Chapter IV: Part 4

"Chicago. I sent her transportation two weeks ago. Reckon she thought she'd better stay home for Christmas. Back in God's country they have Christmas just about this time of year. Watch out to-night, Jim. I'm going home. It's a wind for your life."

Callahan was making a meeting-point for two freights when the door closed behind Bucks; he didn't even sing out "Good-night." And as for Merry Chri--well, that had no place on the West End anyhow.

"D-i, D-i, D-i, D-i," came clicking into the room. Callahan wasn't asleep. Once he did sleep over the key. When he told Bucks, he made sure of his time; only he thought Bucks ought to know.

Bucks shook his head pretty hard that time. "It's awful business, Jim. It's murder, you know. It's the penitentiary, if they should convict you. But it's worse than that. If anything happened because you went to sleep over the key, you'd have them on your mind all your life, don't you know--forever. Men--and--and children. That's what I always think about--the children. Maimed and scalded and burned. Jim, if it ever happens again, quit dispatching; get into commercial work; mistakes don't cost life there; don't try to handle trains. If it ever happens with you, you'll kill yourself."

That was all he said; it was enough. And no wonder Callahan loved him.

The wind tore frantically around the station; but everything else was so still. It was one o'clock now, and not a soul about but Callahan. D-i, D-i, J, clicked sharp and fast. "Twelve or fourteen cars passed here--just--now east--running a-a-a-" Callahan sprang up like a flash--listened. What? R-u-n-n-i-n-g a-w-a-y?

It was the Jackson operator calling; Callahan jumped to the key. "What's that?" he asked, quick as lightning could dash it.

"Twelve or fourteen cars coal passed here, fully forty miles an hour, headed east, driven by the wi--"

That was all J could send, for Ogalalla broke in. Ogalalla is the station just west of Jackson. And with Callahan's copper hair raising higher at every letter, this came from Ogalalla: "Heavy gust caught twelve coal cars on side track, sent them out on main line off down the grade."

They were already past Jackson, eight miles away, headed east, and running down hill. Callahan's eyes turned like hares to the train sheet. 59, going west, was due _that minute_ to leave Callendar. From Callendar to Griffin is a twenty-miles' run. There is a station between, but in those days no night operator. The runaway coal-train was then less than thirty miles west of Griffin, coming down a forty-mile grade like a cannon ball. If 59 could be stopped at Callendar, she could be laid by in five minutes, out of the way of the certain destruction ahead of her on the main line. Callahan seized the key, and began calling "Cn." He pounded until the call burned into his fingers. It was an age before Callendar answered; then Callahan's order flew:

"Hold 59. Answer quick."

And Callendar answered: "59 just pulling out of upper yard. Too late to stop her. What's the matter?"

Callahan struck the table with his clinched fist, looked wildly about him, then sprang from the chair, ran to the window, and threw up the sash. The moon shone a bit through the storm of sand, but there was not a soul in sight. There were lights in the round-house a hundred yards across the track. He pulled a revolver--every railroad man out there carried one those days--and, covering one of the round-house windows, began firing. It was a risk. There was one chance, maybe, to a thousand of his killing a night man. But there were a thousand chances to one that a whole train-load of men and women would be killed inside of thirty minutes if he couldn't get help. He chose a window in the machinists' section, where he knew no one usually went at night. He poured bullets into the unlucky casement as fast as powder could carry them. Reloading rapidly, he watched the round-house door; and, sure enough, almost at once, it was cautiously opened. Then he fired into the air--one, two, three, four, five, six--and he saw a man start for the station on the dead run. He knew, too, by the tremendous sweep of his legs that it was Ole Anderson, the night foreman, the man of all others he wanted.

"Ole," cried the dispatcher, waving his arms frantically as the giant Swede leaped across the track and looked up from the platform below, "go get Bucks. I've got a runaway train going against 59. For your life, Ole, run!"

The big fellow was into the wind with the word. Bucks boarded four blocks away. Callahan, slamming down the window, took the key, and began calling Rowe. Rowe is the first station east of Jackson; it was now the first point at which the runaway coal-train could be headed.

"R-o R-o," he rattled. The operator must have been sitting on the wire, for he answered at once. As fast as Callahan's fingers could talk, he told Rowe the story and gave him orders to get the night agent, who, he knew, must be down to sell tickets for 59, and pile all the ties they could gather across the track to derail the runaway train. Then he began thumping for Kolar, the next station east of Rowe, and the second ahead of the runaways. He pounded and he pounded, and when the man at Kolar answered, Callahan could have sworn he had been asleep--just from the way he talked. Does it seem strange? There are many strange things about a dispatcher's senses. "Send your night man to west switch house-track, and open for runaway train. Set brakes hard on your empties on siding, to spill runaways if possible. Do anything and everything to keep them from getting by you. Work quick."

Behind Kolar's O.K. came a frantic call from Rowe. "Runaways passed here like a streak. Knocked the ties into toothpicks. Couldn't head them."

Callahan didn't wait to hear any more. He only wiped the sweat from his face. It seemed forever before Kolar spoke again. Then it was only to say: "Runaways went by here before night man could get to switch and open it."

