“When I used to be away on long stretches,” he said, “with nothing to do but think, I saw how foolish it was giving my money to a saloon keeper for him to put in the bank instead of putting it there myself. It used to come to me at night, as the engine ran along through the shadows, that the friends I had down in the city were not good for much, and that, if I lost my job or was hurt in an accident, they would be the first to turn their backs on me. At last I decided to get away from all my bad associations and from New York too; so I scraped together what money I could and bought this land, where I have lived ever since with my wife and children. That was the best day’s work I ever did. It was a hard-looking place when I bought it, nothing but rocks and weeds, but I was proud of it, and put in all my spare time fixing it up until I have made it what it is to-day.”
As he spoke the engineer’s eyes wandered complacently over the gardens, the trim gravel walks, and the pretty house—everything as neat and spic-span as the kitchen of a Dutch house-wife.
When not busy with his garden Buchanan’s favorite occupation is reading histories of the war and reminiscences of its great generals. He will sit in his rocking-chair on the shady piazza for hours, reading of Lincoln and McClellan and the stirring scenes in which he himself took part—the battles of Second Bull Run, Seven Days, Big Bethel, and Bristol Station. He has fought these battles over again hundreds of times in his fancy, and many a lonely hour on the track has been brightened by the memories of what he saw and did in the great struggle. His admiration for General McClellan knows no bound, and he entered into quite an argument to show that “McClellan did all the work, sir, and the other fellows got all the glory.” The only vacation Buchanan has taken in a quarter of a century was a few years ago, when he went South for a month to see the old battlefields once more; but they were all changed, and he came back saddened. “I shall never lay off again,” he said, “until I lay off for good.”
Archie Buchanan is but a fair type of the loyal fellows who drive the flying engines of to-day. Many of them are as thrifty as he is; he told me of one veteran in the company’s employ, Thomas Dormatty, who has 363 property in Schenectady valued at one hundred thousand dollars, and who, in spite of his seventy years, does his regular run between Albany and Syracuse. It is easy to see what that means of saving and prudent investment, when one remembers that the best engineers receive only from one hundred and forty to one hundred and sixty dollars per month. And when they have finished their terms of usefulness, and are unable to run any longer, that same day their pay stops, as it stops when they are ill; for railway companies are not philanthropists and have no pension system.
I was glad to learn that there is no truth in the popular notion that engineers are full of superstition. Buchanan told me he had never experienced any such feeling, and had never known a superstitious engineer, with the exception of Nat Sawyer, the veteran who is now at Chicago with Engine 999. It is Nat who runs “the bosses’ engine”—that is, the luxurious observation car which takes the directors and officials of the road on their tours of inspection. In spite of his well-proven courage, Engineer Sawyer always hesitates to go out on his engine if he meets a cross-eyed person in the morning on his way to the roundhouse. That, however, is only the exception which proves the rule.
As he was showing me about his house, which is furnished with taste and comfort, Buchanan stopped before two large portraits of his father and mother. Both of them are alive. His father is eighty-seven, his mother four years younger. Speaking of his parents, the engineer said reverently: “My father was a blacksmith and gave me a strong body, but my mother did more for me than that, because she has prayed for me every day of her life, and I have never had an accident on a train and never got so much as a scratch in the war.”
When I spoke of religion Buchanan showed some reticence. “How can I get time to go to church,” he said, “when I run my engine every other day in the year, Sundays, holidays, and all? I guess my religion is hard work, and I don’t know but it’s as good as any other.”
The religion of hard work! Is it possible for the man who drives one of our great modern trains to have any other religion than that? Fifteen days in the month, twelve months in the year, he runs his engine three hundred miles; and besides that, does extra work when a sick comrade must be replaced, or the occasion demands. The remaining days of the year he is resting for the strain and responsibility of the morrow. He worships in the same place that he does his duty, under the broad arch of heaven; his creed is to keep the train on time, his prayer that danger may be averted. And when his eyes fail or his health breaks down, he says good-by to the old engine which has been his comrade on many a thrilling ride, and spends the years that remain in some quiet, vine-covered home like the one I saw up the Hudson.
