Chapter III (2)

The path of the Englishman was not strewn with flowers for the next few months. Any number of men who had been on the road when he was in the English navy-yards felt that they ought to have had this little promotion. The local foremen along the line saw in the young Englishman the future foreman of the new shops, and no man went out of his way to help the stranger. But in spite of all obstacles, the shop grew from day to day, from week to week; so that as the old year drew to a close the machinery was getting into place. The young foreman, while a hard worker, was always pleasant in his intercourse with the employees, and in a little while he had hosts of friends. There is always a lot of extra work at the end of a big job, and now when Christmas came there was still much to do. The men worked night and day. The boiler that was to come from Chicago had been expected for some time. Everything was in readiness, and it could be set up in a day; but it did not come. Tracer-letters that had gone after it were followed by telegrams; finally it was located in a wreck out in a cornfield in Illinois on the last day of the year.

A great many of the officials were away, and the service was generally demoralized during the holidays, so that the appropriation for which the Englishman was working at M. had for the moment been forgotten; the shops were completed, the machinery was in, but there was no boiler to boil water to make steam.

That night, when the people of M. were watching the old year out and the new year in, the young Englishman with a force of men was wrecking the pump-house down by the station. The little upright boiler was torn out and placed in the machine shops, and with it a little engine was driven that turned the long line-shaft.

At dawn they ran a long pipe through the roof, screwed a locomotive whistle on the top of it, and at six o'clock on New Year's morning the new whistle on the new shops at M. in Iowa, blew in the new year. Incidentally, it blew the town in for $47,000.

This would be a good place to end this story, but the temptation is great to tell the rest.

When the shops were opened, the young Englishman was foreman. This was only about twenty-five years ago. In a little while they promoted him.

In 1887 he went to the Wisconsin Central. In 1890 he was made Superintendent of machinery of the Santa Fé route,--one of the longest roads on earth. It begins at Chicago, strong like a man's wrist, with a finger each on Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, and El Paso, and a thumb touching the Gulf at Galveston.

The mileage of the system, at that time, was equal to one-half that of Great Britain; and upon the companies' payrolls were ten thousand more men than were then in the army of the United States. Fifteen hundred men and boys walk into the main shops at Topeka every morning. They work four hours, eat luncheon, listen to a lecture or short sermon in the meeting-place above the shops, work another four hours, and walk out three thousand dollars better off than they would have been if they had not worked.

These shops make a little city of themselves. There is a perfect water system, fire-brigade with fire stations where the firemen sleep, police, and a dog-catcher.

Here they build anything of wood, iron, brass, or steel that the company needs, from a ninety-ton locomotive to a single-barrelled mouse-trap, all under the eye of the Englishman who came to America with a good wife and three babies, a good head and two hands. This man's name is John Player. He is the inventor of the Player truck, the Player hand-car, the Player frog, and many other useful appliances.

This simple story of an unpretentious man came out in broken sections as the special sped along the smooth track, while the General Manager talked with the resident director and the General Superintendent talked with his assistant, who, not long ago, was the conductor of a work-train upon which the G.S. was employed as brakeman. I was two days stealing this story, between the blushes of the mechanical Superintendent.

He related, also, that a man wearing high-cut trousers and milk on his boot had entered his office when he had got to his first position as master-mechanic and held out a hand, smiling, "Vell, you don't know me yet, ain't it? I'm Martin the fireman; I quit ranchin' already, an' I want a jobs."

Martin got a job at once. He got killed, also, in a little while; but that is part of the business on a new road.

Near the shops at Topeka stands the railroad Young Men's Christian Association building. They were enlarging it when I was there. There are no "saloons" in Kansas, so Player and his company help the men to provide other amusements.

ON THE LIMITED

One Sabbath evening, not long ago, I went down to the depot in an Ontario town to take the International Limited for Montreal. She was on the blackboard five minutes in disgrace. "Huh!" grunted a commercial traveller. It was Sunday in the aforesaid Ontario town, and would be Sunday in Toronto, toward which he was travelling. Even if we were on time we should not arrive until 9.30--too late for church, too early to go to bed, and the saloons all closed and barred. And yet this restless traveller fretted and grieved because we promised to get into Toronto five minutes late. Alas for the calculation of the train despatchers, she was seven minutes overdue when she swept in and stood for us to mount. The get-away was good, but at the eastern yard limits we lost again. The people from the Pullmans piled into the café car and overflowed into the library and parlor cars. The restless traveller snapped his watch again, caught the sleeve of a passing trainman, and asked "'S matter?" and the conductor answered, "Waiting for No. 5." Five minutes passed and not a wheel turned; six, eight, ten minutes, and no sound of the coming west-bound express. Up ahead we could hear the flutter and flap of the blow-off; for the black flier was as restless as the fat drummer who was snapping his watch, grunting "Huh," and washing suppressed profanity down with _café noir_.

