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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Last Spike, by Cy Warman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Last Spike
+       And Other Railroad Stories
+
+Author: Cy Warman
+
+Release Date: January 22, 2006 [EBook #17572]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST SPIKE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Melissa Er-Raqabi, Ted Garvin, Josephine
+Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+LAST SPIKE
+
+AND OTHER
+
+RAILROAD STORIES
+
+BY
+
+CY WARMAN
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+1906
+
+
+_Copyright, 1906_,
+BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+Published February, 1906
+
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                           PAGE
+
+THE LAST SPIKE                               1
+
+THE BELLE OF ATHABASCA                      31
+
+PATHFINDING IN THE NORTHWEST                49
+
+THE CURE'S CHRISTMAS GIFT                   61
+
+THE MYSTERIOUS SIGNAL                       85
+
+CHASING THE WHITE MAIL                     107
+
+OPPRESSING THE OPPRESSOR                   119
+
+THE IRON HORSE AND THE TROLLEY             135
+
+IN THE BLACK CANON                         151
+
+JACK RAMSEY'S REASON                       165
+
+THE GREAT WRECK ON THE PERE MARQUETTE      181
+
+THE STORY OF AN ENGLISHMAN                 193
+
+ON THE LIMITED                             211
+
+THE CONQUEST OF ALASKA                     219
+
+NUMBER THREE                               237
+
+THE STUFF THAT STANDS                      253
+
+THE MILWAUKEE RUN                          273
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST SPIKE
+
+
+"Then there is nothing against him but his poverty?"
+
+"And general appearance."
+
+"He's the handsomest man in America."
+
+"Yes, that is against him, and the fact that he is always _in_ America.
+He appears to be afraid to get out."
+
+"He's the bravest boy in the world," she replied, her face still to the
+window. "He risked his life to drag me from under the ice," she added,
+with a girl's loyalty to her hero and a woman's pride in the man she
+loves.
+
+"Well, I must own he has nerve," her father added, "or he never would
+have accepted my conditions."
+
+"And what where these conditions, pray?" the young woman asked, turning
+and facing her father, who sat watching her every move and gesture.
+
+"First of all, he must do something; and do it off his own bat. His old
+father spent his last dollar to educate this young rascal, to equip him
+for the battle of life, and his sole achievement is a curve that nobody
+can find. Now I insist he shall do something, and I have given him five
+years for the work."
+
+"Five years!" she gasped, as she lost herself in a big chair.
+
+"He is to have time to forget you, and you are to have ample opportunity
+to forget him, which you will doubtless do, for you are not to meet or
+communicate with each other during this period of probation."
+
+"Did he promise this?"
+
+"Upon his honor."
+
+"And if he break that promise?"
+
+"Ah, then he would be without honor, and you would not marry him." A
+moment's silence followed, broken by a long, deep sigh that ended in
+little quivering waves, like the faint ripples that reach the
+shore,--the whispered echoes of the sobbing sea.
+
+"O father, it is cruel! _cruel! cruel!_" she cried, raising a tearful
+face to him.
+
+"It is justice, stern justice; to you, my dear, to myself, and this fine
+young fellow who has stolen your heart. Let him show himself worthy of
+you, and you have my blessing and my fortune."
+
+"Is he going soon?"
+
+"He is gone."
+
+The young woman knelt by her father's chair and bowed her head upon his
+knee, quivering with grief.
+
+This stern man, who had humped himself and made a million, put a hand on
+her head and said:
+
+"Ma-Mary"--and then choked up.
+
+
+II
+
+The tent boy put a small white card down on General Dodge's desk one
+morning, upon which was printed:
+
+    J. BRADFORD, C.E.
+
+The General, who was at that time chief engineer in charge of the
+construction of the first Pacific Railroad, turned the bit of pasteboard
+over. It seemed so short and simple. He ran his eyes over a printed
+list, alphabetically arranged, of directors, promoters, statesmen,
+capitalists, and others who were in the habit of signing "letters of
+recommendation" for young men who wanted to do something and begin well
+up the ladder.
