The Nerve of Foley, and Other Railroad Stories

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 cañon.

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 manœuvres. 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 cañon.

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 cañon 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 cañon, 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 Fé. 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."

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.