Eighteen minutes and No. 5 passed. When the great black steed of steam got them swinging again we were twenty-five minutes to the bad. And how that driver did hit the curves! The impatient traveller snapped his watch again and said, refusing to be comforted, "She'll never make it."

Mayhap the fat and fretful drummer managed to communicate with the engine-driver, or maybe the latter was unhappily married or had an insurance policy; and it is also possible that he is just the devil to drive. Anyway, he whipped that fine train of Pullmans, café, and parlor cars through those peaceful, lamplighted, Sabbath-keeping Ontario towns as though the whole show had cost not more than seven dollars, and his own life less.

On a long lounge in the library car a well-nourished lawyer lay sleeping in a way that I had not dreamed a political lawyer could sleep. One gamey M.P.--double P, I was told--had been robbing this same lawyer of a good deal of rest recently, and he was trying at a mile a minute to catch up with his sleep. I could feel the sleeper slam her flanges against the ball of the rail as we rounded the perfectly pitched curves, and the little semi-quaver that tells the trained traveller that the man up ahead is moving the mile-posts, at least one every minute. At the first stop, twenty-five miles out, the fat drummer snapped his watch again, but he did not say, "Huh." We had made up five minutes.

A few passengers swung down here, and a few others swung up; and off we dashed, drilling the darkness. I looked in on the lawyer again, for I would have speech with him; but he was still sleeping the sleep of the virtuous, with the electric light full on his upturned baby face, that reminds me constantly of the late Tom Reed.

A woman I know was putting one of her babies to bed in lower 2, when we wiggled through a reverse curve that was like shooting White Horse Rapids in a Peterboro. The child intended for lower 2 went over into 4. "Never mind," said its mother, "we have enough to go around;" and so she left that one in 4 and put the next one in 2, and so on.

At the next stop where you "Y" and back into the town, the people, impatient, were lined up, ready to board the Limited. When we swung over the switches again, we were only ten minutes late.

As often as the daring driver eased off for a down grade I could hear the hiss of steam through the safety-valve above the back of the black flier, and I could feel the flanges against the ball of the rail, and the little tell-tale semi-quaver of the car.

By now the babies were all abed; and from bunk to bunk she tucked them in, kissed them good-night, and then cuddled down beside the last one, a fair-haired girl who seemed to have caught and kept, in her hair and in her eyes, the sunshine of the three short summers through which she had passed.

Once more I went and stood by the lounge where the lawyer lay, but I had not the nerve to wake him.

The silver moon rose and lit the ripples on the lake that lay below my window as the last of the diners came from the café car. Along the shore of the sleeping lake our engine swept like a great, black, wingless bird of night. Presently I felt the frogs of South Parkdale; and when, from her hot throat she called "Toronto," the fat and fretful traveller opened his great gold watch. He did not snap it now, but looked into its open face and almost smiled; for we were touching Toronto on the tick of time.

I stepped from the car, for I was interested in the fat drummer. I wanted to see him meet her, and hold her hand, and tell her what a really, truly, good husband he had been, and how he had hurried home. As he came down the short stair a friend faced him and said "Good-night," where we say "Good-evening." "Hello, Bill," said the fat drummer. They shook hands languidly. The fat man yawned and asked, "Anything doing?" "Not the littlest," said Bill. "Then," said Jim (the fat man), "let us go up to the King Edward, sit down, and have a good, quiet smoke."

THE CONQUEST OF ALASKA

Immediately under the man with the money, who lived in London, there was the President in Chicago; then came the chief engineer in Seattle, the locating engineer in Skagway, the contractor in the grading camp, and Hugh Foy, the "boss" of the builders. Yet in spite of all this overhanging stratification, Foy was a big man. To be sure, none of these men had happened to get their positions by mere chance. They were men of character and fortitude, capable of great sacrifice.

Mr. Close, in London, knew that his partner, Mr. Graves, in Chicago, would be a good man at the head of so cold and hopeless an enterprise as a Klondike Railway; and Mr. Graves knew that Erastus Corning Hawkins, who had put through some of the biggest engineering schemes in the West, was the man to build the road. The latter selected, as locating engineer, John Hislop, the hero, one of the few survivors of that wild and daring expedition that undertook, some twenty years ago, to survey a route for a railroad whose trains were to traverse the Grand Cañon of Colorado, where, save for the song of the cataract, there is only shade and silence and perpetual starlight. Heney, a wiry, compact, plucky Canadian contractor, made oral agreement with the chief engineer and, with Hugh Foy as his superintendent of construction, began to grade what they called the White Pass and Yukon Railway. Beginning where the bone-washing Skagway tells her troubles to the tide-waters at the elbow of that beautiful arm of the Pacific Ocean called Lynn Canal, they graded out through the scattered settlement where a city stands to-day, cut through a dense forest of spruce, and began to climb the hill.

