Plain Mary Smith: A Romance of Red Saunders

by Henry Wallace Phillips

Well!!

Howsomever, it seemed manners to me to refuse all pleasant propositions, so I said "no" and prepared to slide away. But he was a wise man.

"Better come down to the shed," he says. So I climbed aboard with no more talk.

"This is the throttle," says he. "You pull that and she goes: try it."

Notwithstanding I expected that engine to explode and scatter us the minute a strange hand was laid on her, I wrastled my nerve together and moved the lever a tiny bit. "Chow!" says the old engine, "Chow-chow-chow!" and I near had a fit with pride and scaredness. It is a great sensation to hold them big critters under your hand. I never knew an engineer yet that got rid of it entirely.

So there was me, white in the face with grandeur, hogging the engine into the shed. I couldn't sleep much that night. When I did doze off, it was to travel a great many miles a minute on a road-bed laid flat against the side of a mountain, with an engine that had wash-tubs for drivers, and was run by winding up by a crank, like the old clock in the hall. Lord! how I whizzed around the turns! Grinding away like a lunatic, until the road ended—just ended, that's all, and off we went into the air. From that on I had business at the railroad every evening I could get off.

I went over to my engine one night. There wasn't a soul around. My friend was as ingenious a Yank as ever helped make this world a factory. He'd got up a scheme for a brake, almost the identical thing with the air-brake they use to-day, except Jerry took pressure into his brake-pistons straight from the boiler. He spent every cent he had to get one made and put on his pusher. How he used to explain it to me, and tell me what we'd do when he sold his patent! For he was a great friend of mine, Jerry was, and I knew the workings of that brake as well as he did himself. The reason he wasn't around was that he'd taken the pusher down the line to show his scheme to some railroad people. So there stood an engine all alone—the one I was used to, I thought—and it occurred to me there'd be no particular harm if I got aboard and moved her up and down the track a foot or two—you see, I'd never had her single-handed. So I started easy, and reversed her, and played around that way for a while, till naturally I got venturesome. One stunt that Jerry and I loved to try was to check her up short with his patent brake. The poor old pusher never got put to bed without being stood on end a half-dozen times; that suggested to me that I'd slam her down on the shed doors and see how near I could come to them without hitting. I backed 'way off, set her on the corner, yanked the throttle, and we boiled for the shed, me as satisfied with myself as could be. I didn't leave much margin for stopping, so there wasn't a lot of track left when I reached down for the brake-lever, and found—it wasn't there! If some day you reach for something and find your right arm's missing, you'll know how I felt. In the little bit of time before the smash, there wasn't a scrap of my brain working—and then, Holy Jeeroosalum! How we rammed that shed! The door fell over, cleaning that engine to the boiler; stack, bell, sand-box, and whistle lay in the dust, and all of the cab but where I sat. Quicker'n lightning we bulled through the other end, and the rest of the cab left there. How it come I didn't get killed, I don't know—all that remained of the shed was a ruin, and that had a list to port that would have scart a Cape-Horner. I woke up then and threw her over kerbang, but she went into the bunker squirting fire from her drivers. I shut her down, took one despairing look, and says out loud, "I guess I'll go home."

I felt about as bad as falls to the lot of man at any age. Jerry was sure to get into trouble over it; he'd make a shrewd guess at who did it, whether I told or not, and his confidence in me would be a thing of the past—nothing but black clouds on the sky-line, whilst inside of me some kind of little devil was hollering all the time, "But wasn't it a gorgeous smash!"

I went home and to bed that night without speaking, resolved to let my misfortunes leak out when they got ready. That's the kind of resolution I've never been able to keep—I've got to face a thing, got to get it done with, swallow my medicine, and clean the table for a new deal.

Next morning I told father. You can imagine how easy it was—me stumbling and stuttering while he sat there, still as if he'd been painted for the occasion.