Every one who jumped got clear. Sinclair lit in twenty feet of snow, and they pulled him out with a rope; he wasn't scratched; even the bridge was not badly strained. No. 1 pulled over it next day. Sankey was right: there was no more snow; not enough to hide the dead engines on the rocks: the line was open.
There never was a funeral in McCloud like Sankey's. George Sinclair and Neeta followed together; and of mourners there were as many as there were people. Every engine on the division carried black for thirty days.
His contrivance for fighting snow has never yet been beaten on the high line. It is perilous to go against a drift behind it—something has to give.
But it gets there—as Sankey got there—always; and in time of blockade and desperation on the West End they still send out Sankey's Double Header; though Sankey—so the conductors tell the children, travelling east or travelling west—Sankey isn't running any more.
Siclone Clark
"There goes a fellow that walks like Siclone Clark," exclaimed Duck Middleton. Duck was sitting in the train-master's office with a group of engineers. He was one of the black-listed strikers, and runs an engine now down on the Santa Fé. But at long intervals Duck gets back to revisit the scenes of his early triumphs. The men who surrounded him were once at deadly odds with Duck and his chums, though now the ancient enmities seem forgotten, and Duck—the once ferocious Duck—sits occasionally among the new men and gossips about early days on the West End.
"Do you remember Siclone, Reed?" asked Duck, calling to me in the private office.
"Remember him?" I echoed. "Did anybody who ever knew Siclone forget him?"
"I fired passenger for Siclone twenty years ago," resumed Duck. "He walked just like that fellow; only he was quicker. I reckon you fellows don't know what a snap you have here now," he continued, addressing the men around him. "Track fenced; ninety-pound rails; steel bridges; stone culverts; slag ballast; sky-scrapers. No wonder you get chances to haul such nobs as Lilioukalani and Schley and Dewey, and cut out ninety miles an hour on tangents.