The Nerve of Foley, and Other Railroad Stories

He came up to the dispatcher's office and sat down. Callahan wondered why he didn't go home and to bed; but Callahan was too good a railroad man to ask questions of a superior. Bucks might have stood on his head on the stove, and it red-hot, without being pursued with inquiries from Callahan. If Bucks chose to sit up out there on the frozen prairies, in a flimsy barn of a station, and with the wind howling murder at twelve o'clock past, and that on Chri – the twenty-fourth of December, it was Bucks's own business.

"I kind of looked for my mother to-night," said he, after Callahan got his orders out of the way for a minute. "Wrote she was coming out pretty soon for a little visit."

"Where does your mother live?"

"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 cañon 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 cañon."

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.