a lantern to be voted to the most popular conductor--a gold-plated
lantern with a green curtain in the globe. Cal Stewart and Ben Doton,
who were very swell conductors, and great rivals, were the favorites,
and had the town divided over their chances for winning it.
But during the last moments Georgia Sinclair stepped up to the booth and
cast a storm of votes for old man Sankey. Doton's friends and Stewart's
laughed at first, but Sankey's votes kept pouring in amazingly. The
favorites grew frightened; they pooled their issues by throwing
Stewart's vote to Doton; but it wouldn't do. Georgie Sinclair, with a
crowd of engineers--Cameron, Moore, Foley, Bat Mullen, and Burns--came
back at them with such a swing that in the final round up they fairly
swamped Doton. Sankey took the lantern by a thousand votes, but I
understood it cost Georgie and his friends a pot of money.
Sankey said all the time he didn't want the lantern, but, just the same,
he always carried that particular lantern, with his full name, Sylvester
Sankey, ground into the glass just below the green mantle. Pretty
soon--Neeta being then eighteen--it was rumored that Sinclair was
engaged to Miss Sankey--was going to marry her. And marry her he did;
though that was not until after the wreck in the Blackwood gorge, the
time of the Big Snow.
It goes yet by just that name on the West End; for never was such a
winter and such a snow known on the plains and in the mountains. One
train on the northern division was stalled six weeks that winter, and
one whole coach was chopped up for kindling-wood.
But the great and desperate effort of the company was to hold open the
main line, the artery which connected the two coasts. It was a hard
winter on trainmen. Week after week the snow kept falling and blowing.
The trick was not to clear the line; it was to keep it clear. Every day
we sent out trains with the fear we should not see them again for a
week.
Freight we didn't pretend to move; local passenger business had to be
abandoned. Coal, to keep our engines and our towns supplied, we were
obliged to carry, and after that all the brains and the muscle and the
motive-power were centred on keeping 1 and 2, our through
passenger-trains, running.
Our trainmen worked like Americans; there were no cowards on our rolls.
But after too long a strain men become exhausted, benumbed,
indifferent--reckless even. The nerves give out, and will power seems to
halt on indecision--but decision is the life of the fast train.
None of our conductors stood the hopeless fight like Sankey. Sankey was
patient, taciturn, untiring, and, in a conflict with the elements,
ferocious. All the fighting-blood of his ancestors seemed to course
again in that struggle with the winter king. I can see him yet, on
bitter days, standing alongside the track, in a heavy pea-jacket and
Napoleon boots, a sealskin cap drawn snugly over his straight, black
hair, watching, ordering, signalling, while No. 1, with its frost-bitten
sleepers behind a rotary, struggled to buck through the ten and twenty
foot cuts, which lay bankful of snow west of McCloud.
Not until April did it begin to look as if we should win out. A dozen
times the line was all but choked on us. And then, when snow-ploughs
were disabled and train crews desperate, there came a storm that
discounted the worst blizzard of the winter. As the reports rolled in on
the morning of the 5th, growing worse as they grew thicker, Neighbor,
dragged out, played out, mentally and physically, threw up his hands.
The 6th it snowed all day, and on Saturday morning the section men
reported thirty feet in the Blackwood canon.
It was six o'clock when we got the word, and daylight before we got the
rotary against it. They bucked away till noon with discouraging results,
and came in with their gear smashed and a driving-rod fractured. It
looked as if we were beaten.
No. 1 got into McCloud eighteen hours late; it was Sankey's and
Sinclair's run west.
There was a long council in the round-house. The rotary was knocked out;
coal was running low in the chutes. If the line wasn't kept open for the
coal from the mountains it was plain we should be tied until we could
ship it from Iowa or Missouri. West of Medicine Pole there was another
big rotary working east, with plenty of coal behind her, but she was
reported stuck fast in the Cheyenne Hills.
Foley made suggestions and Dad Sinclair made suggestions. Everybody had
a suggestion left; the trouble was, Neighbor said, they didn't amount to
anything, or were impossible.
"It's a dead block, boys," announced Neighbor, sullenly, after everybody
had done. "We are beaten unless we can get No. 1 through to-day. Look
there; by the holy poker it's snowing again!"
The air was dark in a minute with whirling clouds. Men turned to the
windows and quit talking; every fellow felt the same--at least, all but
one. Sankey, sitting back of the stove, was making tracings on his
overalls with a piece of chalk.