When the news of ground-breaking had gone out to Seattle and Chicago, and thence to London, conservative capitalists, who had suspected Close Brothers and Company and all their associates in this wild scheme of temporary insanity, concluded that the sore affliction had come to stay. But the dauntless builders on the busy field where the grading camp was in action kept grubbing and grading, climbing and staking, blasting and building, undiscouraged and undismayed. Under the eaves of a dripping glacier, Hawkins, Hislop, and Heney crept; and, as they measured off the miles and fixed the grade by blue chalk-marks where stakes could not be driven, Foy followed with his army of blasters and builders. When the pathfinders came to a deep side cañon, they tumbled down, clambered up on the opposite side, found their bearings, and began again. At one place the main wall was so steep that the engineer was compelled to climb to the top, let a man down by a rope, so that he could mark the face of the cliff for the blasters, and then haul him up again.

It was springtime when they began, and through the long days of that short summer the engineers explored and mapped and located; and ever, close behind them, they could hear the steady roar of Foy's fireworks as the skilled blasters burst big boulders or shattered the shoulders of great crags that blocked the trail of the iron horse. Ever and anon, when the climbers and builders peered down into the ragged cañon, they saw a long line of pack-animals, bipeds and quadrupeds,--some hoofed and some horned, some bleeding, some blind,--stumbling and staggering, fainting and falling, the fittest fighting for the trail and gaining the summit, whence the clear, green waters of the mighty Yukon would carry them down to Dawson,--the Mecca of all these gold-mad men. As often as the road-makers glanced at the pack-trains, they saw hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of traffic going past or waiting transportation at Skagway, and each strained every nerve to complete the work while the sun shone.

By midsummer they began to appreciate the fact that this was to be a hard job. When the flowers faded on the southern slopes, they were not more than half-way up the hill. Each day the sun swung lower across the canals, all the to-morrows were shorter than the yesterdays, and there was not a man among them with a shade of sentiment, or a sense of the beautiful, but sighed when the flowers died. Yes, they had learned to love this maiden, Summer, that had tripped up from the south, smiled on them, sung for a season, sighed, smiled once more, and then danced down the Lynn again.

"I'll come back," she seemed to say, peeping over the shoulder of a glacier that stood at the stage entrance; "I'll come back, but ere I come again there'll be strange scenes and sounds on this rude stage so new to you. First, you will have a short season of melodrama by a melancholy chap called Autumn, gloriously garbed in green and gold, with splashes and dashes of lavender and lace, but sad, sweetly sad, and sighing always, for life is such a little while."

With a sadder smile, she kissed her rosy fingers and was gone,--gone with her gorgeous garments, her ferns and flowers, her low, soft sighs and sunny skies, and there was not a man that was a man but missed her when she was gone.

The autumn scene, though sombre and sad, was far from depressing, but they all felt the change. John Hislop seemed to feel it more than all the rest; for besides being deeply religious, he was deeply in love. His nearest and dearest friend, Heney--happy, hilarious Heney--knew, and he swore softly whenever a steamer landed without a message from Minneapolis,--the long-looked-for letter that would make Hislop better or worse. It came at length, and Hislop was happy. With his horse, his dog, and a sandwich,--but never a gun,--he would make long excursions down toward Lake Linderman, to Bennett, or over Atlin way. When the country became too rough for the horse, he would be left picketed near a stream with a faithful dog to look after him while the pathfinder climbed up among the eagles.

In the meantime Foy kept pounding away. Occasionally a soiled pedestrian would slide down the slope, tell a wild tale of rich strikes, and a hundred men would quit work and head for the highlands. Foy would storm and swear and coax by turns, but to no purpose; for they were like so many steers, and as easily stampeded. When the Atlin boom struck the camp, Foy lost five hundred men in as many minutes. Scores of graders dropped their tools and started off on a trot. The prospector who had told the fable had thrown his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the general direction. Nobody had thought to ask how far. Many forgot to let go; and Heney's picks and shovels, worth over a dollar apiece, went away with the stampeders. As the wild mob swept on, the tethered blasters cut the cables that guyed them to the hills, and each loped away with a piece of rope around one ankle.

Panting, they passed over the range, these gold-crazed Coxeys, without a bun or a blanket, a crust or a crumb, many without a cent or even a sweat-mark where a cent had slept in their soiled overalls.

When Foy had exhausted the English, Irish, and Alaskan languages in wishing the men luck in various degrees, he rounded up the remnant of his army and began again. In a day or two the stampeders began to limp back hungry and weary, and every one who brought a pick or a shovel was re-employed. But hundreds kept on toward Lake Bennett, and thence by water up Windy Arm to the Atlin country, and many of them have not yet returned to claim their time-checks.

The autumn waned. The happy wives of young engineers, who had been tented along the line during the summer, watched the wildflowers fade with a feeling of loneliness and deep longing for their stout-hearted, strong-limbed husbands, who were away up in the cloud-veiled hills; and they longed, too, for other loved ones in the lowlands of their childhood. Foy's blasters and builders buttoned their coats and buckled down to keep warm. Below, they could hear loud peals of profanity as the trailers, packers, and pilgrims pounded their dumb slaves over the trail. Above, the wind cried and moaned among the crags, constantly reminding them that winter was near at hand. The nights were longer than the days. The working day was cut from ten to eight hours, but the pay of the men had been raised from thirty to thirty-five cents an hour.

