A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

Much of the talk between the bosses at this time referred to a later meeting, when, on an appointed day, the gangs for many miles along the line were to foregather at Grand Island under the Division-Superintendent’s orders. There was to be a general distribution then of new sleepers along the railway.

What interested me most at the moment was the tone of the men in speaking of their superior in the service. I had caught it frequently in earlier references to the Superintendent among ourselves. He was the official in command of all the section-gangs in the division and directly responsible for the condition of the road.

The men told me that he had been a section-hand himself and then a boss, and that he had worked his way to the position of superintendent in a long service with the company. The feeling that they bore him was one of admiration, not unmixed with fear. They respected his knowledge of every detail of their work, and a certain liking for him grew out of the fact of his having been a laborer like themselves, but they feared him with an awesome fear.

I remember his passing one afternoon while we were at work. We had stood aside at the coming of a freight train, and, as we stepped back to our work, we caught sight of a wiry little man standing on the rear platform of the caboose, his hands clasping the railing and his eyes intent on the road-bed. Osborn thought that he saw the flutter of a piece of paper in the dust raised by the passing train, and suspecting that it was an order for himself, he dropped his tools and searched the embankment, and even the neighboring cornfield to the leeward, with an eagerness that might have marked a hunt for hid treasure. He could find nothing, however, and for the rest of the day, and I know not for how much longer, the incident was upon his mind with a sense of keen anxiety.

When the day appointed for distributing the sleepers came, we boarded at Buda an eastbound passenger train, and were pressed into a smoking-car already overcrowded by bosses and section-hands. Osborn vouched for us to the conductor, as the other bosses did for their men when we picked up a gang at almost every station.

It was a welcome escape to get off at Grand Island. Like boys set free from school we clambered over the long freight-train, laden with sleepers, that stood waiting for us on a siding. Our orders were perfectly clear. We were to distribute ourselves through the train and, at a given signal, to unlade the sleepers as fast as we could, throwing them along the road-bed well free of the line. Each man was to remember, moreover, that, at the end of his own section, he was to leave the train.

I found myself in a box-car with three other navvies, all strangers to me. Sleepers lay piled to the roof from end to end of the floor, with only a passage across the middle wide enough for us to begin the work. A blue-eyed young Swede and I had just agreed to be partners when the Superintendent passed in his way along the train, noting the number of men in each car.

In a few moments we were off, and we had not gone far before the prearranged signal came. Then we bent to the work with a will. It was a break in the regular routine and we took it as a lark. Two men attacked one side of the passage and the Swede and I the other. Soon it was a race between us to see which could unload the faster.

The train moved slowly, discharging sleepers that piled themselves in grotesque confusion along the sides of the embankment, while above the noise of the cars, rose the voices of the men as they shouted excitedly in the unwonted rivalry.

Before I realized that we had gone half so far, I caught sight of the Buda station. Our car was nearly empty, and as nearly empty at our end as at the other, the Swede and I thought, but our fellow-navvies claimed a victory when, at the end of the section, I jumped to the ground with much care to avoid the flying sleepers. Osborn was there, and soon the other members of the gang gathered, and then we returned to the usual work until six o’clock.