Walker of the Secret Service

by Melville Davisson Post

In order to make no mistake, it was the plan of this man to sit fast until we heard the through train blow for a station, two miles away. That would give us time to fix the semaphore.

It seemed a long time as we sat there in the darkness waiting for the train; but it was perhaps, in fact, less than half an hour. Directly we heard the whistle in the distance and we went down to the track; White had got a piece of fence wire and he now climbed the pole and tied the red semaphore arm down over the green and white lights. Mooney went about fifty yards along the track in the direction from which the train was coming, and waited at the place where he thought the engine would stop. White and I hid ourselves where he thought the baggage and express cars would stop.

But our calculations were not accurate.

Instead of the engine stopping where we thought it would, it ran on for at least a hundred yards past the red light. There was a fog, and the engineer did not see the red signal soon enough. The train roared past us. We knew the engineer had thrown on the emergency, “goosed the air” as White called it. The fire from the brake shoes grinding on the wheels showed up red along the whole train. The engineer reversed and brought back his engine to the point where Mooney was hidden behind a tree on the right of way. The engineer was following a rule of the road that one must not under any circumstances run past a red light.

We jumped at once.

Mooney climbed into the engine and took charge of the fireman and engineer. They made no resistance to the masked man with a weapon in his hand. White rushed in and uncoupled the mail and express cars from the rest of the train.

Now, on these through first-class passenger trains, a power velocipede, or what is known in the dialect of the road as a “gasoline speeder,” is always carried in the baggage car. It is an emergency vehicle in order to enable one of the crew to get to a telegraph station in case of a wreck or any accident. When the engine stopped under this unexpected red light of the semaphore a negro porter, seeing two masked men, ran to the baggage car and got the vehicle out on the ground. He was lifting it on his shoulder.

I did not understand what the thing meant at the time, but I called to White and he came out from behind the two cars.

The porter found himself before the round end of an automatic.

“Put that thing back,” said White, “or I’ll blow your head off.”