"I reckon maybe thirty-five or forty," said McNeal. "Eh, Dad?"
"Maybe, son," growled Hamilton; "and break my back doing it?"
"I gave you a helper once and you kicked him off the tender," retorted Neighbor.
"Don't want anybody raking ashes for me—not while I'm drawing full time," Dad frowned.
But the upshot of it was that we put the Sky-Scraper at hauling wheat, and within a week she was doing the work of a double-header.
It was May, and a thousand miles east of us, in Chicago, there was trouble in the wheat-pit on the Board of Trade. You would hardly suspect what queer things that wheat scramble gave rise to, affecting Georgie McNeal and old man Hamilton and a lot of other fellows away out on a railroad division on the Western plains; but this was the way of it:
A man sitting in a little office on La Salle Street wrote a few words on a very ordinary-looking sheet of paper, and touched a button. That brought a colored boy, and he took the paper out to a young man who sat at the eastern end of a private wire.
The next thing we knew, orders began to come in hot from the president's office—the president of the road, if you please—to get that wheat on the high line into Chicago, and to get it there quickly.
Trainmen, elevator-men, superintendents of motive power, were spurred with special orders and special bulletins. Farmers, startled by the great prices offering, hauled night and day. Every old tub we had in the shops and on the scrap was overhauled and hustled into the service. The division danced with excitement. Every bushel of wheat on it must be in Chicago by the morning of May 31st.
For two weeks we worked everything to the limit; the Sky-Scraper led any two engines on the line. Even Dad Hamilton was glad to cry enough, and take a helper. We doubled them every day, and the way the wheat flew over the line towards the lower end of Lake Michigan was appalling to speculators. It was a battle between two commercial giants—and a battle to the death. It shook not alone the country, it shook the world; but that was nothing to us; our orders were simply to move the wheat. And the wheat moved.