"THE CAB FOR A PASSING INSTANT ROSE IN THE AIR"
That was the saving of Georgie McNeal, and out there they will still tell you about that lift of Dad Hamilton's.
We put him on the cot at the hospital next to his engineer. Georgie, dreadfully bruised and scalded, came on fast in spite of his hurts. But the doctor said Dad had wrenched a tendon in that frightful effort, and he lay there a very sick and very old man long after the young engineer was up and around telling of his experience.
"When we cleared the chutes I saw white signals, I thought," he said to me at Dad's bedside. "I knew we had the right of way over everything. It was a hustle, anyway, on that schedule, Mr. Reed; you know that; an awful hustle, with our load. I never choked her a notch to run the yards; didn't mean to do it with the Junction grade to climb just ahead of us. But I looked out again, and, by hokey! I thought I'd gone crazy, got color-blind—red signals! Of course I thought I must have been wrong the first time I looked. I choked her, I threw the air, I dumped the gravel. Heavens! she never felt it! I couldn't figure how we were wrong, but there was the red light. I yelled, 'Jump, Dad!' and he yelled, 'Jump, son!' Didn't you, Dad?
"He jumped; but I wasn't ever going to jump and my engine going full against a red lamp. Not much.
"I kind of dodged down behind the head; when she struck it was biff, and she jumped about twenty feet up straight. She didn't? Well, it seemed like it. Then it was biff, biff, biff, one after another. With that train behind her she'd have gone through Beverly Hill. Did you ever buck snow with a rotary, Mr. Reed? Well, that was about it, even to the rolling and heaving. Dad, want to lie down? Le' me get another pillow behind you. Isn't that better? Poor Musgrave!" he added, speaking of the engineer of 55, who was instantly killed. "He and the fireman both. Hard lines; but I'd rather have it that way, I guess, if I was wrong. Eh, Dad?"
Even after Georgie went to work, Dad lay in the hospital. We knew he would never shovel coal again. It cost him his good back to lift Georgie loose, so the surgeon told us; and I could believe it, for when they got the jacks under the cab next morning, and Neighbor told the wrecking-gang that Hamilton alone had lifted it six inches the night before, on his back, the wrecking-boss fairly snorted at the statement; but Hamilton did, just the same.
"Son," muttered Dad, one night to Georgie, sitting with him, "I want you to write a letter for me."
"Sure."
"I've been sending money to my boy back East," explained Dad, feebly. "I told you he's in school."
"I know, Dad."
"I haven't been able to send any since I've been by, but I'm going to send some when I get my relief. Not so much as I used to send. I want you to kind of explain why."
"What's his first name, Dad, and where does he live?"
"It's a lawyer that looks after him—a man that 'tends to my business back there."
"Well, what's his name?"
"Scaylor—Ephraim Scaylor."
"Scaylor?" echoed Georgie, in amazement.
"Yes. Why, do you know him?"
"Why, that's the man mother and I had so much trouble with. I wouldn't write to that man. He's a rascal, Dad."
"What did he ever do to you and your mother?"
"I'll tell you, Dad; though it's a matter I don't talk about much. My father had trouble back there fifteen or sixteen years ago. He was running an engine, and had a wreck; there were some passengers killed. The dispatcher managed to throw the blame on father, and they indicted him for man-slaughter. He pretty near went crazy, and all of a sudden he disappeared, and we never heard of him from that day to this. But this man Scaylor, mother stuck to it, knew something about where father was; only he always denied it."
Trembling like a leaf, Dad raised up on his elbow. "What's your mother's name, son? What's your name?"
Georgie looked confused. "I'll tell you, Dad; there's nothing to be ashamed of. I was foolish enough, I told you once, to go out on a strike with the engineers down there. I was only a kid, and we were all black-listed. So I used my middle name, McNeal; my full name is George McNeal Sinclair."
The old fireman made a painful effort to sit up, to speak, but he choked. His face contracted, and Georgie rose frightened. With a herculean effort the old man raised himself up and grasped Georgie's hands.
"Son," he gasped to the astonished boy, "don't you know me?"
"Of course I know you, Dad. What's the matter with you? Lie down."
"Boy, I'm your own father. My name is David Hamilton Sinclair. I had the trouble—Georgie." He choked up like a child, and Georgie McNeal went white and scared; then he grasped the gray-haired man in his arms.
When I dropped in an hour later they were talking hysterically. Dad was explaining how he had been sending money to Scaylor every month, and Georgie was contending that neither he nor his mother had ever seen a cent of it. But one great fact overshadowed all the villany that night: father and son were united and happy, and a message had already gone back to the old home from Georgie to his mother, telling her the good news.
