Chapter II: Part 2

"Yes, I've got a girl there," replied the boy, as the rain tore at the cab window. "I've had a girl there a good while. She's gray-headed and sixty years old--that's my girl--and if she can write letters to me, I can get them out of the post-office without a guardian."

"There she comes," said Dad, as the headlight of the Pullman special shone faint ahead through the mist.

"I'm mighty glad of it," said Georgie, looking at his watch. "Give me 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.

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."

"I've been sending money to my boy back East," explained Dad, feebly. "I told you he's in school."

"I know, Dad."

"I haven't been able to send any since I've been by, but I'm going to send some when I get my relief. Not so much as I used to send. I want you to kind of explain why."

"What's his first name, Dad, and where does he live?"

"It's a lawyer that looks after him--a man that 'tends to my business back there."

"Well, what's his name?"

"Scaylor--Ephraim Scaylor."

"Scaylor?" echoed Georgie, in amazement.

"Yes. Why, do you know him?"

"Why, that's the man mother and I had so much trouble with. I wouldn't write to that man. He's a rascal, Dad."

"What did he ever do to you and your mother?"

"I'll tell you, Dad; though it's a matter I don't talk about much. My father had trouble back there fifteen or sixteen years ago. He was running an engine, and had a wreck; there were some passengers killed. The dispatcher managed to throw the blame on father, and they indicted him for man-slaughter. He pretty near went crazy, and all of a sudden he disappeared, and we never heard of him from that day to this. But this man Scaylor, mother stuck to it, knew something about where father was; only he always denied it."

Trembling like a leaf, Dad raised up on his elbow. "What's your mother's name, son? What's your name?"

Georgie looked confused. "I'll tell you, Dad; there's nothing to be ashamed of. I was foolish enough, I told you once, to go out on a strike with the engineers down there. I was only a kid, and we were all black-listed. So I used my middle name, McNeal; my full name is George McNeal Sinclair."

The old fireman made a painful effort to sit up, to speak, but he choked. His face contracted, and Georgie rose frightened. With a herculean effort the old man raised himself up and grasped Georgie's hands.

"Son," he gasped to the astonished boy, "don't you know me?"

"Of course I know you, Dad. What's the matter with you? Lie down."

"Boy, I'm your own father. My name is David Hamilton Sinclair. I had the trouble--Georgie." He choked up like a child, and Georgie McNeal went white and scared; then he grasped the gray-haired man in his arms.

When I dropped in an hour later they were talking hysterically. Dad was explaining how he had been sending money to Scaylor every month, and Georgie was contending that neither he nor his mother had ever seen a cent of it. But one great fact overshadowed all the villany that night: father and son were united and happy, and a message had already gone back to the old home from Georgie to his mother, telling her the good news.

"And that indictment was wiped out long ago against father," said Georgie to me; "but that rascal Scaylor kept writing him for money to fight it with and to pay for my schooling--and this was the kind of schooling I was getting all the time. Wouldn't that kill you?"

I couldn't sleep till I had hunted up Neighbor and told him about it; and next morning we wired transportation back for Mrs. Sinclair to come out on.

Less than a week afterwards a gentle little old woman stepped off the Flyer at Zanesville, and into the arms of Georgie Sinclair. A smart rig was in waiting, to which her son hurried her, and they were driven rapidly to the hospital. When they entered the old fireman's room together the nurse softly closed the door behind them.

But when they sent for Neighbor and me, I suppose we were the two biggest fools in the hospital, trying to look unconscious of all we saw in the faces of the group at Dad's bed.

He never got his old strength back, yet Neighbor fixed him out, for all that. The Sky-Scraper, once our pride, was so badly stove that we gave up hope of restoring her for a passenger run. So Neighbor built her over into a sort of a dub engine for short runs, stubs, and so on; and though Dad had vowed long ago, when unjustly condemned, that he would never more touch a throttle, we got him to take the Sky-Scraper and the Acton run.

And when Georgie, who takes the Flyer every other day, is off duty, he climbs into Dad's cab, shoves the old gentleman aside, and shoots around the yard in the rejuvenated Sky-Scraper at a hair-raising rate of speed.

After a while the old engine got so full of alkali that Georgie gave her a new name--Soda-Water Sal--and it hangs to her yet. We thought the best of her had gone in the Harvard wreck; but there came a time when Dad and Soda-Water Sal showed us we were very much mistaken.