"You might as well unload your passengers, Sankey," said Neighbor.
"You'll never get 'em through this winter."
And it was then that Sankey proposed his Double Header.
He devised a snow-plough which combined in one monster ram about all the
good material we had left, and submitted the scheme to Neighbor.
Neighbor studied it and hacked at it all he could, and brought it over
to the office. It was like staking everything on the last cast of the
dice, but we were in the state of mind which precedes a desperate
venture. It was talked over for an hour, and orders were finally given
by the superintendent to rig up the Double Header and get against the
snow as quick as it could be made ready.
All that day and most of the night Neighbor worked twenty men on
Sankey's device. By Sunday morning it was in such shape that we began to
take heart.
"If she don't get through she'll get back again, and that's what most of
'em don't do," growled Neighbor, as he and Sankey showed the new ram to
the engineers.
They had taken the 566, George Sinclair's engine, for one head, and
Burns's 497 for the other. Behind these were Kennedy with the 314 and
Cameron with the 296. The engines were set in pairs, headed each way,
and buckled up like pack-mules. Over the pilots and stacks of the head
engines rose the tremendous ploughs which were to tackle the toughest
drifts ever recorded, before or since, on the West End. The ram was
designed to work both ways. Under the coal each tender was loaded with
pig-iron.
The beleaguered passengers on No. 1, side-tracked in the yards, watched
the preparations Sankey was making to clear the line. Every amateur on
the train had his camera snapping at the ram. The town, gathered in a
single great mob, looked silently on, and listened to the frosty notes
of the sky-scrapers as they went through their preliminary manoeuvres.
Just as the final word was given by Sankey, in charge, the sun burst
through the fleecy clouds, and a wild cheer followed the ram out of the
western yard--it was good-luck to see the sun again.
Little Neeta, up on the hill, must have seen them as they pulled out;
surely she heard the choppy, ice-bitten screech of the 566; that was
never forgotten whether the service was special or regular. Besides, the
head cab of the ram carried this time not only Georgie Sinclair but her
father as well. Sankey could handle a slice-bar as well as a punch, and
rode on the head engine, where, if anywhere, the big chances hovered.
What he was not capable of in the train service we never knew, because
he was stronger than any emergency that ever confronted him.
Bucking snow is principally brute force; there is little coaxing. Just
west of the bluffs, like code signals between a fleet of cruisers, there
was a volley of sharp tooting, and in a minute the four ponderous
engines, two of them in the back motion, fires white and throats
bursting, steamed wildly into the canon.
Six hundred feet from the first cut Sinclair's whistle signalled again;
Burns and Cameron and Kennedy answered, and then, literally turning the
monster ram loose against the dazzling mountain, the crews settled
themselves for the shock.
At such a moment there is nothing to be done. If anything goes wrong
eternity is too close to consider. There comes a muffled drumming on the
steam-chests--a stagger and a terrific impact--and then the recoil like
the stroke of a trip-hammer. The snow shoots into the air fifty feet,
and the wind carries a cloud of fleecy confusion over the ram and out of
the cut. The cabs were buried in white, and the great steel frames of
the engines sprung like knitting-needles under the frightful blow.
Pausing for hardly a breath, the signalling again began. Then the
backing; up and up and up the line; and again the massive machines were
hurled screaming into the cut.
"You're getting there, Georgie," exclaimed Sankey, when the rolling and
lurching had stopped. No one else could tell a thing about it, for it
was snow and snow and snow; above and behind, and ahead and beneath.
Sinclair coughed the flakes out of his eyes and nose and mouth like a
baffled collie. He looked doubtful of the claim until the mist had blown
clear and the quivering monsters were again recalled for a dash. Then it
was plain that Sankey's instinct was right; they were gaining.
Again they went in, lifting a very avalanche over the stacks, packing
the banks of the cut with walls hard as ice. Again as the drivers stuck
they raced in a frenzy, and into the shriek of the wind went the
unearthly scrape of the overloaded safeties.
Slowly and sullenly the machines were backed again.
"She's doing the work, Georgie," cried Sankey. "For that kind of a cut
she's as good as a rotary. Look everything over now while I go back and
see how the boys are standing it. Then we'll give her one more, and give
it the hardest kind."