One day a black cloud curtained the cañon, and the workmen looked up from their picks and drills to find that it was November and night. The whole theatre, stage and all, had grown suddenly dark; but they knew, by the strange, weird noise in the wings, that the great tragedy of winter was on. Hislop's horse and dog went down the trail. Hawkins and Hislop and Heney walked up and down among the men, as commanding officers show themselves on the eve of battle. Foy chaffed the laborers and gave them more rope; but no amount of levity could prevail against the universal feeling of dread that seemed to settle upon the whole army. This weird Alaska, so wild and grand, so cool and sweet and sunny in summer, so strangely sad in autumn,--this many-mooded, little known Alaska that seemed doomed ever to be misunderstood, either over-lauded or lied about,--what would she do to them? How cruel, how cold, how weird, how wickedly wild her winters must be! Most men are brave, and an army of brave men will breast great peril when God's lamp lights the field; but the stoutest heart dreads the darkness. These men were sore afraid, all of them; and yet no one was willing to be the first to fall out, so they stood their ground. They worked with a will born of desperation.

The wind moaned hoarsely. The temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees below zero, but the men, in sheltered places, kept pounding. Sometimes they would work all day cleaning the snow from the grade made the day before, and the next day it would probably be drifted full again. At times the task seemed hopeless; but Heney had promised to build to the summit of White Pass without a stop, and Foy had given Heney his hand across a table at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Skagway.

At times the wind blew so frightfully that the men had to hold hands; but they kept pegging away between blasts, and in a little while were ready to begin bridging the gulches and deep side-cañons. One day--or one night, rather, for there were no days then--a camp cook, crazed by the cold and the endless night, wandered off to die. Hislop and Heney found him, but he refused to be comforted. He wanted to quit, but Heney said he could not be spared. He begged to be left alone to sleep in the warm, soft snow, but Heney brought him back to consciousness and to camp.

A premature blast blew a man into eternity. The wind moaned still more drearily. The snow drifted deeper and deeper, and one day they found that, for days and days, they had been blasting ice and snow when they thought they were drilling the rock. Heney and Foy faced each other in the dim light of a tent lamp that night. "Must we give up?" asked the contractor.

"No," said Foy, slowly, speaking in a whisper; "we'll build on snow, for it's hard and safe; and in the spring we'll ease it down and make a road-bed."

They did so. They built and bedded the cross-ties on the snow, ballasted with snow, and ran over that track until spring without an accident.

They were making mileage slowly, but the awful strain was telling on the men and on the bank account. The president of the company was almost constantly travelling between Washington and Ottawa, pausing now and again to reach over to London for another bag of gold, for they were melting it up there in the arctic night--literally burning it up, were these dynamiters of Foy's.

To conceive this great project, to put it into shape, present it in London, secure the funds and the necessary concessions from two governments, survey and build, and have a locomotive running in Alaska a year from the first whoop of the happy Klondiker, had been a mighty achievement; but it was what Heney would call "dead easy" compared with the work that confronted the President at this time. On July 20, 1897, the first pick was driven into the ground at White Pass; just a year later the pioneer locomotive was run over the road. More than once had the financial backers allowed their faith in the enterprise and in the future of the country beyond to slip away; but the President of the company had always succeeded in building it up again, for they had never lost faith in him, or in his ability to see things that were to most men invisible. In summer, when the weekly reports showed a mile or more or less of track laid, it was not so hard; but when days were spent in placing a single bent in a bridge, and weeks were consumed on a switch back in a pinched-out cañon, it was hard to persuade sane men that business sense demanded that they pile on more fuel. But they did it; and, as the work went on, it became apparent to those interested in such undertakings that all the heroes of the White Pass were not in the hills.

In addition to the elements, ever at war with the builders, they had other worries that winter. Hawkins had a fire that burned all the company's offices and all his maps and notes and records of surveys. Foy had a strike, incited largely by jealous packers and freighters; and there was hand-to-hand fighting between the strikers and their abettors and the real builders, who sympathized with the company.

Brydone-Jack, a fine young fellow, who had been sent out as consulting engineer to look after the interests of the shareholders, clapped his hands to his forehead and fell, face down, in the snow. His comrades carried him to his tent. He had been silent, had suffered, perhaps for a day or two, but had said nothing. The next night he passed away. His wife was waiting at Vancouver until he could finish his work in Alaska and go home to her.

With sad and heavy hearts Hawkins and Hislop and Heney climbed back to where Foy and his men were keeping up the fight. Like so many big lightning-bugs they seemed, with their dim white lamps rattling around in the storm. It was nearly all night then. God and his sunlight seemed to have forsaken Alaska. Once every twenty-four hours a little ball of fire, red, round, and remote, swung across the cañon, dimly lighted their lunch-tables, and then disappeared behind the great glacier that guards the gateway to the Klondike.