Soda-Water Sal

When the great engine which we called the Sky-Scraper came out of the Zanesville shops, she was rebuilt from pilot to tender.

Our master-mechanic, Neighbor, had an idea, after her terrific collision, that she could not stand heavy main-line passenger runs, so he put her on the Acton cut-off. It was what railroad men call a jerk-water run, whatever that may be; a little jaunt of ten miles across the divide connecting the northern division with the Denver stem. It was just about like running a trolley, and the run was given to Dad Sinclair, for after that lift at Oxford his back was never strong enough to shovel coal, and he had to take an engine or quit railroading.

Thus it happened that after many years he took the throttle once more and ran over, twice a day, as he does yet, from Acton to Willow Creek.

His boy, Georgie Sinclair, the kid engineer, took the run on the Flyer opposite Foley, just as soon as he got well.

Georgie, who was never happy unless he had eight or ten Pullmans behind him, and the right of way over everything between Omaha and Denver, made great sport of his father's little smoking-car and day-coach behind the big engine.

Foley made sport of the remodelled engine. He used to stand by while the old engineer was oiling and ask him whether he thought she could catch a jack-rabbit. "I mean," Foley would say, "if the rabbit was feeling well."

Dad Sinclair took it all grimly and quietly; he had railroaded too long to care for anybody's chaff. But one day, after the Sky-Scraper had gotten her flues pretty well chalked up with alkali, Foley insisted that she must be renamed.

"I have the only genuine sky-scraper on the West End now myself," declared Foley. He did have a new class H engine, and she was awe-inspiring, in truth. "I don't propose," he continued, "to have her confused with your old tub any longer, Dad."

Dad, oiling his old tub affectionately, answered never a word.

"She's full of soda, isn't she, father?" asked Georgie, standing by.

"Reckon she is, son."

"Full of water, I suppose?"

"Try to keep her that way, son."

"Sal-soda, isn't it, Dad?"

"Now I can't say. As to that--I can't say."

"We'll call her Sal Soda, Georgie," suggested Foley.

"No," interposed Georgie; "stop a bit. I have it. Not Sal Soda, at all--make it Soda-Water Sal."

Then they laughed uproariously; and in the teeth of Dad Sinclair's protests--for he objected at once and vigorously--the queer name stuck to the engine, and sticks yet.

To have seen the great hulking machine you would never have suspected there could be another story left in her. Yet one there was; a story of the wind. As she stood, too, when old man Sinclair took her on the Acton run, she was the best illustration I have ever seen of the adage that one can never tell from the looks of a frog how far it will jump.

Have you ever felt the wind? Not, I think, unless you have lived on the seas or on the plains. People everywhere think the wind blows; but it really blows only on the ocean and on the prairies.

The summer that Dad took the Acton run, it blew for a month steadily. All of one August--hot, dry, merciless; the despair of the farmer and the terror of trainmen.

It was on an August evening, with the gale still sweeping up from the southwest, that Dad came lumbering into Acton with his little trolley train. He had barely pulled up at the platform to unload his passengers when the station-agent, Morris Reynolds, coatless and hatless, rushed up to the engine ahead of the hostler and sprang into the cab. Reynolds was one of the quietest fellows in the service. To see him without coat or hat didn't count for much in such weather; but to see him sallow with fright and almost speechless was enough to stir even old Dad Sinclair.

It was not Dad's habit to ask questions, but he looked at the man in questioning amazement. Reynolds choked and caught at his breath, as he seized the engineer's arm and pointed down the line.

"Dad," he gasped, "three cars of coal standing over there on the second spur blew loose a few minutes ago."

"Where are they?"

"Where are they? Blown through the switch and down the line, forty miles an hour."

The old man grasped the frightened man by the shoulder. "What do you mean? How long ago? When is 1 due? Talk quick, man! What's the matter with you?"

"Not five minutes ago. No. 1 is due here in less than thirty minutes; they'll go into her sure. Dad," cried Reynolds, all in a fright, "what'll I do? For Heaven's sake do something. I called up Riverton and tried to catch 1, but she'd passed. I was too late. There'll be a wreck, and I'm booked for the penitentiary. What can I do?"

All the while the station-agent, panic-stricken, rattled on Sinclair was looking at his watch--casting it up--charting it all under his thick, gray, grizzled wool, fast as thought could compass.

