THE LAST ORDER
In order to meet objection on the score of the impossible, and to anticipate inquiry as to whether "The Despatcher's Story" is true, it may be well to state frankly at the outset that this tale, in its inexplicable psychological features, is a transcript from the queer things in the railroad life. It is based on an extraordinary happening that fell within the experience of the president of a large Western railway system. Whether the story, suggestive from any point of view of mystery, can be regarded as a demonstration of the efficacy of prayer may be a disputable question. In passing, however, it is only fair to say that the circumstance on which the tale is based was so regarded by the despatcher himself, and by those familiar with the circumstance.
A hundred times if once the thing had been, on appeals for betterment, before the board of directors. It was the one piece of track on the Mountain Division that trainmen shook their heads over—the Peace River stretch. To run any sort of a line through that cañon would take the breath of an engineer. Give him all the money he could ask and it would stagger Wetmore himself. Brodie in his day said there was nothing worse in the Andes, and Brodie, before he drifted into the Rockies, had seen, first and last, pretty much all of the Chilian work.
But our men had the job to do with one half the money they needed. The lines to run, the grades to figure, the culverts to put in, the fills to make, the blasting to do, the tunnel to bore, the bridge to build—in a limit; that was the curse of it—the limit. And they did the best they could. But I will be candid: if a section and elevation of Rosamond's bower and a section and elevation of our Peace River work were put up to stand for a prize at a civil engineers' cake-walk the decision would go, and quick, to the Peace River track. There are only eight miles of it; but our men would back it against any eighty on earth for whipping curves, tough grades, villainous approaches, and railroad tangle generally.
The directors always have promised to improve it; and they are promising yet. Thanks to what Hailey taught them, there's a good bridge there now—pneumatic caissons sunk to the bed. It's the more pity they haven't eliminated the dread main line curves that approach it, through a valley which I brief as a cañon and the Mauvaises Terres rolled into one single proposition.
Yet, we do lots of business along that stretch. Our engineers thread the cuts and are glad to get safely through them. Our roadmasters keep up the elevations, hoping some night the blooming right of way will tumble into perdition. Our despatchers, studying under shaded lamps, think of it with their teeth clinched and hope there never will be any trouble on that stretch. Trouble is our portion and trouble we must get; but not there. Let it come; but let it come anywhere except on the Peace.
It was in the golden days of the battered old Wickiup that the story opens; when Blackburn sat in the night chair. The days when the Old Guard were still there; before Death and Fame and Circumstance had stolen our first commanders and left only us little fellows, forgotten by every better fate, to tell their greater stories.
Hailey had the bridges then, and Wetmore the locating, and Neighbor the roundhouses, and Bucks the superintendency, and Callahan, so he claimed, the work, and Blackburn had the night trick.