+
+There were no Bradfords. Burgess and Blodgett were the only B's, and the
+General was glad. His desk was constantly littered with the "letters" of
+tenderfeet, and his office-tent filled with their portmanteaus, holding
+dress suits and fine linen.
+
+Here was a curiosity--a man with no press notices, no character, only
+one initial and two chasers.
+
+"Show him in," said the General, addressing the one luxury his hogan
+held. A few moments later the chief engineer was looking into the eye of
+a young man, who returned the look and asked frankly, and without
+embarrassment, for work with the engineers.
+
+"Impossible, young man--full up," was the brief answer.
+
+"Now," thought the General, "he'll begin to beat his breast and haul out
+his 'pull.'" The young man only smiled sadly, and said, "I'm sorry. I
+saw an 'ad' for men in the _Bee_ yesterday, and hoped to be in time," he
+added, rising.
+
+"Men! Yes, we want men to drive mules and stakes, to grade, lay track,
+and fight Indians--but engineers? We've got 'em to use for cross-ties."
+
+"I am able and willing to do any of these things--except the
+Indians--and I'll tackle that if nothing else offers."
+
+"There's a man for you," said the General to his assistant as Bradford
+went out with a note to Jack Casement, who was handling the graders,
+teamsters, and Indian fighters. "No influential friends, no baggage, no
+character, just a man, able to stand alone--a real man in corduroys and
+flannels."
+
+Coming up to the gang, Bradford singled out the man who was swearing
+loudest and delivered the note. "Fall in," said the straw boss, and
+Bradford got busy. He could handle one end of a thirty-foot rail with
+ease, and before night, without exciting the other workmen or making any
+show of superiority, he had quietly, almost unconsciously, become the
+leader of the track-laying gang. The foreman called Casement's
+attention to the new man, and Casement watched him for five minutes.
+
+Two days later a big teamster, having found a bottle of fire-water,
+became separated from his reasoning faculties, crowded under an old
+dump-cart, and fell asleep.
+
+"Say, young fellow," said the foreman, panting up the grade to where
+Bradford was placing a rail, "can you skin mules?"
+
+"I can drive a team, if that's what you mean," was the reply.
+
+"How many?"
+
+"Well," said Bradford, with his quiet smile, "when I was a boy I used to
+drive six on the Montpelier stage."
+
+So he took the eight-mule team and amazed the multitude by hauling
+heavier loads than any other team, because he knew how to handle his
+whip and lines, and because he was careful and determined to succeed.
+Whatever he did he did it with both hands, backed up by all the
+enthusiasm of youth and the unconscious strength of an absolutely
+faultless physique, and directed by a remarkably clear brain. When the
+timekeeper got killed, Bradford took his place, for he could "read
+writin'," an accomplishment rare among the laborers. When the bookkeeper
+got drunk he kept the books, working overtime at night.
+
+In the rush and roar of the fight General Dodge had forgotten the young
+man in corduroys until General Casement called his attention to the
+young man's work. The engineers wanted Bradford, and Casement had
+kicked, and, fearing defeat, had appealed to the chief. They sent for
+Bradford. Yes, he was an engineer, he said, and when he said it they
+knew it was true. He was quite willing to remain in the store department
+until he could be relieved, but, naturally, he would prefer field work.
+
+He got it, and at once. Also, he got some Indian fighting. In less than
+a year he was assigned to the task of locating a section of the line
+west of the Platte. Coming in on a construction train to make his first
+report, the train was held up, robbed, and burned by a band of Sioux.
+Bradford and the train crew were rescued by General Dodge himself, who
+happened to be following them with his "arsenal" car, and who heard at
+Plumb Creek of the fight and of the last stand that Bradford and his
+handful of men were making in the way car, which they had detached and
+pushed back from the burning train. Such cool heroism as Bradford
+displayed here could not escape the notice of so trained an Indian
+fighter as General Dodge. Bradford was not only complimented, but was
+invited into the General's private car. The General's admiration for the
+young pathfinder grew as he received a detailed and comprehensive report
+of the work being done out on the pathless plains. He knew the worth of
+this work, because he knew the country, for he had spent whole months
+together exploring it while in command of that territory, where he had
+been purposely placed by General Sherman, without whose encouragement
+the West could not have been known at that time, and without whose help
+as commander-in-chief of the United States army the road could not have
+been built.