As the road neared the summit, Heney observed that Foy was growing nervous, and that he coughed a great deal. He watched the old fellow, and found that he was not eating well, and that he slept very little. Heney asked Foy to rest, but the latter shook his head. Hawkins and Hislop and Heney talked the matter over in Hislop's tent, called Foy in, and demanded that he go down and out. Foy was coughing constantly, but he choked it back long enough to tell the three men what he thought of them. He had worked hard and faithfully to complete the job, and now that only one level mile remained to be railed, would they send the old man down the hill? "I will not budge," said Foy, facing his friends; "an' when you gentlemen ar-re silibratin' th' vict'ry at the top o' the hill ahn Chuesday nixt, Hugh Foy'll be wood ye. Do you moind that, now?"

Foy steadied himself by a tent-pole and coughed violently. His eyes were glassy, and his face flushed with the purplish flush that fever gives.

"Enough of this!" said the chief engineer, trying to look severe. "Take this message, sign it, and send it at once."

Foy caught the bit of white clip and read:--

"CAPTAIN O'BRIEN,

SKAGWAY.

"Save a berth for me on the 'Rosalie.'"

They thought, as they watched him, that the old road-maker was about to crush the paper in his rough right hand; but suddenly his face brightened, he reached for a pencil, saying, "I'll do it," and when he had added "next trip" to the message, he signed it, folded it, and took it over to the operator.

So it happened that, when the last spike was driven at the summit, on February 20, 1899, the old foreman, who had driven the first, drove the last, and it was _his_ last spike as well. Doctor Whiting guessed it was pneumonia.

When the road had been completed to Lake Bennett, the owners came over to see it; and when they saw what had been done, despite the prediction that Dawson was dead and that the Cape Nome boom would equal that of the Klondike, they authorized the construction of another hundred miles of road which would connect with the Yukon below the dreaded White Horse Rapids. Jack and Foy and Hislop are gone; and when John Hislop passed away, the West lost one of the most modest and unpretentious, yet one of the best and bravest, one of the purest minded men that ever saw the sun go down behind a snowy range.

NUMBER THREE

One winter night, as the west-bound express was pulling out of Omaha, a drunken man climbed aboard. The young Superintendent, who stood on the rear platform, caught the man by the collar and hauled him up the steps.

The train, from the tank to the tail-lights, was crammed full of passenger-people going home or away to spend Christmas. Over in front the express and baggage cars were piled full of baggage, bundles, boxes, trinkets, and toys, each intended to make some heart happier on the morrow, for it was Christmas Eve. It was to see that these passengers and their precious freight, already a day late, got through that the Superintendent was leaving his own fireside to go over the road.

The snow came swirling across the plain, cold and wet, pasting the window and blurring the headlight on the black locomotive that was climbing laboriously over the kinks and curves of a new track. Here and there, in sheltered wimples, bands of buffalo were bunched to shield them from the storm. Now and then an antelope left the rail or a lone coyote crouched in the shadow of a telegraph-pole as the dim headlight swept the right of way. At each stop the Superintendent would jump down, look about, and swing onto the rear car as the train pulled out again. At one time he found that his seat had been taken, also his overcoat, which had been left hanging over the back. The thief was discovered on the blind baggage and turned over to the "city marshal" at the next stop.

Upon entering the train again, the Superintendent went forward to find a seat in the express car. It was near midnight now. They were coming into a settlement and passing through prosperous new towns that were building up near the end of the division. Near the door the messenger had set a little green Christmas tree, and grouped about it were a red sled, a doll-carriage, some toys, and a few parcels. If the blond doll in the little toy carriage toppled over, the messenger would set it up again; and when passing freight out he was careful not to knock a twig from the tree. So intent was he upon the task of taking care of this particular shipment that he had forgotten the Superintendent, and started and almost stared at him when he shouted the observation that the messenger was a little late with his tree.

"'Tain't mine," he said sadly, shaking his head. "B'longs to the fellow 't swiped your coat."

"No!" exclaimed the Superintendent, as he went over to look at the toys.

"If he'd only asked me," said the messenger, more to himself than to the Superintendent, "he could 'a' had mine and welcome."

"Do you know the man?"

"Oh, yes--he lives next door to me, and I'll have to face his wife and lie to her, and then face my own; but I can't lie to her. I'll tell her the truth and get roasted for letting Downs get away. I'll go to sleep by the sound of her sobs and wake to find her crying in her coffee--that's the kind of a Christmas I'll have. When he's drunk he's disgusting, of course; but when he's sober he's sorry. And Charley Downs is honest."

"Honest!" shouted the Superintendent.

"Yes, I know he took your coat, but that wasn't Charley Downs; it was the tarantula-juice he'd been imbibing in Omaha. Left alone he's as honest as I am; and here's a run that would trip up a missionary. For instance, leaving Loneville the other night, a man came running alongside the car and threw in a bundle of bills that looked like a bale of hay. Not a scrap of paper or pencil-mark, just a wad o' winnings with a wang around the middle. 'A Christmas gift for my wife,' he yelled. 'How much?' I shouted. 'Oh, I dunno--whole lot, but it's tied good'; and then a cloud of steam from the cylinder-cocks came between us, and I haven't seen him since.