And they did give her one more--and another. Men at Santiago put up no
stouter fight than they made that Sunday morning in the canon of the
Blackwood. Once and twice more they went in. And the second time the
bumping drummed more deeply; the drivers held, pushed, panted, and
gained against the white wall--heaved and stumbled ahead--and with a
yell from Sinclair and Sankey and the fireman, the Double Header shot
her nose into the clear over the Blackwood gorge. As engine after engine
flew past the divided walls, each cab took up the cry--it was the
wildest shout that ever crowned victory.
Through they went and half-way across the bridge before they could check
their monster catapult. Then at a half-full they shot it back at the
cut--it worked as well one way as the other.
"The thing is done," declared Sankey. Then they got into position up the
line for a final shoot to clean the eastern cut and to get the head for
a dash across the bridge into the west end of the canon, where lay
another mountain of snow to split.
"Look the machines over close, boys," said Sankey to the engineers. "If
nothing's sprung we'll take a full head across the gorge--the bridge
will carry anything--and buck the west cut. Then after we get No. 1
through this afternoon Neighbor can get his baby cabs in here and keep
'em chasing all night; but it's done snowing," he added, looking into
the leaden sky.
He had everything figured out for the master-mechanic--the shrewd,
kindly old man. There's no man on earth like a good Indian; and for that
matter none like a bad one. Sankey knew by a military instinct just what
had to be done and how to do it. If he had lived he was to have been
assistant superintendent. That was the word which leaked from
headquarters after he got killed.
And with a volley of jokes between the cabs, and a laughing and a
yelling between toots, down went Sankey's Double Header again into the
Blackwood gorge.
At the same moment, by an awful misunderstanding of orders, down came
the big rotary from the West End with a dozen cars of coal behind it.
Mile after mile it had wormed east towards Sankey's ram, burrowed
through the western cut of the Blackwood, crashed through the drift
Sankey was aiming for, and whirled then out into the open, dead against
him, at forty miles an hour. Each train, in order to make the grade and
the blockade, was straining the cylinders.
Through the swirling snow which half hid the bridge and swept between
the rushing ploughs Sinclair saw them coming--he yelled. Sankey saw them
a fraction of a second later, and while Sinclair struggled with the
throttle and the air, Sankey gave the alarm through the whistle to the
poor fellows in the blind pockets behind. But the track was at the
worst. Where there was no snow there were whiskers; oil itself couldn't
have been worse to stop on. It was the old and deadly peril of fighting
blockades from both ends on a single track.
The great rams of steel and fire had done their work, and with their
common enemy overcome they dashed at each other frenzied across the
Blackwood gorge.
The fireman at the first cry shot out the side. Sankey yelled at
Sinclair to jump. But George shook his head: he never would jump.
Without hesitating an instant, Sankey caught him in his arms, tore him
from the levers, planted a mighty foot, and hurled Sinclair like a block
of coal through the gangway out into the gorge. The other cabs were
already emptied; but the instant's delay in front cost Sankey's life.
Before he could turn the rotary crashed into the 566. They reared like
mountain lions, and pitched headlong into the gorge; Sankey went under
them.
He could have saved himself; he chose to save George. There wasn't time
to do both; he had to choose and he chose instinctively. Did he, maybe,
think in that flash of Neeta and of whom she needed most--of a young and
a stalwart protector better than an old and a failing one? I do not
know; I know only what he did.
Every one who jumped got clear. Sinclair lit in twenty feet of snow, and
they pulled him out with a rope; he wasn't scratched; even the bridge
was not badly strained. No. 1 pulled over it next day. Sankey was
right: there was no more snow; not enough to hide the dead engines on
the rocks: the line was open.
There never was a funeral in McCloud like Sankey's. George Sinclair and
Neeta followed together; and of mourners there were as many as there
were people. Every engine on the division carried black for thirty days.
His contrivance for fighting snow has never yet been beaten on the high
line. It is perilous to go against a drift behind it--something has to
give.
But it gets there--as Sankey got there--always; and in time of blockade
and desperation on the West End they still send out Sankey's Double
Header; though Sankey--so the conductors tell the children, travelling
east or travelling west--Sankey isn't running any more.