Would Bucks never come? And if he did come, what on earth could stop the runaway train now? They were heading into the worst grade on the West End. It averages one per cent. from Kolar to Griffin, and there we get down off the Cheyenne Hills with a long reverse curve, and drop into the canon of the Blackwood with a three per cent. grade. Callahan, almost beside himself, threw open a north window to look for Bucks. Two men were flying down Main Street towards the station. He knew them; it was Ole and Bucks.

But Bucks! Never before or since was seen on a street of McCloud such a figure as Bucks, in his trousers and slippers, with his night-shirt free as he sailed down the wind. In another instant he was bounding up the stairs. Callahan told him.

"What have you done?" he panted, throwing himself into the chair. Callahan told him. Bucks held his head in his hands while the boy talked. He turned to the sheet--asked quick for 59.

"She's out of Callendar. I tried hard to stop her. I didn't lose a second; she was gone."

Barely an instant Bucks studied the sheet. Routed out of a sound sleep after an eight-hour trick, and on such a night, by such a message--the marvel was he could think at all, much less set a trap which should save 59. In twenty minutes from the time Bucks took the key the two trains would be together--could he save the passenger? Callahan didn't believe it.

A sharp, quick call brought Griffin. We had one of the brightest lads on the whole division at Griffin. Callahan, listening, heard Griffin answer. Bucks rattled a question. How the heart hangs on the faint, uncertain tick of a sounder when human lives hang on it!

"Where are your section men?" asked Bucks.

"In bed at the section house."

"Who's with you?"

"Night agent. Sheriff with two cowboy prisoners waiting to take 59."

Before the last word came, Bucks was back at him:

_To Opr._:

Ask Sheriff release his prisoners to save passenger-train. Go
together to west switch house-track, open, and set it. Smash in
section tool-house, get tools. Go to point of house-track
curve, cut the rails, and point them to send runaway train from
Ogalalla over the bluff into the river.

BUCKS.

The words flew off his fingers like sparks, and another message crowded the wire behind it:

_To Agt._:

Go to east switch, open, and set for passing-track. Flag 59,
and run her on siding. If can't get 59 into the clear, ditch
the runaways.

BUCKS.

They look old now. The ink is faded, and the paper is smoked with the fire of fifteen winters and bleached with the sun of fifteen summers. But to this day they hang there in their walnut frames, the original orders, just as Bucks scratched them off. They hang there in the dispatchers' offices in the new depot. But in their present swell surroundings Bucks wouldn't know them. It was Harvey Reynolds who took them off the other end of the wire--a boy in a thousand for that night and that minute. The instant the words flashed into the room he instructed the agent, grabbed an axe, and dashed out into the waiting-room, where the sheriff, Ed Banks, sat with his prisoners, the cowboys.

"Ed," cried Harvey, "there's a runaway train from Ogalalla coming down the line in the wind. If we can't trap it here, it'll knock 59 into kindling-wood. Turn the boys loose, Ed, and save the passenger-train. Boys, show the man and square yourselves right now. I don't know what you're here for; but I believe it's to save 59. Will you help?"

The three men sprang to their feet; Ed

Banks slipped the handcuffs off in a trice. "Never mind the rest of it. Save the passenger-train first," he roared. Everybody from Ogalalla to Omaha knew Ed Banks.

"Which way? How?" cried the cowboys, in a lather of excitement.

Harvey Reynolds, beckoning as he ran, rushed out the door and up the track, his posse at his heels, stumbling into the gale like lunatics.

"Smash in the tool-house door," panted Harvey as they neared it.

Ed Banks seized the axe from his hands and took command as naturally as Dewey.

"Pick up that tie and ram her," he cried, pointing to the door. "All together--now."

Harvey and the cowboys splintered the panel in a twinkling, and Banks, with a few clean strokes, cut an opening. The cowboys, jumping together, ran in and began fishing for tools in the dark. One got hold of a wrench; the other, a pick. Harvey caught up a clawbar, and Banks grabbed a spike-maul. In a bunch they ran for the point of the curve on the house-track. It lies there close to the verge of a limestone bluff that looms up fifty feet above the river.

But it is one thing to order a contact opened, and another and very different thing to open it, at two in the morning on December twenty-fifth, by men who know no more about track-cutting than about logarithms. Side by side and shoulder to shoulder the man of the law and the men out of the law, the rough-riders and the railroad boy, pried and wrenched and clawed and struggled with the steel. While Harvey and Banks clawed at the spikes the cowboys wrestled with the nuts on the bolts of the fish-plates. It was a baffle. The nuts wouldn't twist, the spikes stuck like piles, sweat covered the assailants, Harvey went into a frenzy. "Boys, we must work faster," he cried, tugging at the frosty spikes; but flesh and blood could do no more.

"There they come--there's the runaway train--do you hear it? I'm going to open the switch, anyhow," Harvey shouted, starting up the track. "Save yourselves."

Heedless of the warning, Banks struggled with the plate-bolts in a silent fury. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. "Give me the maul!" he cried.

Raising the heavy tool like a tack-hammer he landed heavily on the bolt nuts; once, and again; and they flew in a stream like bullets over the bluff. The taller cowboy, bending close on his knees, raised a yell. The plates had given. Springing to the other rail, Banks stripped the bolts even after the mad train had shot into the gorge above them. They drove the pick under the loosened steel, and with a pry that bent the clawbar and a yell that reached Harvey, trembling at the switch, they tore away the stubborn contact, and pointed the rails over the precipice.

