Over the Wire
By Eugene Jones
Snow and ice on that mountain. Nothing but snow. The wind drove it with a howl against the windows, where it stuck on the warm panes. Sometimes I could just make out the blur of the semaphore lights and sometimes I couldn’t. All day the blizzard had dumped its swirling load about us, and now, when night closed down, the storm took the tower in its teeth, shaking it like you’ve seen a dog shake a rat.
Oh, we were warm and cozy enough with our stove red hot. Which was more than Donaldson, the agent at Hastings, could say. His wire talk was rotten, chattery, and he told us he’d run out of coal. Looked like he’d freeze to death, according to him. But Big Ben prophesied grimly that Donaldson could take care of himself, so we might as well save our worries.
I don’t suppose you ever heard of Big Ben, but that is your loss. Every soul on the Mountain Division knew him. His Morse snapped out like a track torpedo, fast, too, but accurate, staccato, with a smooth flow as if a machine had hold of the key. Dots and dashes were part of him, for, after years of it, he could express himself better that way.
Sort of feeling for the language, I suppose. I’ve seen the same gift since, but never to the extent Ben possessed it. Why, he could come mighty close to telling the color of your eyes over a telegraph-wire.
He and I had worked tower BB-17 on the Mountain Division for three years, and during that time I never saw him flurried. Once a freight, running extra, got by us—dispatcher tangled up his train-sheet. Forty minutes later a relay came into stop her or she’d meet 87 on the big grade.
It takes just forty minutes to run from our tower to Hastings, further down the line. Hastings is the last station with a siding before the grade. In other words, the freight ought to have been getting her O. K. from Hastings right then.
Was Ben excited? Not one little bit.