The White Mail

by Cy Warman

As tank after tank they passed without stopping, the fireman would look over at the engineer, and the driver, making the sign of a man drinking (which means “water” on an engine), would jerk his thumb over his shoulder, and the fireman would go back and sound the engine tank and show the wet line on the shovel handle to the engineer, and he would raise his right hand and wriggle his wrist, which means “All right, let ’er go.”

Then he would take off his cap, hold his head out of the cab window, and cool his temples in the dewy twilight. He had no thought now of danger; not the faintest appreciation of the risk he was running. He would drive her so to the very edge of the Mississippi, and, if the lights were white, and the switches right, and if it were necessary, he would take the trackless, tieless skeleton of the big bridge that was being built over the broad river. They were flying.

The President of the C. & A., by a singular coincidence, was watching at the Columbia Theatre in Chicago, men and women going ’round the world in eighty days. “This,” thought the railway man, “is play-acting, and you can’t prove it. But this,” he would add, as message after message was passed into his box, “this play that the Alton is putting up to-night is the real thing.”

The Midnight Express was thirty minutes over-due to leave when the driver of the special, pale but calm faced, dashed up to the station at East St. Louis and brought them to a stand with an emergency stop.

“This is no boy’s business,” growled the Superintendent, as he hurried the young man from the special to the rear of the Midnight Express. “Where’s your father?”

“In Chicago. Got any instructions?”

The Superintendent handed the voyager an envelope containing a letter, his transportation, and a check for an upper berth.

“Thank you,” said the young man, and, ignoring the insult to his tender age, he swung himself into one of the sleepers that were gliding by.

Side by side with the Midnight Express came the O. & M. broad gauge, lumbering along, her high wheels climbing the cold steel rails that lay in “splendid isolation,” with six feet of earth between them. The O. & M. Cannon Ball was jealous of the Midnight Express. In fact it was the coming of the new line, with her narrower, swifter engines, that caused the rails of the O. & M. to get together on a sensible gauge, that has since become a standard for American railways. Side by side the two trains passed the last lights of the city, and found the open fields. Of course there would be a race. Everybody knew that, and when the big engine had got her short train well under way, and her smoke lay across the Van Line in the glare of the light of the Midnight Express, she whistled the other man ahead. Under these circumstances that constitutes a “dare,” and no self-respecting engineer will take it. The Van answered the signal. The Express was a heavy train, and before the driver could get them going (he would not tear the fireman’s fire, full of green coal) he was looking into the tail lights of the Cannon Ball. Five miles out the broad gauge had reached the limit of her speed. The black plunger at the head of the Night Express was hanging at her flank, as you have seen a farm-dog hang at the side of a sow, racing up through a field, with only a row of corn between them. Gradually she began to gain. To the joy of her driver and all of her passengers, she began to crawl up. Her headlight could no longer be seen from the sleepers behind the Cannon Ball—only the glare of it. Now her stack stood opposite the mail car on the O. & M. She would soon have the sow by the ear. There was not a man, woman, or child on either of the two trains that did not enter into the excitement of the chase. Now the headlight of the broad gauge engine shone full on the face of the daring driver of the Midnight Express, who was looking back from the cab window. He whistled the man ahead, and a moment later the Van flyer, swinging into a shallow cañon near Collinsville, showed her tail lights to the Cannon Ball.

Of all the people on the two trains, the man who was to occupy lower seven and the man who was to occupy upper seven were least interested in the race. The former kept his thin face, with its receding forehead, pressed to the pane, peering into the night, and thinking wild and awful thoughts.