"For the past six months Downs has tried hard to be decent, and has succeeded some; and this was to be the supreme test. For six months his wife has been saving up to send him to Omaha to buy things for Christmas. If he could do that, she argued, and come back sober, he'd be stronger to begin the New Year. Of course they looked to me to keep him on the rail, and I did. I shadowed him from shop to shop until he bought all the toys and some little trinkets for his wife. Always I found he had paid and ordered the things to be sent to the express office marked to me.

"Well, finally I followed him to a clothing store, where, according to a promise made to his wife, he bought an overcoat, the first he had felt on his back for years. This he put on, of course, for it is cold in Omaha to-day; and I left him and slipped away to grab a few hours' sleep.

"When I woke I went out to look for him, but could not find him, though I tried hard, and came to my car without supper. I found his coat, however, hung up in a saloon, and redeemed it, hoping still to find Charley before train time. I watched for him until we were signalled out, and then went back and looked through the train, but failed to find him.

"Of course I am sorry for Charley," the messenger went on after a pause, "but more so for the poor little woman. She's worked and worked, and saved and saved, and hoped and dreamed, until she actually believed he'd been cured and that the sun would shine in her life again. Why, the neighbors have been talking across the back fence about how well Mrs. Downs was looking. My wife declared she heard her laugh the other day clear over to our house. Half the town knew about her dream. The women folks have been carrying work to her and then going over and helping her do it as a sort of surprise party. And now it's all off. To-morrow will be Christmas; and he'll be in jail, his wife in despair, and I in disgrace. Charley Downs a thief--in jail! It'll just break her heart!"

The whistle proclaimed a stop, and the Superintendent swung out with a lump in his throat. This was an important station, and the last one before Loneville. Without looking to the right or left, the Superintendent walked straight to the telegraph office and sent the following message to the agent at the place where Downs had been ditched:--

"Turn that fellow loose and send him to Loneville on three--all
a joke.

"W.C.V., Superintendent."

In a little while the train was rattling over the road again; and when the engine screamed for Loneville, the Superintendent stood up and looked at the messenger.

"What'll I tell her?" the latter asked.

"Well, he got left at Cactus sure enough, didn't he? If that doesn't satisfy her, tell her that he may get over on No. 3."

When the messenger had turned his freight over to the driver of the Fargo wagon, he gathered up the Christmas tree and the toys and trudged homeward, looking like Santa Claus, so completely hidden was he by the tree and the trinkets. As he neared the Downs' home, the door swung open, the lamplight shone out upon him, and he saw two women smiling from the open door. It took but one glance at the messenger's face to show them that something was wrong, and the smiles faded. Mrs. Downs received the shock without a murmur, leaning on her friend and leaving the marks of her fingers on her friend's arm.

The messenger put the toys down suddenly, silently; and feeling that the unhappy woman would be better alone, the neighbors departed, leaving her seated by the window, peering into the night, the lamp turned very low.

The little clock on the shelf above the stove ticked off the seconds, measured the minutes, and marked the melancholy hours. The storm ceased, the stars came out and showed the quiet town asleep beneath its robe of white. The clock was now striking four, and she had scarcely stirred. She was thinking of the watchers of Bethlehem, when suddenly a great light shone on the eastern horizon. At last the freight was coming. She had scarcely noticed the messenger's suggestion that Charley might come in on three. Now she waited, with just the faintest ray of hope; and after a long while the deep voice of the locomotive came to her, the long black train crept past and stopped. Now her heart beat wildly. Somebody was coming up the road. A moment later she recognized her erring husband, dressed exactly as he had been when he left home, his short coat buttoned close up under his chin. When she saw him approaching slowly but steadily, she knew he was sober and doubtless cold. She was about to fling the door open to admit him when he stopped and stood still. She watched him. He seemed to be wringing his hands. An awful thought chilled her,--the thought that the cold and exposure had unbalanced his mind. Suddenly he knelt in the snow and turned his sad face up to the quiet sky. He was praying, and with a sudden impulse she fell upon her knees and they prayed together with only the window-glass between them.

When the prodigal got to his feet, the door stood open and his wife was waiting to receive him. At sight of her, dressed as she had been when he left her, a sudden flame of guilt and shame burned through him; but it served only to clear his brain and strengthen his will-power, which all his life had been so weak, and lately made weaker for want of exercise. He walked almost hurriedly to the chair she set for him near the stove, and sank into it with the weary air of one who has been long in bed. She felt of his hands and they were not cold. She touched his face and found it warm. She pushed the dark hair from his pale forehead and kissed it. She knelt and prayed again, her head upon his knee. He bowed above her while she prayed, and stroked her hair. She felt his tears falling upon her head. She stood up, and when he lifted his face to hers, looked into his wide weeping eyes,--aye, into his very soul. She liked to see the tears and the look of agony on his face, for she knew by these signs how he suffered, and she knew why.

