for a bar. They passed
him a bar; other men, careless of life and limb, tried to crawl under
and in to him, but he warned them back. Who but a man baked twenty years
in an engine cab could stand the steam that poured on him where he lay?
Neighbor, just outside, flashing a light, heard the labored strain of
his breathing, saw him getting half up, bend to the bar, and saw the
iron give like lead in his hands as he pried mightily.
Neighbor heard, and told me long afterwards, how the old man flung the
bar away with an imprecation, and cried for one to help him; for a
minute meant a life now--the boy lying pinned under the shattered cab
was roasting in a jet of live steam. The master-mechanic crept in.
By signs Dad told him what to do, and then, getting on his knees,
crawled straight into the dash of the white jet--crawled into it, and
got the cab on his shoulders.
Crouching an instant, the giant muscles of his back set in a tremendous
effort. The wreckage snapped and groaned, the knotted legs slowly and
painfully straightened, the cab for a passing instant rose in the air,
and in that instant Neighbor dragged Georgie McNeal from out the vise of
death, and passed him, like a pinch-bar, to the men waiting next behind.
Then Neighbor pulled Dad back, blind now and senseless. When they got
the old fireman out he made a pitiful struggle to pull himself together.
He tried to stand up, but the sweat broke over him and he sank in a heap
at Neighbor's feet.
[Illustration: "THE CAB FOR A PASSING INSTANT ROSE IN THE AIR"]
That was the saving of Georgie McNeal, and out there they will still
tell you about that lift of Dad Hamilton's.
We put him on the cot at the hospital next to his engineer. Georgie,
dreadfully bruised and scalded, came on fast in spite of his hurts. But
the doctor said Dad had wrenched a tendon in that frightful effort, and
he lay there a very sick and very old man long after the young engineer
was up and around telling of his experience.
"When we cleared the chutes I saw white signals, I thought," he said to
me at Dad's bedside. "I knew we had the right of way over everything. It
was a hustle, anyway, on that schedule, Mr. Reed; you know that; an
awful hustle, with our load. I never choked her a notch to run the
yards; didn't mean to do it with the Junction grade to climb just ahead
of us. But I looked out again, and, by hokey! I thought I'd gone crazy,
got color-blind--red signals! Of course I thought I must have been wrong
the first time I looked. I choked her, I threw the air, I dumped the
gravel. Heavens! she never felt it! I couldn't figure how we were wrong,
but there was the red light. I yelled, 'Jump, Dad!' and he yelled,
'Jump, son!' Didn't you, Dad?
"He jumped; but I wasn't ever going to jump and my engine going full
against a red lamp. Not much.
"I kind of dodged down behind the head; when she struck it was biff, and
she jumped about twenty feet up straight. She didn't? Well, it seemed
like it. Then it was biff, biff, biff, one after another. With that
train behind her she'd have gone through Beverly Hill. Did you ever buck
snow with a rotary, Mr. Reed? Well, that was about it, even to the
rolling and heaving. Dad, want to lie down? Le' me get another pillow
behind you. Isn't that better? Poor Musgrave!" he added, speaking of the
engineer of 55, who was instantly killed. "He and the fireman both. Hard
lines; but I'd rather have it that way, I guess, if I was wrong. Eh,
Dad?"
Even after Georgie went to work, Dad lay in the hospital. We knew he
would never shovel coal again. It cost him his good back to lift Georgie
loose, so the surgeon told us; and I could believe it, for when they got
the jacks under the cab next morning, and Neighbor told the
wrecking-gang that Hamilton alone had lifted it six inches the night
before, on his back, the wrecking-boss fairly snorted at the statement;
but Hamilton did, just the same.
"Son," muttered Dad, one night to Georgie, sitting with him, "I want you
to write a letter for me."
"Sure."