Held for Orders: Being Stories of Railroad Life. Spearman Frank Hamilton
the track layers, and stopped for a bite of breakfast at Wind River. Above the roundhouse there is a switchback. When the train pulled in, the crew got off for some hot coffee. Johnnie Horigan was around playing good fellow, and he climbed into the cab to run the train through the switchback while the crews were at the eating house. It was irregular to leave the engine, but they did, and as for Johnnie Horigan, he was regularly irregular. There were sixteen cars of steel in the string, besides a cabooseful of laborers. The backing up the leg of the nipper was easy. After the switch was newly set, Johnnie pulled down the lower leg; and that, considering the whiskers, was too easy.
When he pulled past the eating house on the down grade, he was going so lively with his flats that he was away before the crew could get out of the lunch room. In just one minute everybody in Wind River was in trouble: the crew, because their train was disappearing down the cañon; the eating house man, because nobody paid him for his coffee; and Johnnie Horigan, because he found it impossible to stop. He had dumped the sand, he had applied the air, he had reversed the engine – by all the rules laid down in the instruction car she ought to stop. But she didn't stop, and – this was the embarrassing feature – she was headed down a hill twenty miles long, with curves to weary a boa-constrictor. John hung his head wildly over the drivers, looked back at the yelling crew, contemplated the load that was pushing him down the grade and his head began to swim. There appeared but one thing more to do: that was to make a noise; and as he neared the roundhouse he whistled like the wind. Aloysius O'Cooney McGrath, at the alarm, darted out of the house like a fox. As he reached the door he saw the construction train coming, and Johnnie Horigan in the gangway looking for a soft place to light.
The wiper chartered the situation in a mental second. The train was running away, and Horigan was leaving it to its fate. From any point of view it was a tough proposition, but tough propositions come rarely to ambitious railroad men, and Aloysius was starving for any sort of a proposition that would help him out of the waste. The laborers in the caboose, already bewildered, were craning anxiously from the windows. Horigan, opposite the roundhouse, jumped in a sprawl; the engine was shot past Aloysius; boarding was out of the question.
But on the siding stood a couple of flats, empty; and with his hair straight on centres, the little wiper ran for them and mounted the nearest. The steel train was jumping. Aloysius, bunching his muscle, ran the length of the two flats for a head, and, from the far corner, threw himself across the gap, like a bat, on a load of the runaway steel. Scrambling to his feet, he motioned and yelled to the hoboes, who were pouring frantic out on the hind flat of the string, to set brakes; then he made ahead for the engine.
It was a race with the odds all wrong, for with every yard Aloysius gained, the train gained a dozen. By the time he reached the tender, breathless, and slid down the coal into the deserted cab, the train was heading into Little Horn gap, and every Italian aboard, yelling for life. Aloysius jumped into the levers, poked his head through the window, and looked at the drivers. They were in the back motion, and in front of them the sand was streaming wide open. The first thing he did was to shut half it off – the fight could not be won by wasting ammunition. Over and over again he jerked at the air. It was refusing its work. Where so many a hunted runner has turned for salvation there was none for Aloysius. He opened and closed, threw on and threw off; it was all one, and all useless. The situation was as simple as it was frightful. Even if they didn't leave the track, they were certain to smash into Number Sixteen, the up-passenger, which must meet them somewhere on the hill.
Aloysius's fingers closed slowly on the sand lever. There was nothing on earth for it but sand, merely sand; and even the wiper's was oozing with the stream that poured from the tank on the whiskered rails. He shut off a bit more, thinking of the terrific curves below, and mentally calculated – or tried to – how long his steam would last to reverse the drivers – how he could shovel coal and sand the curves at the same time – and how much slewing the Italians at the tail of the kite could stand without landing on the rocks.
The pace was giddy and worse. When his brain was whirling fastest, a man put a hand on his shoulder. Aloysius started as if Davy Jones had tapped him, and between bounces looked, scared, around. He looked into a face he didn't know from Adam's, but there was sand in the eyes that met his.
"What can I do?"
Aloysius saw the man's lips move, and, without taking his hands from the levers, bent his head to catch the words.
"What can I do?" shouted the man at his elbow.
"Give me steam – steam," cried the wiper, looking straight ahead.
It was the foreman of the steel gang from the caboose. Aloysius, through the backs of his eyes, saw him grab the shovel and make a pass at the tender. Doing so, he nearly took a header through the gangway, but he hung to the shovel and braced himself better.
With the next attempt he got a shovelful into the cab, but in the delivery passed it well up Aloysius's neck. There were neither words nor grins, but just another shovelful of coal a minute after; and the track-layer, in spite of the dizzy lurching, shot it where it belonged – into the furnace. Feeling that if one shovelful could be landed, more could, Aloysius's own steam rose. As they headed madly around the Cinnamon bend the dial began to climb in spite of the obstacles; and the wiper, considering there were two, and the steam and the sand to fight the thing out, opened his valve and dusted the whiskers on the curve with something more than a gleam of hope.
If there was confusion on the runaway train, there was terror and more below it. As the spectre flitted past Pringle station, five miles down the valley, the agent caught a glimpse of the sallow face of the wiper at the cab window, and saw the drivers whirling backward. He rushed to his key and called the Medicine Bend despatcher. With a tattoo like a drum-roll the despatcher in turn called Soda Springs, ten miles below Pringle, where Number Sixteen, the up-passenger, was then due. He rattled on with his heart in his fingers, and answer came on the instant. Then an order flashed into Soda Springs:
To No. 16.
Take Soda Springs siding quick. Extra 240 West has lost control of the train. Di.
There never was such a bubbling at Soda Springs as that bubbling. The operator tore up the platform like a hawk in a chicken yard. Men never scattered so quick as when Number Sixteen began screaming and wheezing and backing for the clear. Above the town, Aloysius, eyes white to the sockets, shooting the curves like a meteor, watched his lessening stream of sand pour into the frost on the track. As they whipped over bridges and fills the caboose reeled like a dying top – fear froze every soul on board. To leave the track now meant a scatter that would break West End records.
When Soda Springs sighted Extra 240 West, pitching down the mountain, the steel dancing behind and Aloysius jumping before, there was a painful sensation – the sensation of good men who see a disaster they are powerless to avert. Nor did Soda Springs know how desperate the wiper's extremity had become. Not even the struggling steel foreman knew that with Soda Springs passing like the films of a cinematograph, and two more miles of down-grade ahead, the last cupful of sand was trickling from the wiper's tank. Aloysius, at that moment, wouldn't have given the odd change on a pay check for all the chances Extra 240 and he himself had left. He stuck to his levers merely because there was no particular reason for letting go. It was only a question of how a man wanted to take the rocks. Yet, with all his figuring, Aloysius had lost sight of his only salvation – maybe because it was quite out of his power to effect it himself. But in making the run up to Soda Springs Number Sixteen had already sanded the rails below.
He could feel the help the minute the tires ground into the grit. They began to smoke, and Aloysius perceived the grade was easing somewhat. Even the dazed foreman, looking back, saw an improvement in the lurch of the caboose. There was one more hair-raiser ahead – the appalling curve at the forks of the Goose. But, instead of being hurled over the elevation, they found themselves around it and on the bridge with only a vicious slew. Aloysius's hair began to lie down, and his heart to rise up. He had her checked – even the hoboes knew it – and a mile further, with the dangers past, they took new ones by dropping off the hind end.
At the second bend below the Goose, Aloysius made a stop, and began again to breathe. A box was blazing on the tender truck, and, with his handy fireman, he got down at once to doctor it. The whole thing shifted so mortally quick