"Soon after this incident, while going over my route one cold night the driver stopped the team and called to me. I sat in a seat on the inside with my revolvers lying beside me. Getting out of the door, the driver told me there was a man crouched down in the road ahead of us. We were out on the prairie some miles from a station. I went forward, with no feeling of pleasure, to investigate. The man came forward also and I recognized him as a fellow who had been lying around one of the stations for several days. I asked him what he wanted and he replied that he wished to get in and ride for a ways. Although the night was cold I could not let him in for fear that he had companions farther up the road and was only getting inside to get the lay of the land. The express was unusually valuable that night. The fellow ran along behind the coach for some time, but the horses gradually outdistanced him, and that was the last we ever saw of him."
After the completion of the railroad, Mr. Reiner was given a position as express messenger on one of the trains. "Many times," said the veteran express messenger, "I have literally had the car floor paved with gold and silver, over which I walked in doing my work. We had carried lots of gold and silver bars east from Virginia City, in Nevada. In order that, the weight should be evenly distributed the bars were spread like paving bricks all over the car floor. The following description, written by a reporter from one of the Council Bluffs papers while Mr. Reiner was yet at Boone, gives a description of the work of carrying the bullion:
"While viewing the scenes at the transfer yesterday afternoon, we boarded W. F. Reiner's Northwestern express car and beheld a scene that caused our hump of inquisitiveness to jump. Mr. Reiner is a messenger of the American Merchants Union Express company, and will have served in his present position and on his present route seven years in November next. He lives in Boone. On the floor of his car were sixty-seven gold and silver bricks. That is, each brick was composed of gold and silver in compound. In some of them, silver predominated—in value. They resemble silver almost entirely in color. They are of somewhat irregular sizes, though nearly every one of them weighs more than one hundred pounds. Some of them were much more refined than the others. The amount of gold and silver in each one is stamped on the face or top, in different lines, and the total value of the brick is added in a third line. The value of each metal is marked, even to a cent. How those values can be so accurately determined in a compound brick is beyond our knowledge. Fifty-seven of those bricks which we yesterday saw, were worth $101,950.80. The remaining eleven were worth $15,077.57. They were mostly from Virginia City and are being taken to New York. Mr. Reiner informed us also that these bricks are carried only by the Northwestern and Rock Island roads. On some days he has had as many as 160 of them in his car. They are taken east nearly every day."
For ten years Mr. Reiner lived in Boone, then a redivision of the road brought him back to this city. For the next fifteen years he continued to run out of this city and do active service. Thirteen years ago the terrible strain he had undergone in the earlier years of service for the company began to tell upon him and he broke down in health. Then, if a private company ever did a good and wise thing, the American Express company did it. They said they realized the value that Mr. Reiner had been to them when they were getting established in Iowa and running their route through to Omaha, and they would not forget his efficient services now that he was getting old.
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
Linn County Libraries
THE IOWA MASONIC LIBRARY
BY HELEN R. DONNAN
The Iowa Masonic Library, "unique in idea and unapproachable in scope," is an institution of which Cedar Rapids is proud, and to which the Masons of Iowa point as a satisfactory answer to those who would question the purposes of the fraternity.