The shriek of a locomotive whistle cut the wind. Looking east, Harvey had been watching 59's headlight. She was pulling in on the siding. He still held the switch open to send the runaways into the trap Bucks had set, if the passenger-train failed to get into the clear; but there was a minute yet--a bare sixty seconds--and Harvey had no idea of dumping ten thousand dollars' worth of equipment into the river unless he had to.

Suddenly, up went the safety signals from the east end. The 101 was coughing noisily up the passing-track--the line was clear. Banks and the cowboys, waiting breathless, saw Harvey with a determined lurch close the main-line contact.

In the next breath the coalers, with the sweep of the gale in their frightful velocity, smashed over the switch and on. A rattling whirl of ballast and a dizzy clatter of noise, and before the frightened crew of 59 could see what was against them, the runaway train was passed--gone!

"I wasn't going to stop here to-night," muttered the engineer, as he stood with the conductor over Harvey's shoulder at the operator's desk a minute later and wiped the chill from his forehead with a piece of waste. "We'd have met them in the canon."

Harvey was reporting to Bucks. Callahan heard it coming: "Rails cut, but 59 safe. Runaways went by here fully seventy miles an hour."

It was easy after that. Griffin is the foot of the grade; from there on, the runaway train had a hill to climb. Bucks had held 250, the local passenger, side-tracked at Davis, thirty miles farther east. Sped by the wind, the runaways passed Davis, though not at half their highest speed. An instant later, 250's engine was cut loose, and started after them like a scared collie. Three miles east of Davis they were overhauled by the light engine. The fireman, Donahue, crawled out of the cab window, along the foot-rail, and down on the pilot, caught the ladder of the first car, and, running up, crept along to the leader and began setting brakes. Ten minutes later they were brought back in triumph to Davis.

When the multitude of orders was out of the way, Bucks wired Ed Banks to bring his cowboys down to McCloud on 60. 60 was the east-bound passenger due at McCloud at 5.30 A.M. It turned out that the cowboys had been arrested for lassoing a Norwegian homesteader who had cut their wire. It was not a heinous offence, and after it was straightened out by the intervention of Bucks--who was the whole thing then--they were given jobs lassoing sugar barrels in the train service. One of them, the tall fellow, is a passenger conductor on the high line yet.

It was three o'clock that morning--the twenty-fifth of December in small letters, on the West End--before they got things decently straightened out: there was so much to do--orders to make and reports to take. Bucks, still on the key in his flowing robes and tumbling hair, sent and took them all. Then he turned the seat over to Callahan, and getting up for the first time in two hours, dropped into another chair.

The very first thing Callahan received was a personal from Pat Francis, at Ogalalla, conductor of 59. It was for Bucks:

Your mother is aboard 59. She was carried by McCloud in the
Denver sleeper. Sending her back to you on 60. Merry Christmas.

It came off the wire fast. Callahan, taking it, didn't think Bucks heard; though it's probable he did hear. Anyway, Callahan threw the clip over towards him with a laugh.

"Look there, old man. There's your mother coming, after all your kicking--carried by on 59."

As the boy turned he saw the big dispatcher's head sink between his arms on the table. Callahan sprang to his side; but Bucks had fainted.

Sankey's Double Header

The oldest man in the train service didn't pretend to say how long Sankey had worked for the company.

Pat Francis was a very old conductor; but old man Sankey was a veteran when Pat Francis began braking. Sankey ran a passenger-train when Jimmie Brady was running--and Jimmie afterwards enlisted and was killed in the Custer fight.

There was an odd tradition about Sankey's name. He was a tall, swarthy fellow, and carried the blood of a Sioux chief in his veins. It was in the time of the Black Hills excitement, when railroad men struck by the gold fever were abandoning their trains, even at way-stations, and striking across the divide for Clark's crossing. Men to run the trains were hard to get, and Tom Porter, train-master, was putting in every man he could pick up, without reference to age or color.

Porter--he died at Julesburg afterwards--was a great jollier, and he wasn't afraid of anybody on earth.

One day a war-party of Sioux clattered into town. They tore around like a storm, and threatened to scalp everything, even to the local tickets. The head braves dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the dispatcher's office up-stairs. The dispatcher was hiding under a loose plank in the baggage-room floor; Tom, being bald as a sand-hill, considered himself exempt from scalping-parties. He was working a game of solitaire when they bore down on him, and interested them at once. That led to a parley, which ended in Porter's hiring the whole band to brake on freight-trains. Old man Sankey is said to have been one of that original war-party.

Now this is merely a caboose story--told on winter nights when trainmen get stalled in the snow drifting down from the Sioux country. But what follows is better attested.

Sankey, to start with, had a peculiar name. An unpronounceable, unspellable, unmanageable name. I never heard it; so I can't give it. It was as hard to catch as an Indian cur, and that name made more trouble on the pay-rolls than all the other names put together. Nobody at headquarters could handle it; it was never turned in twice alike, and they were always writing Tom Porter about the thing. Tom explained several times that it was Sitting Bull's ambassador who was drawing that money, and that he usually signed the pay-roll with a tomahawk. But nobody at Omaha ever knew how to take a joke.

The first time Tom went down he was called in very solemnly to explain again about the name; and being in a hurry, and very tired of the whole business, Tom spluttered:

"Hang it, don't bother me any more about that name. If you can't read it, make it Sankey, and be done with it."

