One day a war-party of Sioux clattered into town. They tore around like a storm, and threatened to scalp everything, even to the local tickets. The head braves dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the dispatcher's office up-stairs. The dispatcher was hiding under a loose plank in the baggage-room floor; Tom, being bald as a sand-hill, considered himself exempt from scalping-parties. He was working a game of solitaire when they bore down on him, and interested them at once. That led to a parley, which ended in Porter's hiring the whole band to brake on freight-trains. Old man Sankey is said to have been one of that original war-party.
Now this is merely a caboose story—told on winter nights when trainmen get stalled in the snow drifting down from the Sioux country. But what follows is better attested.
Sankey, to start with, had a peculiar name. An unpronounceable, unspellable, unmanageable name. I never heard it; so I can't give it. It was as hard to catch as an Indian cur, and that name made more trouble on the pay-rolls than all the other names put together. Nobody at headquarters could handle it; it was never turned in twice alike, and they were always writing Tom Porter about the thing. Tom explained several times that it was Sitting Bull's ambassador who was drawing that money, and that he usually signed the pay-roll with a tomahawk. But nobody at Omaha ever knew how to take a joke.
The first time Tom went down he was called in very solemnly to explain again about the name; and being in a hurry, and very tired of the whole business, Tom spluttered:
"Hang it, don't bother me any more about that name. If you can't read it, make it Sankey, and be done with it."
They took Tom at his word. They actually did make it Sankey; and that's how our oldest conductor came to bear the name of the famous singer. And more I may say: good name as it was—and is—the Sioux never disgraced it.
Probably every old traveller on the system knew Sankey. He was not only always ready to answer questions, but, what is much more, always ready to answer the same question twice: it is that which makes conductors gray-headed and spoils their chances for heaven—answering the same questions over and over again. Children were apt to be a bit startled at first sight of Sankey—he was so dark. But he had a very quiet smile, that always made them friends after the second trip through the sleepers, and they sometimes ran about asking for him after he had left the train.
Of late years—and it is this that hurts—these very same children, grown ever so much bigger, and riding again to or from California or Japan or Australia, will ask when they reach the West End about the Indian conductor.
But the conductors who now run the overland trains pause at the question, checking over the date limits on the margins of the coupon tickets, and, handing the envelopes back, will look at the children and say, slowly, "He isn't running any more."