When he had grown calm she brought a cup of coffee to him. He drank it, and then she led him to the little dining-room, where a midnight supper had been set for four, but, because of his absence, had not been touched. He saw the tree and the toys that the messenger had left, and spoke for the first time. "Oh, wife dear, have they all come? Are they all here? The toys and all?" and then, seeing the overcoat that the messenger had left on a chair near by, and which his wife had not yet seen, he cried excitedly, "Take that away--it isn't mine!"

"Why, yes, dear," said his wife, "it must be yours."

"No, no," he said; "I bought a coat like that, but I sold it. I drank a lot and only climbed on the train as it was pulling out of Omaha. In the warm car I fell asleep and dreamed the sweetest dream I ever knew. I had come home sober with all the things, you had kissed me, we had a great dinner here, and there stood the Christmas tree, the children were here, the messenger and his wife, and their children. We were all so happy! I saw the shadow fade from your face, saw you smile and heard you laugh; saw the old love-light in your eyes and the rose coming into your cheek. And then--'Oh, bitterness of things too sweet!'--I woke to find my own old trembling self again. It was all a dream. Looking across the aisle, I saw that coat on the back of an empty seat. I knew it was not mine, for I had sold mine for two miserable dollars. I knew, too, that the man who gave them to me got them back again before they were warm in my pocket. This thought embittered me, and, picking up the coat, I walked out and stood on the platform of the baggage car. At the next stop they took me off and turned me over to the city marshal,--for the coat belonged to the Superintendent.

"It is like mine, except that it is real, and mine, of course, was only a good imitation. Take it away, wife--do take it away--it haunts me!"

Pitying him, the wife put the coat out of his sight; and immediately he grew calm, drank freely of the strong coffee, but he could not eat. Presently he went over and began to arrange the little Christmas tree in the box his wife had prepared for it during his absence. She began opening the parcels, and when she could trust herself, began to talk about the surprise they would have for the children, and now and again to express her appreciation of some dainty trifle he had selected for her. She watched him closely, noting that his hand was unsteady, and that he was inclined to stagger after stooping for a little while. Finally, when the tree had been trimmed, and the sled for the boy and the doll-carriage for the girl were placed beneath it, she got him to lie down. When she had made him comfortable she kissed him again, knelt by his bed and prayed, or rather offered thanks, and he was asleep.

Two hours later the subdued shouts of her babies, the exclamations of glad surprise that came in stage whispers from the dining-room, woke her, and she rose from the little couch where she had fallen asleep, already dressed to begin the day.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon when she called the prodigal. When he had bathed his feverish face and put on the fresh clothes she had brought in for him and come into the dining-room, he saw his rosy dreams of the previous night fulfilled. The messenger and his wife shook hands with him and wished him a Merry Christmas. His children, all the children, came and kissed him. His wife was smiling, and the warm blood leaping from her happy heart actually put color in her cheeks.

As Downs took the chair at the head of the table he bowed his head, the rest did likewise, and he gave thanks, fervently and without embarrassment.

THE STUFF THAT STANDS

It was very late in the fifties, and Lincoln and Douglas were engaged in animated discussion of the burning questions of the time, when Melvin Jewett journeyed to Bloomington, Illinois, to learn telegraphy.

It was then a new, weird business, and his father advised him not to fool with it. His college chum said to him, as they chatted together for the last time before leaving school, that it would be grewsomely lonely to sit in a dimly lighted flag-station and have that inanimate machine tick off its talk to him in the sable hush of night; but Jewett was ambitious. Being earnest, brave, and industrious, he learned rapidly, and in a few months found himself in charge of a little wooden way-station as agent, operator, yard-master, and everything else. It was lonely, but there was no night work. When the shadows came and hung on the bare walls of his office the spook pictures that had been painted by his school chum, the young operator went over to the little tavern for the night.

True, Springdale at that time was not much of a town; but the telegraph boy had the satisfaction of feeling that he was, by common consent, the biggest man in the place.

Out in a hayfield, he could see from his window a farmer gazing up at the humming wire, and the farmer's boy holding his ear to the pole, trying to understand. All this business that so blinded and bewildered with its mystery, not only the farmer, but the village folks as well, was to him as simple as sunshine.

In a little while he had learned to read a newspaper with one eye and keep the other on the narrow window that looked out along the line; to mark with one ear the "down brakes" signal of the north-bound freight, clear in the siding, and with the other to catch the whistle of the oncoming "cannon ball," faint and far away.

When Jewett had been at Springdale some six or eight months, another young man dropped from the local one morning, and said, "_Wie gehts_," and handed him a letter. The letter was from the Superintendent, calling him back to Bloomington to despatch trains. Being the youngest of the despatchers, he had to take the "death trick." The day man used to work from eight o'clock in the morning until four o'clock in the afternoon, the "split trick" man from four until midnight, and the "death trick" man from midnight until morning.

