ii
Frank Lucius Packard was born of American parents at Montreal on 2 February 1877 and was graduated from McGill University in 1897. The following year he took a postgraduate course in engineering at L’Institut Montefiore, University of Liége, Belgium. He engaged in engineering work in the United States for a number of years and when, in 1906, he began writing for various magazines, his first tales were railroad stories. On the Iron at Big Cloud (1911), The Wire Devils (1918), which tells of the work of a band of expert telegraphers and masters of the art of cipher codes, and The Night Operator (1919) are best characterized in Mr. Packard’s own Foreword to The Night Operator:
“Summed up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also, it is a classic in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations and formulæ of engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason that it could not be any other way. The mountains objected, and objected strenuously, to the process of manhandling. They were there first, the mountains, that was all, and their surrender was a bitter matter.
“So, from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of the Rockies, to where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side merge with the more open, rolling country, the right of way ... sweeps through the rifts in the range like a freed bird from the open door of its cage; clings to canyon edges where a hissing stream bubbles and boils eighteen hundred feet below; burrows its way into the heart of things in long tunnels and short ones; circles a projecting spur in a dizzy whirl, and swoops from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose percentages the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify in its advertising literature, but before which the men in the cabs and the cabooses shut their teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they learned at their mothers’ knees. Some parts of it are worse than others, naturally; but no part of it, to the last inch of its single-tracked mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is grand. That is the Hill Division.”
So much for the setting.
“And the men who man the shops, who pull the throttles on the big, ten-wheel mountain racers, who swing the picks and shovels in the lurching cabs, who do the work about the yards, or from the cupola of a caboose stare out on a string of wriggling flats, boxes and gondolas, and, at night time, watch the high-flung sparks sail heavenward, as the full, deep-chested notes of the exhaust roar an accompaniment in their ears, are men ... whose hearts are big and right.”
The human values of these early stories of Packard’s are as sturdy today as when they were first written; whatever their shortcomings, a lack of vitality was not one of them. The man who was to become a chef of plots began by simply pitching the fat of human nature in the fire of dramatic incident. His first stories are like steaks; and if they are hastily and simply cooked, they are not cooked up. Thick, rich cuts from the flanks of actual life, burned a little at the edges, perhaps, they still are tender with juices and flavor. They nourish directly. Their protein is the example of courage, from the story of a train newsboy who averted a wreck to the tale of how Martin Bradley saved the Rat River Special.