They took Tom at his word. They actually did make it Sankey; and that's how our oldest conductor came to bear the name of the famous singer. And more I may say: good name as it was--and is--the Sioux never disgraced it.

Probably every old traveller on the system knew Sankey. He was not only always ready to answer questions, but, what is much more, always ready to answer the same question twice: it is that which makes conductors gray-headed and spoils their chances for heaven--answering the same questions over and over again. Children were apt to be a bit startled at first sight of Sankey--he was so dark. But he had a very quiet smile, that always made them friends after the second trip through the sleepers, and they sometimes ran about asking for him after he had left the train.

Of late years--and it is this that hurts--these very same children, grown ever so much bigger, and riding again to or from California or Japan or Australia, will ask when they reach the West End about the Indian conductor.

But the conductors who now run the overland trains pause at the question, checking over the date limits on the margins of the coupon tickets, and, handing the envelopes back, will look at the children and say, slowly, "He isn't running any more."

* * * * *

If you have ever gone over our line to the mountains or to the coast you may remember at McCloud, where they change engines and set the diner in or out, the pretty little green park to the east of the depot with a row of catalpa-trees along the platform line. It looks like a glass of spring water.

If it happened to be Sankey's run and a regular West End day, sunny and delightful, you would be sure to see standing under the catalpas a shy, dark-skinned girl of fourteen or fifteen years, silently watching the preparations for the departure of the Overland.

And after the new engine had been backed, champing down, and harnessed to its long string of vestibuled sleepers; after the air hose had been connected and the air valves examined; after the engineer had swung out of his cab, filled his cups, and swung in again; after the fireman and his helper had disposed of their slice-bar and shovel, and given the tender a final sprinkle, and the conductor had walked leisurely forward, compared time with the engineer, and cried, "All Abo-o-o-ard!"

Then, as your coach moved slowly ahead, you might notice under the receding catalpas the little girl waving a parasol, or a handkerchief, at the outgoing train--that is, at conductor Sankey; for she was his daughter, Neeta Sankey. Her mother was Spanish, and died when Neeta was a wee bit. Neeta and the Limited were Sankey's whole world.

When Georgie Sinclair began pulling the Limited, running west opposite Foley, he struck up a great friendship with Sankey. Sankey, though he was hard to start, was full of early-day stories. Georgie, it seemed, had the faculty of getting him to talk; perhaps because when he was pulling Sankey's train he made extraordinary efforts to keep on time--time was a hobby with Sankey. Foley said he was so careful of it that when he was off duty he let his watch stop just to save time.

Sankey loved to breast the winds and the floods and the snows, and if he could get home pretty near on schedule, with everybody else late, he was happy; and in respect of that, as Sankey used to say, Georgie Sinclair could come nearer gratifying Sankey's ambition than any runner we had.

Even the firemen used to observe that the young engineer, always neat, looked still neater the days that he took out Sankey's train. By-and-by there was an introduction under the catalpas; after that it was noticed that Georgie began wearing gloves on the engine--not kid gloves, but yellow dogskin--and black silk shirts; he bought them in Denver.

Then--an odd way engineers have of paying compliments--when Georgie pulled into town on No. 2, if it was Sankey's train, the big sky-scraper would give a short, hoarse scream, a most peculiar note, just as they drew past Sankey's house, which stood on the brow of the hill west of the yards. Then Neeta would know that No. 2 and her father, and naturally Mr. Sinclair, were in again, and all safe and sound.

When the railway trainmen held their division fair at McCloud, there was a lantern to be voted to the most popular conductor--a gold-plated lantern with a green curtain in the globe. Cal Stewart and Ben Doton, who were very swell conductors, and great rivals, were the favorites, and had the town divided over their chances for winning it.

But during the last moments Georgia Sinclair stepped up to the booth and cast a storm of votes for old man Sankey. Doton's friends and Stewart's laughed at first, but Sankey's votes kept pouring in amazingly. The favorites grew frightened; they pooled their issues by throwing Stewart's vote to Doton; but it wouldn't do. Georgie Sinclair, with a crowd of engineers--Cameron, Moore, Foley, Bat Mullen, and Burns--came back at them with such a swing that in the final round up they fairly swamped Doton. Sankey took the lantern by a thousand votes, but I understood it cost Georgie and his friends a pot of money.

Sankey said all the time he didn't want the lantern, but, just the same, he always carried that particular lantern, with his full name, Sylvester Sankey, ground into the glass just below the green mantle. Pretty soon--Neeta being then eighteen--it was rumored that Sinclair was engaged to Miss Sankey--was going to marry her. And marry her he did; though that was not until after the wreck in the Blackwood gorge, the time of the Big Snow.

It goes yet by just that name on the West End; for never was such a winter and such a snow known on the plains and in the mountains. One train on the northern division was stalled six weeks that winter, and one whole coach was chopped up for kindling-wood.

But the great and desperate effort of the company was to hold open the main line, the artery which connected the two coasts. It was a hard winter on trainmen. Week after week the snow kept falling and blowing. The trick was not to clear the line; it was to keep it clear. Every day we sent out trains with the fear we should not see them again for a week.

Freight we didn't pretend to move; local passenger business had to be abandoned. Coal, to keep our engines and our towns supplied, we were obliged to carry, and after that all the brains and the muscle and the motive-power were centred on keeping 1 and 2, our through passenger-trains, running.