No. 1 headed for Acton, and her pace was a hustle every mile of the way; three cars of coal blowing down on her, how fast he dared not think; and through it all he was asking himself what day it was. Thursday? Up! Yes, Georgie, his boy, was on the Flyer No. 1. It was his day up. If they met on a curve--

"Uncouple her!" roared Dad Sinclair, in a giant tone.

"What are you going to do?"

"Burns," thundered Dad to his fireman, "give her steam, and quick, boy! Dump in grease, waste, oil, everything! Are you clear there?" he cried, opening the throttle as he looked back.

The old engine, pulling clear of her coaches, quivered as she gathered herself under the steam. She leaped ahead with a swish. The drivers churned in the sand, bit into it with gritting tires, and forged ahead with a suck and a hiss and a roar. Before Reynolds had fairly gathered his wits, Sinclair, leaving his train on the main track in front of the depot, was clattering over the switch after the runaways. The wind was a terror, and they had too good a start. But the way Soda-Water Sal took the gait when she once felt her feet under her made the wrinkled engineer at her throttle set his mouth with the grimness of a gamester. It meant the runaways--and catch them--or the ditch for Soda-Water Sal; and the throbbing old machine seemed to know it, for her nose hung to the steel like the snout of a pointer.

He was a man of a hundred even then--Burns; but nobody knew it, then. We hadn't thought much about Burns before. He was a tall, lank Irish boy, with an open face and a morning smile. Dad Sinclair took him on because nobody else would have him. Burns was so green that Foley said you couldn't set his name afire. He would, so Foley said, put out a hot box just by blinking at it.

But every man's turn comes once, and it had come for Burns. It was Dick Burns's chance now to show what manner of stuff was bred in his long Irish bones. It was his task to make the steam--if he could--faster than Dad Sinclair could burn it. What use to grip the throttle and scheme if Burns didn't furnish the power, put the life into her heels as she raced the wind--the merciless, restless gale sweeping over the prairie faster than horse could fly before it?

Working smoothly and swiftly into a dizzy whirl, the monstrous drivers took the steel in leaps and bounds. Dad Sinclair, leaning from the cab window, gloatingly watched their gathering speed, pulled the bar up notch after notch, and fed Burns's fire into the old engine's arteries fast and faster than she could throw it into her steel hoofs.

That was the night the West End knew that a greenhorn had cast his chrysalis and stood out a man. Knew that the honor-roll of our frontier division wanted one more name, and that it was big Dick Burns's. Sinclair hung silently desperate to the throttle, his eyes straining into the night ahead, and the face of the long Irish boy, streaked with smut and channelled with sweat, lit every minute with the glare of the furnace as he fed the white-hot blast that leaped and curled and foamed under the crown-sheet of Soda-Water Sal.

There he stooped and sweat and swung, as she slewed and lurched and jerked across the fish-plates. Carefully, nursingly, ceaselessly he pushed the steam-pointer higher, higher, higher on the dial--and that despite the tremendous draughts of Dad's throttle.

Never a glance to the right or the left, to the track or the engineer. From the coal to the fire, the fire to the water, the water to the gauge, the gauge to the stack, and back again to the coal--that was Burns. Neither eyes nor ears nor muscles for anything but steam.

Such a firing as the West End never saw till that night; such a firing as the old engine never felt in her choking flues till that night; such a firing as Dad Sinclair, king of all West and East End firemen, lifted his hat to--that was Burns's firing that night on Soda-Water Sal; the night she chased the Acton runaways down the line to save Georgie Sinclair and No. 1.

It was a frightful pace--how frightful no one ever knew; neither old man Sinclair nor Dick Burns ever cared. Only, the crew of a freight, side-tracked for the approaching Flyer, saw an engine flying light; knew the hunter and the quarry, for they had seen the runaways shoot by--saw then, a minute after, a star and a streak and a trail of rotten smoke fly down the wind, and she had come and passed and gone.

It was just east of that siding, so Burns and Sinclair always maintained--but it measured ten thousand feet east--that they caught them.

A shout from Dad brought the dripping fireman up standing, and looking ahead he saw in the blaze of their own headlight the string of coalers standing still ahead of them. So it seemed to him, their own speed was so great, and the runaways were almost equalling it. They were making forty miles an hour when they dashed past the paralyzed freight crew.

