“That is what I am trying to figure out.”
“Where is the brakeman?” demanded Francis. As he asked the question he saw the big fellow asleep in the corner. Francis shook him roughly. “That comes of depending on some one else,” he muttered to Bucks. “I went to sleep on his promise to watch for an hour––he knew I had been up all last night and told me to take a nap. You see what happened. The moment I went to sleep, he went to sleep,” exclaimed Francis in disgust. “Wake up!” he continued brusquely to the drowsy brakeman. “Where are we? What have we stopped for? What’s all this noise?” Though he asked the questions fast, he expected no answer to any of them from the confused trainman and waited for none. Instead, he threw up a curtain and looked out. “Thunder and guns! Buffaloes!” he cried, and seizing his lantern ran out of the caboose door and climbed the roof-ladder. Bucks was fast upon his heels.
The freight train stood upon a wide plain and in the midst of thousands of buffaloes travelling south. As far as their eyes could reach in all directions, the astonished railroad men beheld a sea of moving buffaloes. Without further delay Francis, followed by Bucks, started along the running boards for the head end of the train.
The conductor found his train intact; but when he reached the head end he could find neither engine, tender, nor crew. All had disappeared. Running down the ladder of the head box-car, the conductor examined the draw-bar for evidence of an accident. The coupling was apparently uninjured but the tender and engine were gone. Francis, more upset than Bucks had ever seen him, or ever afterward saw him, walked moodily back to the caboose. What humiliated him more than the strange predicament in which he found himself was that he had trusted to a subordinate and gone to sleep in his caboose while on duty.
“Serves me right,” he muttered, knitting his brows. “Brakeman,” he added sternly, “take your lantern and flags and get out behind. The 182 minute the buffaloes get across the track, go back two hundred yards and protect us. I will watch the head end. While these buffaloes are crossing they will be protection enough. Soon as it is daylight we will find out where we are.”
The snow continued falling and the buffaloes drifted south with the storm, which was squally. Every moment, as the sky and landscape lightened, Francis, whom Bucks had followed forward, expected to see the last of the moving herd. But an hour passed and a second hour without showing any gaps in the enormous fields. And the brighter the daylight grew, the more buffaloes they could see.
Francis stormed at the situation, but he could do nothing. Finally, and as hope was deserting him, he heard the distant tooting of an engine whistle. It grew louder and louder until Bucks could hear the ringing of a bell and the hissing of the open cylinder cocks of a slow-moving locomotive. Gaps could now be discerned in the great herds of buffaloes, and through the blowing snow the uncertain outlines of the backing 183 engine could dimly be seen. Francis angrily watched the approaching engine, and, as soon as it had cleared the last of the stumbling buffaloes on the track, he walked forward to meet it and greeted the engineman roughly.
“What do you mean by setting my train out here on the main track in the middle of the night?” he demanded ferociously, and those that knew Pat Francis never wanted to add to his anger when it was aroused.
“Don’t get excited,” returned Dan Baggs calmly, for it was the redoubtable Baggs who held the throttle. “I found I was getting short of water. We are just coming to Blackwood Hill and I knew I could never make Blackwood Siding with the train. So I uncoupled and ran to the Blackwood tank for water. We are all right now. Couple us up. If I hadn’t got water, we should have been hung up here till we got another engine.”