Our trainmen worked like Americans; there were no cowards on our rolls. But after too long a strain men become exhausted, benumbed, indifferent--reckless even. The nerves give out, and will power seems to halt on indecision--but decision is the life of the fast train.

None of our conductors stood the hopeless fight like Sankey. Sankey was patient, taciturn, untiring, and, in a conflict with the elements, ferocious. All the fighting-blood of his ancestors seemed to course again in that struggle with the winter king. I can see him yet, on bitter days, standing alongside the track, in a heavy pea-jacket and Napoleon boots, a sealskin cap drawn snugly over his straight, black hair, watching, ordering, signalling, while No. 1, with its frost-bitten sleepers behind a rotary, struggled to buck through the ten and twenty foot cuts, which lay bankful of snow west of McCloud.

Not until April did it begin to look as if we should win out. A dozen times the line was all but choked on us. And then, when snow-ploughs were disabled and train crews desperate, there came a storm that discounted the worst blizzard of the winter. As the reports rolled in on the morning of the 5th, growing worse as they grew thicker, Neighbor, dragged out, played out, mentally and physically, threw up his hands. The 6th it snowed all day, and on Saturday morning the section men reported thirty feet in the Blackwood canon.

It was six o'clock when we got the word, and daylight before we got the rotary against it. They bucked away till noon with discouraging results, and came in with their gear smashed and a driving-rod fractured. It looked as if we were beaten.

No. 1 got into McCloud eighteen hours late; it was Sankey's and Sinclair's run west.

There was a long council in the round-house. The rotary was knocked out; coal was running low in the chutes. If the line wasn't kept open for the coal from the mountains it was plain we should be tied until we could ship it from Iowa or Missouri. West of Medicine Pole there was another big rotary working east, with plenty of coal behind her, but she was reported stuck fast in the Cheyenne Hills.

Foley made suggestions and Dad Sinclair made suggestions. Everybody had a suggestion left; the trouble was, Neighbor said, they didn't amount to anything, or were impossible.

"It's a dead block, boys," announced Neighbor, sullenly, after everybody had done. "We are beaten unless we can get No. 1 through to-day. Look there; by the holy poker it's snowing again!"

The air was dark in a minute with whirling clouds. Men turned to the windows and quit talking; every fellow felt the same--at least, all but one. Sankey, sitting back of the stove, was making tracings on his overalls with a piece of chalk.

"You might as well unload your passengers, Sankey," said Neighbor. "You'll never get 'em through this winter."

And it was then that Sankey proposed his Double Header.

He devised a snow-plough which combined in one monster ram about all the good material we had left, and submitted the scheme to Neighbor. Neighbor studied it and hacked at it all he could, and brought it over to the office. It was like staking everything on the last cast of the dice, but we were in the state of mind which precedes a desperate venture. It was talked over for an hour, and orders were finally given by the superintendent to rig up the Double Header and get against the snow as quick as it could be made ready.

All that day and most of the night Neighbor worked twenty men on Sankey's device. By Sunday morning it was in such shape that we began to take heart.

"If she don't get through she'll get back again, and that's what most of 'em don't do," growled Neighbor, as he and Sankey showed the new ram to the engineers.

They had taken the 566, George Sinclair's engine, for one head, and Burns's 497 for the other. Behind these were Kennedy with the 314 and Cameron with the 296. The engines were set in pairs, headed each way, and buckled up like pack-mules. Over the pilots and stacks of the head engines rose the tremendous ploughs which were to tackle the toughest drifts ever recorded, before or since, on the West End. The ram was designed to work both ways. Under the coal each tender was loaded with pig-iron.

The beleaguered passengers on No. 1, side-tracked in the yards, watched the preparations Sankey was making to clear the line. Every amateur on the train had his camera snapping at the ram. The town, gathered in a single great mob, looked silently on, and listened to the frosty notes of the sky-scrapers as they went through their preliminary manoeuvres. Just as the final word was given by Sankey, in charge, the sun burst through the fleecy clouds, and a wild cheer followed the ram out of the western yard--it was good-luck to see the sun again.

Little Neeta, up on the hill, must have seen them as they pulled out; surely she heard the choppy, ice-bitten screech of the 566; that was never forgotten whether the service was special or regular. Besides, the head cab of the ram carried this time not only Georgie Sinclair but her father as well. Sankey could handle a slice-bar as well as a punch, and rode on the head engine, where, if anywhere, the big chances hovered. What he was not capable of in the train service we never knew, because he was stronger than any emergency that ever confronted him.

Bucking snow is principally brute force; there is little coaxing. Just west of the bluffs, like code signals between a fleet of cruisers, there was a volley of sharp tooting, and in a minute the four ponderous engines, two of them in the back motion, fires white and throats bursting, steamed wildly into the canon.

Six hundred feet from the first cut Sinclair's whistle signalled again; Burns and Cameron and Kennedy answered, and then, literally turning the monster ram loose against the dazzling mountain, the crews settled themselves for the shock.

At such a moment there is nothing to be done. If anything goes wrong eternity is too close to consider. There comes a muffled drumming on the steam-chests--a stagger and a terrific impact--and then the recoil like the stroke of a trip-hammer. The snow shoots into the air fifty feet, and the wind carries a cloud of fleecy confusion over the ram and out of the cut. The cabs were buried in white, and the great steel frames of the engines sprung like knitting-needles under the frightful blow.