"And that indictment was wiped out long ago against father," said Georgie to me; "but that rascal Scaylor kept writing him for money to fight it with and to pay for my schooling—and this was the kind of schooling I was getting all the time. Wouldn't that kill you?"
I couldn't sleep till I had hunted up Neighbor and told him about it; and next morning we wired transportation back for Mrs. Sinclair to come out on.
Less than a week afterwards a gentle little old woman stepped off the Flyer at Zanesville, and into the arms of Georgie Sinclair. A smart rig was in waiting, to which her son hurried her, and they were driven rapidly to the hospital. When they entered the old fireman's room together the nurse softly closed the door behind them.
But when they sent for Neighbor and me, I suppose we were the two biggest fools in the hospital, trying to look unconscious of all we saw in the faces of the group at Dad's bed.
He never got his old strength back, yet Neighbor fixed him out, for all that. The Sky-Scraper, once our pride, was so badly stove that we gave up hope of restoring her for a passenger run. So Neighbor built her over into a sort of a dub engine for short runs, stubs, and so on; and though Dad had vowed long ago, when unjustly condemned, that he would never more touch a throttle, we got him to take the Sky-Scraper and the Acton run.
And when Georgie, who takes the Flyer every other day, is off duty, he climbs into Dad's cab, shoves the old gentleman aside, and shoots around the yard in the rejuvenated Sky-Scraper at a hair-raising rate of speed.
After a while the old engine got so full of alkali that Georgie gave her a new name—Soda-Water Sal—and it hangs to her yet. We thought the best of her had gone in the Harvard wreck; but there came a time when Dad and Soda-Water Sal showed us we were very much mistaken.
Soda-Water Sal
When the great engine which we called the Sky-Scraper came out of the Zanesville shops, she was rebuilt from pilot to tender.
Our master-mechanic, Neighbor, had an idea, after her terrific collision, that she could not stand heavy main-line passenger runs, so he put her on the Acton cut-off. It was what railroad men call a jerk-water run, whatever that may be; a little jaunt of ten miles across the divide connecting the northern division with the Denver stem. It was just about like running a trolley, and the run was given to Dad Sinclair, for after that lift at Oxford his back was never strong enough to shovel coal, and he had to take an engine or quit railroading.
Thus it happened that after many years he took the throttle once more and ran over, twice a day, as he does yet, from Acton to Willow Creek.
His boy, Georgie Sinclair, the kid engineer, took the run on the Flyer opposite Foley, just as soon as he got well.
Georgie, who was never happy unless he had eight or ten Pullmans behind him, and the right of way over everything between Omaha and Denver, made great sport of his father's little smoking-car and day-coach behind the big engine.
Foley made sport of the remodelled engine. He used to stand by while the old engineer was oiling and ask him whether he thought she could catch a jack-rabbit. "I mean," Foley would say, "if the rabbit was feeling well."
Dad Sinclair took it all grimly and quietly; he had railroaded too long to care for anybody's chaff. But one day, after the Sky-Scraper had gotten her flues pretty well chalked up with alkali, Foley insisted that she must be renamed.
"I have the only genuine sky-scraper on the West End now myself," declared Foley. He did have a new class H engine, and she was awe-inspiring, in truth. "I don't propose," he continued, "to have her confused with your old tub any longer, Dad."
Dad, oiling his old tub affectionately, answered never a word.
"She's full of soda, isn't she, father?" asked Georgie, standing by.
"Reckon she is, son."
"Full of water, I suppose?"
"Try to keep her that way, son."
"Sal-soda, isn't it, Dad?"
"Now I can't say. As to that—I can't say."
"We'll call her Sal Soda, Georgie," suggested Foley.
"No," interposed Georgie; "stop a bit. I have it. Not Sal Soda, at all—make it Soda-Water Sal."
Then they laughed uproariously; and in the teeth of Dad Sinclair's protests—for he objected at once and vigorously—the queer name stuck to the engine, and sticks yet.
To have seen the great hulking machine you would never have suspected there could be another story left in her. Yet one there was; a story of the wind. As she stood, too, when old man Sinclair took her on the Acton run, she was the best illustration I have ever seen of the adage that one can never tell from the looks of a frog how far it will jump.
Have you ever felt the wind? Not, I think, unless you have lived on the seas or on the plains. People everywhere think the wind blows; but it really blows only on the ocean and on the prairies.
The summer that Dad took the Acton run, it blew for a month steadily. All of one August—hot, dry, merciless; the despair of the farmer and the terror of trainmen.
It was on an August evening, with the gale still sweeping up from the southwest, that Dad came lumbering into Acton with his little trolley train. He had barely pulled up at the platform to unload his passengers when the station-agent, Morris Reynolds, coatless and hatless, rushed up to the engine ahead of the hostler and sprang into the cab. Reynolds was one of the quietest fellows in the service. To see him without coat or hat didn't count for much in such weather; but to see him sallow with fright and almost speechless was enough to stir even old Dad Sinclair.