We called it the "death trick" because, in the early days of railroading, we had a lot of wrecks about four o'clock in the morning. That was before double tracks and safety inventions had made travelling by rail safer than sleeping at home, and before trainmen off duty had learned to look not on liquor that was red. Jewett, however, was not long on the night shift. He was a good despatcher,--a bit risky at times, the chief thought, but that was only when he knew his man. He was a rusher and ran trains close, but he was ever watchful and wide awake.

In two years' time he had become chief despatcher. During these years the country, so quiet when he first went to Bloomington, had been torn by the tumult of civil strife.

With war news passing under his eye every day, trains going south with soldiers, and cars coming north with the wounded, it is not remarkable that the fever should get into the young despatcher's blood. He read of the great, sad Lincoln, whom he had seen and heard and known, calling for volunteers, and his blood rushed red and hot through his veins. He talked to the trainmen who came in to register, to enginemen waiting for orders, to yardmen in the yards, and to shopmen after hours; and many of them, catching the contagion, urged him to organize a company, and he did. He continued to work days and to drill his men in the twilight. He would have been up and drilling at dawn if he could have gotten them together. He inspired them with his quiet enthusiasm, held them by personal magnetism, and by unselfish patriotism kindled in the breast of each of his fifty followers a desire to do something for his country. Gradually the railroad, so dear to him, slipped back to second place in the affairs of the earth. His country was first. To be sure, there was no shirking of responsibility at the office, but the business of the company was never allowed to overshadow the cause in which he had silently but heartily enlisted. "Abe" Lincoln was, to his way of reasoning, a bigger man than the President of the Chicago and Alton Railroad--which was something to concede. The country must be cared for first, he argued; for what good would a road be with no country to run through?

All day he would work at the despatcher's office, flagging fast freights and "laying out" local passenger trains, to the end that the soldiers might be hurried south. He would pocket the "cannon ball" and order the "thunderbolt" held at Alton for the soldiers' special. "Take siding at Sundance for troop train, south-bound," he would flash out, and glory in his power to help the government.

All day he would work and scheme for the company (and the Union), and at night, when the silver moonlight lay on the lot back of the machine shops, he would drill and drill as long as he could hold the men together. They were all stout and fearless young fellows, trained and accustomed to danger by the hazard of their daily toil. They knew something of discipline, were used to obeying orders, and to reading and remembering regulations made for their guidance; and Jewett reasoned that they would become, in time, a crack company, and a credit to the state.

By the time he had his company properly drilled, young Jewett was so perfectly saturated with the subject of war that he was almost unfit for duty as a despatcher. Only his anxiety about south-bound troop trains held his mind to the matter and his hand to the wheel. At night, after a long evening in the drill field, he would dream of great battles, and hear in his dreams the ceaseless tramp, tramp of soldiers marching down from the north to re-enforce the fellows in the fight.

Finally, when he felt that they were fit, he called his company together for the election of officers. Jewett was the unanimous choice for captain, other officers were chosen, and the captain at once applied for a commission.

The Jewetts were an influential family, and no one doubted the result of the young despatcher's request. He waited anxiously for some time, wrote a second letter, and waited again. "Any news from Springfield?" the conductor would ask, leaving the register, and the chief despatcher would shake his head.

One morning, on entering his office, Jewett found a letter on his desk. It was from the Superintendent, and it stated bluntly that the resignation of the chief despatcher would be accepted, and named his successor.

Jewett read it over a second time, then turned and carried it into the office of his chief.

"Why?" echoed the Superintendent; "you ought to know why. For months you have neglected your office, and have worked and schemed and conspired to get trainmen and enginemen to quit work and go to war. Every day women who are not ready to be widowed come here and cry on the carpet because their husbands are going away with 'Captain' Jewett's company. Only yesterday a schoolgirl came running after me, begging me not to let her little brother, the red-headed peanut on the local, go as drummer-boy in 'Captain' Jewett's company.

"And now, after demoralizing the service and almost breaking up a half a hundred homes, you ask, 'Why?' Is that all you have to say?"

"No," said the despatcher, lifting his head; "I have to say to you, sir, that I have never knowingly neglected my duty. I have not conspired. I have been misjudged and misunderstood; and in conclusion, I would say that my resignation shall be written at once."

Returning to his desk, Jewett found the long-looked-for letter from Springfield. How his heart beat as he broke the seal! How timely--just as things come out in a play. He would not interrupt traffic on the Alton, but with a commission in his pocket would go elsewhere and organize a new company. These things flashed through his mind as he unfolded the letter. His eye fell immediately on the signature at the end. It was not the name of the Governor, who had been a close friend of his father, but of the Lieutenant-Governor. It was a short letter, but plain; and it left no hope. His request had been denied.

This time he did not ask why. He knew why, and knew that the influence of a great railway company, with the best of the argument on its side, would outweigh the influence of a train despatcher and his friends.