"Hear what? Smell what?"
"Hear the noises of the engine. If any little thing was working wrong, I'd hear it. If there was any wear on the bearings, I'd hear it. Why, if a mouse squeaked somewhere inside of 590, I guess I'd hear it."
Then he went on to explain that the ordinary roar of the engine, which drowned everything for me, was to him an unimportant background of sound that made little impression, and left his ears free for other sounds.
"I get so accustomed to listening to an engine," he added, "that often up home, talking with my wife and child, I find myself trying to hear sounds from the round-house. And, after a run, I talk to people as if they were deaf."
"You spoke about smelling better."
"That's right. I can smell a hot box in a minute, or oil burning. All engineers can. Why, there was—"
This led to the story of poor Giddings, killed on 590 three years before through this very necessity of putting his head out of the cab window. Giddings had Bullard's place, and was one of the most trusted men in the Burlington employ.
"You saw last night," said Bullard, "how the boiler in 590 shuts off the engineer from the fireman. And prob'ly you noticed those posts along the road that hold the tell-tale strings. They're to warn crews on freight-car tops when it is time to duck for bridges. Well, Giddings was coming along one night between Biggsville and Gladstone—that's about ten miles before you get to the Mississippi. He was driving her fast to make up time, sixty miles an hour easy, and he put his head out to hear and to smell, the way I've explained it.
"There must have been a post set too near the track, and anyway 590's cab is extra wide, so the first thing he knew—and he didn't know that—his head was knocked clean off, or as good as that, and there was 590, her throttle wide open, tearing along, with a fireman stoking for all he was worth and a dead engineer hanging out the window.
"So they ran for eight miles, and Billy Maine—he was firing—never suspected anything wrong—for of course he couldn't see—until they struck the Mississippi bridge at full speed. You remember crossing the bridge just before we pulled in here. It's twenty-two hundred feet long, and we always give a long whistle before we get to it, and then slow down. That's the law," he added, smiling, "and, besides, there's a draw to look out for. When he heard no whistle this time, Billy Maine jumped around quick to where Giddings was, and then he saw he had a corpse for a partner."