Without waiting for orders--what orders did such a man need?--without a word, Burns crawled out of his window with a pin, and ran forward on the foot-board, clinging the best he could, as the engine dipped and lurched, climbed down on the cow-catcher, and lifted the pilot-bar to couple. It was a crazy thing to attempt; he was much likelier to get under the pilot than to succeed; yet he tried it.

Then it was that the fine hand of Dad Sinclair came into play. To temper the speed enough, and just enough; to push her nose just enough, and far enough for Burns to make the draw-bar of the runaway--that was the nicety of the big seamed hands on the throttle and on the air; the very magic of touch which, on a slender bar of steel, could push a hundred tons of flying metal up, and hold it steady in a play of six inches on the teeth of the gale that tore down behind him.

Again and again Burns tried to couple and failed. Sinclair, straining anxiously ahead, caught sight of the headlight of No. 1 rounding O'Fallon's bluffs.

He cried to Burns, and, incredible though it seems, the fireman heard. Above all the infernal din, the tearing of the flanges and the roaring of the wind, Burns heard the cry; it nerved him to a supreme effort. He slipped the eye once more into the draw, and managed to drop his pin. Up went his hand in signal.

Choking the steam, Sinclair threw the brake-shoes flaming against the big drivers. The sand poured on the rails, and with Burns up on the coalers setting brakes, the three great runaways were brought to with a jerk that would have astounded the most reckless scapegraces in the world.

While the plucky fireman crept along the top of the freight-cars to keep from being blown bodily through the air, Sinclair, with every resource that brain and nerve and power could exert, was struggling to overcome the terrible headway of pursuer and pursued, driving now frightfully into the beaming head of No. 1.

With the Johnson bar over and the drivers dancing a gallop backward; with the sand striking fire, and the rails burning under it; with the old Sky-Scraper shivering again in a terrific struggle, and Burns twisting the heads off the brake-rods; with every trick of old Sinclair's cunning, and his boy duplicating every one of them in the cab of No. 1--still they came together. It was too fearful a momentum to overcome, when minutes mean miles and tons are reckoned by thousands.

They came together; but instead of an appalling wreck--destruction and death--it was only a bump. No. 1 had the speed when they met; and it was a car of coal dumped a bit sudden and a nose on Georgie's engine like a full-back's after a centre rush. The pilot doubled back into the ponies, and the headlight was scoured with nut, pea, and slack; but the stack was hardly bruised.

The minute they struck, Georgie Sinclair, making fast, and, leaping from his cab, ran forward in the dark, panting with rage and excitement. Burns, torch in hand, was himself just jumping down to get forward. His face wore its usual grin, even when Georgie assailed him with a torrent of abuse.

"What do you mean, you red-headed lubber?" he shouted, with much the lungs of his father. "What are you doing switching coal here on the main line?"

In fact, Georgie called the astonished fireman everything he could think of, until his father, who was blundering forward on his side of the engine, hearing the voice, turned, and ran around behind the tender to take a hand himself.

"Mean?" he roared above the blow of his safety. "Mean?" he bellowed in the teeth of the wind. "Mean? Why, you impudent, empty-headed, ungrateful rapscallion, what do you mean coming around here to abuse a man that's saved you and your train from the scrap?"

And big Dick Burns, standing by with his torch, burst into an Irish laugh, fairly doubled up before the nonplussed boy, and listened with great relish to the excited father and excited son. It was not hard to understand Georgie's amazement and anger at finding Soda-Water Sal behind three cars of coal half-way between stations on the main line and on his time--and that the fastest time on the division. But what amused Burns most was to see the imperturbable old Dad pitching into his boy with as much spirit as the young man himself showed.

It was because both men were scared out of their wits; scared over their narrow escape from a frightful wreck; from having each killed the other, maybe--the son the father, and the father the son.

For brave men do get scared; don't believe anything else. But between the fright of a coward and the fright of a brave man there is this difference: the coward's scare is apparent before the danger, that of the brave man after it has passed; and Burns laughed with a tremendous mirth, "at th' two o' thim a-jawin'," as he expressed it.

No man on the West End could turn on his pins quicker than Georgie Sinclair, though, if his hastiness misled him. When it all came clear he climbed into the old cab--the cab he himself had once gone against death in--and with stumbling words tried to thank the tall Irishman, who still laughed in the excitement of having won.

And when Neighbor next day, thoughtful and taciturn, heard it all, he very carefully looked Soda-Water Sal all over again.

"Dad," said he, when the boys got through telling it for the last time, "she's a better machine than I thought she was."