Siclone Clark
"There goes a fellow that walks like Siclone Clark," exclaimed Duck
Middleton. Duck was sitting in the train-master's office with a group of
engineers. He was one of the black-listed strikers, and runs an engine
now down on the Santa Fe. But at long intervals Duck gets back to
revisit the scenes of his early triumphs. The men who surrounded him
were once at deadly odds with Duck and his chums, though now the ancient
enmities seem forgotten, and Duck--the once ferocious Duck--sits
occasionally among the new men and gossips about early days on the West
End.
"Do you remember Siclone, Reed?" asked Duck, calling to me in the
private office.
"Remember him?" I echoed. "Did anybody who ever knew Siclone forget
him?"
"I fired passenger for Siclone twenty years ago," resumed Duck. "He
walked just like that fellow; only he was quicker. I reckon you fellows
don't know what a snap you have here now," he continued, addressing the
men around him. "Track fenced; ninety-pound rails; steel bridges; stone
culverts; slag ballast; sky-scrapers. No wonder you get chances to haul
such nobs as Lilioukalani and Schley and Dewey, and cut out ninety miles
an hour on tangents.
"When I was firing for Siclone the road-bed was just off the scrapers;
the dumps were soft; pile bridges; paper culverts; fifty-six-pound
rails; not a fence west of Buffalo gap, and the plains black with Texas
steers. We never closed our cylinder cocks; the hiss of the steam
frightened the cattle worse than the whistle, and we never knew when we
were going to find a bunch of critters on the track.
"The first winter I came out was great for snow, and I was a tenderfoot.
The cuts made good wind-breaks, and whenever there was a norther they
were chuck full of cattle. Every time a train ploughed through the snow
it made a path on the track. Whenever the steers wanted to move they
would take the middle of the track single file, and string out mile
after mile. Talk about fast schedules and ninety miles an hour. You had
to poke along with your cylinders spitting, and just whistle and
yell--sort of blow them off into the snow-drifts.
"One day Siclone and I were going west on 59, and we were late; for that
matter we were always late. Simpson coming against us on 60 had caught a
bunch of cattle in the rock-cut, just west of the Sappie, and killed a
couple. When we got there there must have been a thousand head of steers
mousing around the dead ones. Siclone--he used to be a cowboy, you
know--Siclone said they were holding a wake. At any rate, they were
still coming from every direction and as far as you could see.
"'Hold on, Siclone, and I'll chase them out,' I said.
"'That's the stuff, Duck,' says he. 'Get after them and see what you can
do.' He looked kind of queer, but I never thought anything. I picked up
a jack-bar and started up the track.
"The first fellow I tackled looked lazy, but he started full quick when
I hit him. Then he turned around to inspect me, and I noticed his horns
were the broad-gauge variety. While I whacked another the first one put
his head down and began to snort and paw the ties; then they all began
to bellow at once; it looked smoky. I dropped the jack-bar and started
for the engine, and about fifty of them started for me.
"I never had an idea steers could run so; you could have played checkers
on my heels all the way back. If Siclone hadn't come out and jollied
them, I'd never have got back in the world. I just jumped the pilot and
went clear over against the boiler-head. Siclone claimed I tried to
climb the smoke-stack; but he was excited. Anyway, he stood out there
with a shovel and kept the whole bunch off me. I thought they would kill
him; but I never tried to chase range steers on foot again.
"In the spring we got the rains; not like you get now, but cloud-bursts.
The section men were good fellows, only sometimes we would get into a
storm miles from a section gang and strike a place where we couldn't see
a thing.
"Then Siclone would stop the train, take a bar, and get down ahead and
sound the road-bed. Many and many a wash-out he struck that way which
would have wrecked our train and wound up our ball of yarn in a minute.
Often and often Siclone would go into his division without a dry thread
on him.
"Those were different days," mused the grizzled striker. "The old boys
are scattered now all over this broad land. The strike did it; and you
fellows have the snap. But what I wonder, often and often, is whether
Siclone is really alive or not."
I
Siclone Clark was one of the two cowboys who helped Harvey Reynolds and
Ed Banks save 59 at Griffin the night the coal-train ran down from
Ogalalla. They were both taken into the service; Siclone, after a while,
went to wiping.
When Bucks asked his name, Siclone answered, "S. Clark."
"What's your full name?" asked Bucks.
"S. Clark."
"But what does S. stand for?" persisted Bucks.
"Stands for Cyclone, I reckon; don't it?" retorted the cowboy, with some
annoyance.
