“Why,” remarked one white-haired man, gazing after them, “they look just as we looked after we got through the Wilderness. They look like they’ve been under fire for a week.”
The superintendent, passing, heard the remark.
“They have,” he answered, dryly. “They’ve been under the heaviest kind of fire continuously for thirty-six hours. You fellows have had whole libraries written about you, and about a thousand monuments built to you. You get a pension while you live, and your grave is decorated when you die. I’m not saying you don’t deserve it all, for I believe you do. But there’s some other people in the world who deserve honour and glory, too,—section-men, for instance. I never heard of anybody building a monument to them, or calling them heroes; and, if there are any flowers on their graves, it’s their families put them there!”
He passed on, while his auditor stared open-mouthed, not knowing whether to be moved or angry. The superintendent’s nerves were shaken somewhat, or he might have spoken less bitterly; but a sudden sharp sense of the world’s injustice had clamoured for utterance.
And the wrecking-train was run in again on the siding, ready for the next trip.
The men, of course, paid the penalty for their almost superhuman exertions. No men could work as they had done and not feel the after-effects in diminished vitality. The younger ones among them soon recovered, for youth has a wonderful power of recuperation; the older ones were a little more bent, a little more gnarled and withered, a little nearer the end of the journey. They had sacrificed themselves on the altar of the great system which they served; they had done so without a murmur, with no thought of shirking or holding back. They would do so again without an instant’s hesitation whenever duty called them. For that was their life-work, to which they were dedicated with a simple, unquestioning devotion. There was something touching about it,—something grand and noble, too,—just as there is in a man dedicating himself to any work, whether to conquer the world with Napoleon, or to keep clean a stretch of street pavement committed to his care. It was this dedication, this singleness of purpose—this serfdom to the road—which Allan grew to understand more and more deeply, and to glory in.
And it was not an unworthy service, for the road was worth devotion. Not the company of capitalists, who sat in an office somewhere in the East and manipulated its stocks and bonds, but the road itself,—this thing of steel and oak which had rendered possible the development of the country, which had added fabulously to its wealth, which bound together its widely separated States into one indivisible Union. They were servants of the force which, more than any other, has made our modern civilization possible.
Let me add that the story of this wreck is no imaginary one. It is a true story which actually occurred just as it is set down here; it is an experience which repeats itself over and over again in the life of every railroad man; it was a battle which, in one form or another, railroad men are always fighting, and always winning. And, more than most battles, is it worth winning!
CHAPTER XIII.
A NEW DANGER
There is a superstition among railroad men which, strangely enough, is seemingly warranted by experience, that when one wreck occurs, two more are certain to follow. And, sure enough, two more did follow, though neither was so serious as the one at Vinton; which, indeed, still lives in the memories of those who helped clear it away as the worst that ever happened on the division.