"He told me once that if he hadn't saved 59 that night he would never have signed another order anywhere on any road."
"Why?"
"Why? Because, after it was all over, he found out that his own mother was aboard 59. Didn't you ever hear that? Well, sir, it was Christmas Eve, and the year was 1884."
Christmas Eve everywhere; but on the West End it was just plain December 24th.
"High winds will prevail for ensuing twenty-four hours. Station agents will use extra care to secure cars on sidings; brakemen must use care to avoid being blown from moving trains."
That is about all Bucks said in his bulletins that evening; not a word about Christmas or Merry Christmas. In fact, if Christmas had come to McCloud that night they couldn't have held it twenty-four minutes, much less twenty-four hours; the wind was too high. All the week, all the day, all the night it had blown—a December wind; dry as an August noon, bitter as powdered ice. It was in the early days of our Western railroading, when we had only one fast train on the schedule—the St. Louis-California Express; and only one fast engine on the division—the 101; and only one man on the whole West End—Bucks.
Bucks was assistant superintendent and master-mechanic and train-master and chief dispatcher and storekeeper—and a bully good fellow. There were some boys in the service; among them, Callahan. Callahan was seventeen, with hair like a sunset, and a mind quick as an air-brake. It was his first year at the key, and he had a night trick under Bucks.
Callahan claims it blew so hard that night that it blew most of the color out of his hair. Sod houses had sprung up like dog-towns in the buffalo grass during the fall. But that day homesteaders crept into dugouts and smothered over buffalo chip fires. Horses and cattle huddled into friendly pockets a little out of the worst of it, or froze mutely in pitiless fence corners on the divides. Sand drove gritting down from the Cheyenne hills like a storm of snow. Streets of the raw prairie towns stared deserted at the sky. Even cowboys kept their ranches, and through the gloom of noon the sun cast a coward shadow. It was a wretched day, and the sun went down with the wind tuning into a gale, and all the boys in bad humor—except Bucks. Not that Bucks couldn't get mad; but it took more than a cyclone to start him.
No. 59, the California Express, was late that night. All the way up the valley the wind caught her quartering. Really the marvel is that out there on the plains such storms didn't blow our toy engines clear off the rails; for that matter they might as well have taken the rails, too, for none of them went over sixty pounds. 59 was due at eleven o'clock; it was half-past twelve when she pulled in and on Callahan's trick. But Bucks hung around the office until she staggered up under the streaked moonlight, as frowsy a looking train as ever choked on alkali.