"There isn't a better pulling your coaches," maintained Dad Sinclair, stoutly.

"I'll put her on the main line, Dad, and give you the 168 for the cut-off. Hm?"

"The 168 will suit me, Neighbor; any old tub--eh, Foley?" said Dad, turning to the cheeky engineer, who had come up in time to hear most of the talk. The old fellow had not forgotten Foley's sneer at Soda-Water Sal when he rechristened her. But Foley, too, had changed his mind, and was ready to give in.

"That's quite right, Dad," he acknowledged. "You can get more out of any old tub on the division than the rest of us fellows can get out of a Baldwin consolidated. I mean it, too. It's the best thing I ever heard of. What are you going to do for Burns, Neighbor?" asked Foley, with his usual assurance.

"I was thinking I would give him Soda-Water Sal, and put him on the right side of the cab for a freight run. I reckon he earned it last night."

In a few minutes Foley started off to hunt up Burns.

"See here, Irish," said he, in his off-hand way, "next time you catch a string of runaways just remember to climb up the ladder and set your brakes before you couple; it will save a good deal of wear and tear on the pilot-bar--see? I hear you're going to get a run; don't fall out the window when you get over on the right."

And that's how Burns was made an engineer, and how Soda-Water Sal was rescued from the disgrace of running on the trolley.

The McWilliams Special

It belongs to the Stories That Never Were Told, this of the McWilliams Special. But it happened years ago, and for that matter McWilliams is dead. It wasn't grief that killed him, either; though at one time his grief came uncommonly near killing us.

It is an odd sort of a yarn, too; because one part of it never got to headquarters, and another part of it never got from headquarters.

How, for instance, the mysterious car was ever started from Chicago on such a delirious schedule, how many men in the service know that even yet?

How, for another instance, Sinclair and Francis took the ratty old car reeling into Denver with the glass shrivelled, the paint blistered, the hose burned, and a tire sprung on one of the Five-Nine's drivers--how many headquarters slaves know that?

Our end of the story never went in at all. Never went in because it was not deemed--well, essential to the getting up of the annual report. We could have raised their hair; they could have raised our salaries; but they didn't; we didn't.

In telling this story I would not be misunderstood; ours is not the only line between Chicago and Denver: there are others, I admit it. But there is only one line (all the same) that could have taken the McWilliams Special, as we did, out of Chicago at four in the evening and put it in Denver long before noon the next day.

A communication came from a great La Salle Street banker to the president of our road. Next, the second vice-president heard of it; but in this way:

"Why have you turned down Peter McWilliams's request for a special to Denver this afternoon?" asked the president.

"He wants too much," came back over the private wire. "We can't do it."

After satisfying himself on this point the president called up La Salle Street.

"Our folks say, Mr. McWilliams, we simply can't do it."

"You must do it."

"When will the car be ready?"

"At three o'clock."

"When must it be in Denver?"

"Ten o'clock to-morrow morning."

The president nearly jumped the wire.

"McWilliams, you're crazy. What on earth do you mean?"

The talk came back so low that the wires hardly caught it. There were occasional outbursts such as, "situation is extremely critical," "grave danger," "acute distress," "must help me out."

But none of this would ever have moved the president had not Peter McWilliams been a bigger man than most corporations; and a personal request from Peter, if he stuck for it, could hardly be refused; and for this he most decidedly stuck.

"I tell you it will turn us upside-down," stormed the president.

"Do you recollect," asked Peter McWilliams, "when your infernal old pot of a road was busted eight years ago--you were turned inside out then, weren't you? and hung up to dry, weren't you?"

The president did recollect; he could not decently help recollecting. And he recollected how, about that same time, Peter McWilliams had one week taken up for him a matter of two millions floating, with a personal check; and carried it eighteen months without security, when money could not be had in Wall Street on government bonds.

Do you--that is, have you heretofore supposed that a railroad belongs to the stockholders? Not so; it belongs to men like Mr. McWilliams, who own it when they need it. At other times they let the stockholders carry it--until they want it again.

"We'll do what we can, Peter," replied the president, desperately amiable. "Good-bye."

I am giving you only an inkling of how it started. Not a word as to how countless orders were issued, and countless schedules were cancelled. Not a paragraph about numberless trains abandoned _in toto_, and numberless others pulled and hauled and held and annulled. The McWilliams Special in a twinkle tore a great system into great splinters.