Pausing for hardly a breath, the signalling again began. Then the backing; up and up and up the line; and again the massive machines were hurled screaming into the cut.

"You're getting there, Georgie," exclaimed Sankey, when the rolling and lurching had stopped. No one else could tell a thing about it, for it was snow and snow and snow; above and behind, and ahead and beneath. Sinclair coughed the flakes out of his eyes and nose and mouth like a baffled collie. He looked doubtful of the claim until the mist had blown clear and the quivering monsters were again recalled for a dash. Then it was plain that Sankey's instinct was right; they were gaining.

Again they went in, lifting a very avalanche over the stacks, packing the banks of the cut with walls hard as ice. Again as the drivers stuck they raced in a frenzy, and into the shriek of the wind went the unearthly scrape of the overloaded safeties.

Slowly and sullenly the machines were backed again.

"She's doing the work, Georgie," cried Sankey. "For that kind of a cut she's as good as a rotary. Look everything over now while I go back and see how the boys are standing it. Then we'll give her one more, and give it the hardest kind."

And they did give her one more--and another. Men at Santiago put up no stouter fight than they made that Sunday morning in the canon of the Blackwood. Once and twice more they went in. And the second time the bumping drummed more deeply; the drivers held, pushed, panted, and gained against the white wall--heaved and stumbled ahead--and with a yell from Sinclair and Sankey and the fireman, the Double Header shot her nose into the clear over the Blackwood gorge. As engine after engine flew past the divided walls, each cab took up the cry--it was the wildest shout that ever crowned victory.

Through they went and half-way across the bridge before they could check their monster catapult. Then at a half-full they shot it back at the cut--it worked as well one way as the other.

"The thing is done," declared Sankey. Then they got into position up the line for a final shoot to clean the eastern cut and to get the head for a dash across the bridge into the west end of the canon, where lay another mountain of snow to split.

"Look the machines over close, boys," said Sankey to the engineers. "If nothing's sprung we'll take a full head across the gorge--the bridge will carry anything--and buck the west cut. Then after we get No. 1 through this afternoon Neighbor can get his baby cabs in here and keep 'em chasing all night; but it's done snowing," he added, looking into the leaden sky.

He had everything figured out for the master-mechanic--the shrewd, kindly old man. There's no man on earth like a good Indian; and for that matter none like a bad one. Sankey knew by a military instinct just what had to be done and how to do it. If he had lived he was to have been assistant superintendent. That was the word which leaked from headquarters after he got killed.

And with a volley of jokes between the cabs, and a laughing and a yelling between toots, down went Sankey's Double Header again into the Blackwood gorge.

At the same moment, by an awful misunderstanding of orders, down came the big rotary from the West End with a dozen cars of coal behind it. Mile after mile it had wormed east towards Sankey's ram, burrowed through the western cut of the Blackwood, crashed through the drift Sankey was aiming for, and whirled then out into the open, dead against him, at forty miles an hour. Each train, in order to make the grade and the blockade, was straining the cylinders.

Through the swirling snow which half hid the bridge and swept between the rushing ploughs Sinclair saw them coming--he yelled. Sankey saw them a fraction of a second later, and while Sinclair struggled with the throttle and the air, Sankey gave the alarm through the whistle to the poor fellows in the blind pockets behind. But the track was at the worst. Where there was no snow there were whiskers; oil itself couldn't have been worse to stop on. It was the old and deadly peril of fighting blockades from both ends on a single track.

The great rams of steel and fire had done their work, and with their common enemy overcome they dashed at each other frenzied across the Blackwood gorge.

The fireman at the first cry shot out the side. Sankey yelled at Sinclair to jump. But George shook his head: he never would jump. Without hesitating an instant, Sankey caught him in his arms, tore him from the levers, planted a mighty foot, and hurled Sinclair like a block of coal through the gangway out into the gorge. The other cabs were already emptied; but the instant's delay in front cost Sankey's life. Before he could turn the rotary crashed into the 566. They reared like mountain lions, and pitched headlong into the gorge; Sankey went under them.

He could have saved himself; he chose to save George. There wasn't time to do both; he had to choose and he chose instinctively. Did he, maybe, think in that flash of Neeta and of whom she needed most--of a young and a stalwart protector better than an old and a failing one? I do not know; I know only what he did.

Every one who jumped got clear. Sinclair lit in twenty feet of snow, and they pulled him out with a rope; he wasn't scratched; even the bridge was not badly strained. No. 1 pulled over it next day. Sankey was right: there was no more snow; not enough to hide the dead engines on the rocks: the line was open.

There never was a funeral in McCloud like Sankey's. George Sinclair and Neeta followed together; and of mourners there were as many as there were people. Every engine on the division carried black for thirty days.

His contrivance for fighting snow has never yet been beaten on the high line. It is perilous to go against a drift behind it--something has to give.

But it gets there--as Sankey got there--always; and in time of blockade and desperation on the West End they still send out Sankey's Double Header; though Sankey--so the conductors tell the children, travelling east or travelling west--Sankey isn't running any more.