It was not usual in those days on the plains to press a man too closely
about his name. There might be reasons why it would not be esteemed
courteous.
"I reckon it do," replied Bucks, dropping into Siclone's grammar; and
without a quiver he registered the new man as Siclone Clark; and his
checks always read that way. The name seemed to fit; he adopted it
without any objection; and, after everybody came to know him, it fitted
so well that Bucks was believed to have second sight when he named the
hair-brained fireman. He could get up a storm quicker than any man on
the division, and, if he felt so disposed, stop one quicker.
In spite of his eccentricities, which were many, and his headstrong way
of doing some things, Siclone Clark was a good engineer, and deserved a
better fate than the one that befell him. Though--who can tell?--it may
have been just to his liking.
The strike was the worst thing that ever happened to Siclone. He was one
of those big-hearted, violent fellows who went into it loaded with
enthusiasm. He had nothing to gain by it; at least, nothing to speak of.
But the idea that somebody on the East End needed their help led men
like Siclone in; and they thought it a cinch that the company would have
to take them all back.
The consequence was that, when we staggered along without them, men like
Siclone, easily aroused, naturally of violent passions, and with no
self-restraint, stopped at nothing to cripple the service. And they
looked on the men who took their places as entitled neither to liberty
nor life.
When our new men began coming from the Reading to replace the strikers,
every one wondered who would get Siclone Clark's engine, the 313.
Siclone had gently sworn to kill the first man who took out the 313--and
bar nobody.
Whatever others thought of Siclone's vaporings, they counted for a good
deal on the West End; nobody wanted trouble with him.
Even Neighbor, who feared no man, sort of let the 313 lay in her stall
as long as possible, after the trouble began.
Nothing was said about it. Threats cannot be taken cognizance of
officially; we were bombarded with threats all the time; they had long
since ceased to move us. Yet Siclone's engine stayed in the round-house.
Then, after Foley and McTerza and Sinclair, came Fitzpatrick from the
East. McTerza was put on the mails, and, coming down one day on the
White Flyer, he blew a cylinder-head out of the 416.
Fitzpatrick was waiting to take her out when she came stumping in on one
pair of drivers--for we were using engines worse than horseflesh then.
But of course the 416 was put out. The only gig left in the house was
the 313.
I imagine Neighbor felt the finger of fate in it. The mail had to go.
The time had come for the 313; he ordered her fired.
"The man that ran this engine swore he would kill the man that took her
out," said Neighbor, sort of incidentally, as Fitz stood by waiting for
her to steam.
"I suppose that means me," said Fitzpatrick.
"I suppose it does."
"Whose engine is it?"
"Siclone Clark's."
Fitzpatrick shifted to the other leg.
"Did he say what I would be doing while this was going on?"
Something in Fitzpatrick's manner made Neighbor laugh. Other things
crowded in and no more was said.
No more was thought in fact. The 313 rolled as kindly for Fitzpatrick as
for Siclone, and the new engineer, a quiet fellow like Foley, only a
good bit heavier, went on and off her with never a word for anybody.
One day Fitzpatrick dropped into a barber shop to get shaved. In the
next chair lay Siclone Clark. Siclone got through first, and, stepping
over to the table to get his hat, picked up Fitzpatrick's, by mistake,
and walked out with it. He discovered his change just as Fitz got out of
his chair. Siclone came back, replaced the hat on the table--it had
Fitzpatrick's name pasted in the crown--took up his own hat, and, as
Fitz reached for his, looked at him.
Everyone in the shop caught their breaths.
"Is your name Fitzpatrick?"
"Yes, sir."
"Mine is Clark."
Fitzpatrick put on his hat.
"You're running the 313, I believe?" continued Siclone.
"Yes, sir."
"That's my engine."
"I thought it belonged to the company."
"Maybe it does; but I've agreed to kill the man that takes her out
before this trouble is settled," said Siclone, amiably.
Fitzpatrick met him steadily. "If you'll let me know when it takes
place, I'll try and be there."
"I don't jump on any man without fair warning; any of the boys will tell
you that," continued Siclone. "Maybe you didn't know my word was out?"
Fitzpatrick hesitated. "I'm not looking for trouble with any man," he
replied, guardedly. "But since you're disposed to be fair about notice,
it's only fair to you to say that I did know your word was out."
"Still you took her?"
"It was my orders."