It was not Dad's habit to ask questions, but he looked at the man in questioning amazement. Reynolds choked and caught at his breath, as he seized the engineer's arm and pointed down the line.
"Dad," he gasped, "three cars of coal standing over there on the second spur blew loose a few minutes ago."
"Where are they?"
"Where are they? Blown through the switch and down the line, forty miles an hour."
The old man grasped the frightened man by the shoulder. "What do you mean? How long ago? When is 1 due? Talk quick, man! What's the matter with you?"
"Not five minutes ago. No. 1 is due here in less than thirty minutes; they'll go into her sure. Dad," cried Reynolds, all in a fright, "what'll I do? For Heaven's sake do something. I called up Riverton and tried to catch 1, but she'd passed. I was too late. There'll be a wreck, and I'm booked for the penitentiary. What can I do?"
All the while the station-agent, panic-stricken, rattled on Sinclair was looking at his watch—casting it up—charting it all under his thick, gray, grizzled wool, fast as thought could compass.
No. 1 headed for Acton, and her pace was a hustle every mile of the way; three cars of coal blowing down on her, how fast he dared not think; and through it all he was asking himself what day it was. Thursday? Up! Yes, Georgie, his boy, was on the Flyer No. 1. It was his day up. If they met on a curve—
"Uncouple her!" roared Dad Sinclair, in a giant tone.
"What are you going to do?"
"Burns," thundered Dad to his fireman, "give her steam, and quick, boy! Dump in grease, waste, oil, everything! Are you clear there?" he cried, opening the throttle as he looked back.
The old engine, pulling clear of her coaches, quivered as she gathered herself under the steam. She leaped ahead with a swish. The drivers churned in the sand, bit into it with gritting tires, and forged ahead with a suck and a hiss and a roar. Before Reynolds had fairly gathered his wits, Sinclair, leaving his train on the main track in front of the depot, was clattering over the switch after the runaways. The wind was a terror, and they had too good a start. But the way Soda-Water Sal took the gait when she once felt her feet under her made the wrinkled engineer at her throttle set his mouth with the grimness of a gamester. It meant the runaways—and catch them—or the ditch for Soda-Water Sal; and the throbbing old machine seemed to know it, for her nose hung to the steel like the snout of a pointer.
He was a man of a hundred even then—Burns; but nobody knew it, then. We hadn't thought much about Burns before. He was a tall, lank Irish boy, with an open face and a morning smile. Dad Sinclair took him on because nobody else would have him. Burns was so green that Foley said you couldn't set his name afire. He would, so Foley said, put out a hot box just by blinking at it.
But every man's turn comes once, and it had come for Burns. It was Dick Burns's chance now to show what manner of stuff was bred in his long Irish bones. It was his task to make the steam—if he could—faster than Dad Sinclair could burn it. What use to grip the throttle and scheme if Burns didn't furnish the power, put the life into her heels as she raced the wind—the merciless, restless gale sweeping over the prairie faster than horse could fly before it?
Working smoothly and swiftly into a dizzy whirl, the monstrous drivers took the steel in leaps and bounds. Dad Sinclair, leaning from the cab window, gloatingly watched their gathering speed, pulled the bar up notch after notch, and fed Burns's fire into the old engine's arteries fast and faster than she could throw it into her steel hoofs.
That was the night the West End knew that a greenhorn had cast his chrysalis and stood out a man. Knew that the honor-roll of our frontier division wanted one more name, and that it was big Dick Burns's. Sinclair hung silently desperate to the throttle, his eyes straining into the night ahead, and the face of the long Irish boy, streaked with smut and channelled with sweat, lit every minute with the glare of the furnace as he fed the white-hot blast that leaped and curled and foamed under the crown-sheet of Soda-Water Sal.
There he stooped and sweat and swung, as she slewed and lurched and jerked across the fish-plates. Carefully, nursingly, ceaselessly he pushed the steam-pointer higher, higher, higher on the dial—and that despite the tremendous draughts of Dad's throttle.
Never a glance to the right or the left, to the track or the engineer. From the coal to the fire, the fire to the water, the water to the gauge, the gauge to the stack, and back again to the coal—that was Burns. Neither eyes nor ears nor muscles for anything but steam.
Such a firing as the West End never saw till that night; such a firing as the old engine never felt in her choking flues till that night; such a firing as Dad Sinclair, king of all West and East End firemen, lifted his hat to—that was Burns's firing that night on Soda-Water Sal; the night she chased the Acton runaways down the line to save Georgie Sinclair and No. 1.