Siclone Clark

"There goes a fellow that walks like Siclone Clark," exclaimed Duck Middleton. Duck was sitting in the train-master's office with a group of engineers. He was one of the black-listed strikers, and runs an engine now down on the Santa Fe. But at long intervals Duck gets back to revisit the scenes of his early triumphs. The men who surrounded him were once at deadly odds with Duck and his chums, though now the ancient enmities seem forgotten, and Duck--the once ferocious Duck--sits occasionally among the new men and gossips about early days on the West End.

"Do you remember Siclone, Reed?" asked Duck, calling to me in the private office.

"Remember him?" I echoed. "Did anybody who ever knew Siclone forget him?"

"I fired passenger for Siclone twenty years ago," resumed Duck. "He walked just like that fellow; only he was quicker. I reckon you fellows don't know what a snap you have here now," he continued, addressing the men around him. "Track fenced; ninety-pound rails; steel bridges; stone culverts; slag ballast; sky-scrapers. No wonder you get chances to haul such nobs as Lilioukalani and Schley and Dewey, and cut out ninety miles an hour on tangents.

"When I was firing for Siclone the road-bed was just off the scrapers; the dumps were soft; pile bridges; paper culverts; fifty-six-pound rails; not a fence west of Buffalo gap, and the plains black with Texas steers. We never closed our cylinder cocks; the hiss of the steam frightened the cattle worse than the whistle, and we never knew when we were going to find a bunch of critters on the track.

"The first winter I came out was great for snow, and I was a tenderfoot. The cuts made good wind-breaks, and whenever there was a norther they were chuck full of cattle. Every time a train ploughed through the snow it made a path on the track. Whenever the steers wanted to move they would take the middle of the track single file, and string out mile after mile. Talk about fast schedules and ninety miles an hour. You had to poke along with your cylinders spitting, and just whistle and yell--sort of blow them off into the snow-drifts.

"One day Siclone and I were going west on 59, and we were late; for that matter we were always late. Simpson coming against us on 60 had caught a bunch of cattle in the rock-cut, just west of the Sappie, and killed a couple. When we got there there must have been a thousand head of steers mousing around the dead ones. Siclone--he used to be a cowboy, you know--Siclone said they were holding a wake. At any rate, they were still coming from every direction and as far as you could see.

"'Hold on, Siclone, and I'll chase them out,' I said.

"'That's the stuff, Duck,' says he. 'Get after them and see what you can do.' He looked kind of queer, but I never thought anything. I picked up a jack-bar and started up the track.

"The first fellow I tackled looked lazy, but he started full quick when I hit him. Then he turned around to inspect me, and I noticed his horns were the broad-gauge variety. While I whacked another the first one put his head down and began to snort and paw the ties; then they all began to bellow at once; it looked smoky. I dropped the jack-bar and started for the engine, and about fifty of them started for me.

"I never had an idea steers could run so; you could have played checkers on my heels all the way back. If Siclone hadn't come out and jollied them, I'd never have got back in the world. I just jumped the pilot and went clear over against the boiler-head. Siclone claimed I tried to climb the smoke-stack; but he was excited. Anyway, he stood out there with a shovel and kept the whole bunch off me. I thought they would kill him; but I never tried to chase range steers on foot again.

"In the spring we got the rains; not like you get now, but cloud-bursts. The section men were good fellows, only sometimes we would get into a storm miles from a section gang and strike a place where we couldn't see a thing.

"Then Siclone would stop the train, take a bar, and get down ahead and sound the road-bed. Many and many a wash-out he struck that way which would have wrecked our train and wound up our ball of yarn in a minute. Often and often Siclone would go into his division without a dry thread on him.

"Those were different days," mused the grizzled striker. "The old boys are scattered now all over this broad land. The strike did it; and you fellows have the snap. But what I wonder, often and often, is whether Siclone is really alive or not."

I

Siclone Clark was one of the two cowboys who helped Harvey Reynolds and Ed Banks save 59 at Griffin the night the coal-train ran down from Ogalalla. They were both taken into the service; Siclone, after a while, went to wiping.

When Bucks asked his name, Siclone answered, "S. Clark."

"What's your full name?" asked Bucks.

"S. Clark."

"But what does S. stand for?" persisted Bucks.

"Stands for Cyclone, I reckon; don't it?" retorted the cowboy, with some annoyance.

It was not usual in those days on the plains to press a man too closely about his name. There might be reasons why it would not be esteemed courteous.

"I reckon it do," replied Bucks, dropping into Siclone's grammar; and without a quiver he registered the new man as Siclone Clark; and his checks always read that way. The name seemed to fit; he adopted it without any objection; and, after everybody came to know him, it fitted so well that Bucks was believed to have second sight when he named the hair-brained fireman. He could get up a storm quicker than any man on the division, and, if he felt so disposed, stop one quicker.

In spite of his eccentricities, which were many, and his headstrong way of doing some things, Siclone Clark was a good engineer, and deserved a better fate than the one that befell him. Though--who can tell?--it may have been just to his liking.

The strike was the worst thing that ever happened to Siclone. He was one of those big-hearted, violent fellows who went into it loaded with enthusiasm. He had nothing to gain by it; at least, nothing to speak of. But the idea that somebody on the East End needed their help led men like Siclone in; and they thought it a cinch that the company would have to take them all back.

The consequence was that, when we staggered along without them, men like Siclone, easily aroused, naturally of violent passions, and with no self-restraint, stopped at nothing to cripple the service. And they looked on the men who took their places as entitled neither to liberty nor life.

