A RAILROAD SAINT IN IDAHO
The “railroad saint” was a locomotive engineer. His life was ever an open book, yet while careful and almost severe in his personal religious habits, he did not criticize the manners of his associates. He simply let his well kept searchlight shine.
Though born in Ohio, his boy life was spent mainly in Nebraska, when it was just emerging from the ragged swaddlings of rough frontierdom; and during his young manhood he lived in Wyoming, at the time when men “carried the law in their hip-pockets,” as he graphically expressed it.
Early becoming an employee of the Union Pacific, he was a permanent portion of its westward intermountain extension, and he did his life’s work among the scenic cliffs and clefts of the picturesque crags and corrugated cañons of the wrinkled ridges in the Rocky and the Wahsatch ranges. Opportunities for literary education were very limited to one so engaged, 50 and little more than what was absolutely necessary to the railmen did he receive. But he was not ignorant by any means. In later years he read extendedly and with careful discrimination. He had a poet’s soul, but was not visionary.
His mother had been a careful and sensible Christian. The indelible impress she left upon him was like to that given by Jochebed to her son Moses. He never wholly escaped from her hallowed influence, although he descended into vicious living and became a notorious and blatant blasphemer, sceptic, and drunkard.
Once when attending a national convention of railway engineers in an Eastern city he noticed a little flower boy vainly attempting to dispose of his roses. Our engineer (who always had a feeling for the “other fellow”) paid the lad for all he had left and directed him to carry them to the hotel where the delegates were stopping, and give them to the ladies in the parlor. This act was repeated on successive days. It attracted attention finally, and one of the delegates asked him if he were a Christian. Characteristically he blurted out: 51 “Do you see anything about me that indicates it? If so, I will take it off at once. Why do you ask such a question?”
“Because,” said the questioner, “your kindness to that pale-faced little flower boy makes people think you are.”