When our new men began coming from the Reading to replace the strikers, every one wondered who would get Siclone Clark's engine, the 313. Siclone had gently sworn to kill the first man who took out the 313--and bar nobody.

Whatever others thought of Siclone's vaporings, they counted for a good deal on the West End; nobody wanted trouble with him.

Even Neighbor, who feared no man, sort of let the 313 lay in her stall as long as possible, after the trouble began.

Nothing was said about it. Threats cannot be taken cognizance of officially; we were bombarded with threats all the time; they had long since ceased to move us. Yet Siclone's engine stayed in the round-house.

Then, after Foley and McTerza and Sinclair, came Fitzpatrick from the East. McTerza was put on the mails, and, coming down one day on the White Flyer, he blew a cylinder-head out of the 416.

Fitzpatrick was waiting to take her out when she came stumping in on one pair of drivers--for we were using engines worse than horseflesh then. But of course the 416 was put out. The only gig left in the house was the 313.

I imagine Neighbor felt the finger of fate in it. The mail had to go. The time had come for the 313; he ordered her fired.

"The man that ran this engine swore he would kill the man that took her out," said Neighbor, sort of incidentally, as Fitz stood by waiting for her to steam.

"I suppose that means me," said Fitzpatrick.

"I suppose it does."

"Whose engine is it?"

"Siclone Clark's."

Fitzpatrick shifted to the other leg.

"Did he say what I would be doing while this was going on?"

Something in Fitzpatrick's manner made Neighbor laugh. Other things crowded in and no more was said.

No more was thought in fact. The 313 rolled as kindly for Fitzpatrick as for Siclone, and the new engineer, a quiet fellow like Foley, only a good bit heavier, went on and off her with never a word for anybody.

One day Fitzpatrick dropped into a barber shop to get shaved. In the next chair lay Siclone Clark. Siclone got through first, and, stepping over to the table to get his hat, picked up Fitzpatrick's, by mistake, and walked out with it. He discovered his change just as Fitz got out of his chair. Siclone came back, replaced the hat on the table--it had Fitzpatrick's name pasted in the crown--took up his own hat, and, as Fitz reached for his, looked at him.

Everyone in the shop caught their breaths.

"Is your name Fitzpatrick?"

"Yes, sir."

"Mine is Clark."

Fitzpatrick put on his hat.

"You're running the 313, I believe?" continued Siclone.

"Yes, sir."

"That's my engine."

"I thought it belonged to the company."

"Maybe it does; but I've agreed to kill the man that takes her out before this trouble is settled," said Siclone, amiably.

Fitzpatrick met him steadily. "If you'll let me know when it takes place, I'll try and be there."

"I don't jump on any man without fair warning; any of the boys will tell you that," continued Siclone. "Maybe you didn't know my word was out?"

Fitzpatrick hesitated. "I'm not looking for trouble with any man," he replied, guardedly. "But since you're disposed to be fair about notice, it's only fair to you to say that I did know your word was out."

"Still you took her?"

"It was my orders."

"My word is out; the boys know it is good. I don't jump any man without fair warning. I know you now, Fitzpatrick, and the next time I see you, look out," and without more ado Siclone walked out of the shop greatly to the relief of the barber, if not of Fitz.

Fitzpatrick may have wiped a little sweat from his face; but he said nothing--only walked down to the round-house and took out the 313 as usual for his run.

A week passed before the two men met again. One night Siclone with a crowd of the strikers ran into half a dozen of the new men, Fitzpatrick among them, and there was a riot. It was Siclone's time to carry out his intention, for Fitzpatrick would have scorned to try to get away. No tree ever breasted a tornado more sturdily than the Irish engineer withstood Siclone; but when Ed Banks got there with his wrecking crew and straightened things out, Fitzpatrick was picked up for dead. That night Siclone disappeared.

Warrants were gotten out and searchers put after him; yet nobody could or would apprehend him. It was generally understood that the sudden disappearance was one of Siclone's freaks. If the ex-cowboy had so determined he would not have hidden to keep out of anybody's way. I have sometimes pondered whether shame hadn't something to do with it. His tremendous physical strength was fit for so much better things than beating other men that maybe he, himself, sort of realized it after the storm had passed.

Down east of the depot grounds at McCloud stands, or stood, a great barnlike hotel, built in boom days, and long a favorite resting-place for invalids and travellers en route to California by easy stages. It was nicknamed the barracks. Many railroad men boarded there, and the new engineers liked it because it was close to the round-house and away from the strikers.

Fitzpatrick, without a whine or a complaint, was put to bed in the barracks, and Holmes Kay, one of our staff surgeons, was given charge of the case; a trained nurse was provided besides. Nobody thought the injured man would live. But after every care was given him, we turned our attention to the troublesome task of operating the road.

The 313, whether it happened so, or whether Neighbor thought it well to drop the disputed machine temporarily, was not taken out again for three weeks. She was looked on as a hoodoo, and nobody wanted her. Foley refused point-blank one day to take her, claiming that he had troubles of his own. Then, one day, something happened to McTerza's engine; we were stranded for a locomotive, and the 313 was brought out for McTerza; he didn't like it a bit.

Meantime nothing had been seen or heard of Siclone. That, in fact, was the reason Neighbor urged for using his engine; but it seemed as if every time the 313 went out it brought out Siclone, not to speak of worse things.