+
+As the pathfinders neared the Rockies the troops had to guard them
+constantly. The engineers reconnoitered, surveyed, located, and built
+inside the picket lines. The men marched to work to the tap of the drum,
+stacked arms on the dump, and were ready at a moment's notice to fall
+in and fight. Many of the graders were old soldiers, and a little fight
+only rested them. Indeed there was more military air about this work
+than had been or has since been about the building of a railroad in this
+country. It was one big battle, from the first stake west of Omaha to
+the last spike at Promontory--a battle that lasted five long years; and
+if the men had marked the graves of those who fell in that fierce fight
+their monuments, properly distributed, might have served as mile-posts
+on the great overland route to-day. But the mounds were unmarked, most
+of them, and many there were who had no mounds, and whose home names
+were never known even to their comrades. If this thing had been done on
+British soil, and all the heroic deeds had been recorded and rewarded, a
+small foundry could have been kept busy beating out V.C.'s. They could
+not know, these silent heroes fighting far out in the wilderness, what a
+glorious country they were conquering--what an empire they were opening
+for all the people of the land. Occasionally there came to the men at
+the front old, worn newspapers, telling wild stories of the failure of
+the enterprise. At other times they heard of changes in the Board of
+Directors, the election of a new President, tales of jobs and looting,
+but they concerned themselves only with the work in hand. No breath of
+scandal ever reached these pioneer trail-makers, or, if it did, it
+failed to find a lodging-place, but blew by. Ample opportunity they had
+to plunder, to sell supplies to the Indians or the Mormons, but no one
+of the men who did the actual work of bridging the continent has ever
+been accused of a selfish or dishonest act.
+
+During his second winter of service Bradford slept away out in the
+Rockies, studying the snowslides and drifts. For three winters they did
+this, and in summer they set stakes, keeping one eye out for Indians and
+the other for wash-outs, and when, after untold hardships, privation,
+and youth-destroying labor, they had located a piece of road, out of the
+path of the slide and the washout, a well-groomed son of a politician
+would come up from the Capital, and, in the capacity of Government
+expert, condemn it all. Then strong men would eat their whiskers and the
+weaker ones would grow blasphemous and curse the country that afforded
+no facilities for sorrow-drowning.
+
+Once, at the end of a long, hard winter, when spring and the Sioux came,
+they found Bradford and a handful of helpers just breaking camp in a
+sheltered hollow in the hills. Hiding in the crags, the warriors waited
+until Bradford went out alone to try to shoot a deer, and incidentally
+to sound a drift, and then they surrounded him. He fought until his gun
+was unloaded, and then emptied his revolver; but ever dodging and
+crouching from tree to rock, the red men, whose country he and his
+companions had invaded, came nearer and nearer. In a little while the
+fight was hand to hand. There was not the faintest show for escape; to
+be taken alive was to be tortured to death, so he fought on, clubbing
+his revolver until a well-directed blow from a war club caught the gun,
+sent it whirling through the top of a nearby cedar, and left the
+pathfinder empty-handed. The chief sprang forward and lifted his hatchet
+that had caused more than one paleface to bite the dust. For the
+faintest fraction of a second it stood poised above Bradford's head,
+then out shot the engineer's strong right arm, and the Indian lay flat
+six feet away.
+
+For a moment the warriors seemed helpless with mingled awe and
+admiration, but when Bradford stooped to grab his empty rifle they came
+out of their trance. A dull blow, a sense of whirling round swiftly, a
+sudden sunset, stars--darkness, and all pain had gone!
+
+
+III
+
+When Bradford came to they were fixing him for the fun. His back was
+against a tree, his feet pinioned, and his elbows held secure by a
+rawhide rope. He knew what it meant. He knew by the look of joy on the
+freshly smeared faces at his waking, by the pitch-pine wood that had
+been brought up, and by the fagots at his feet. The big chief who had
+felt his fist came up, grinning, and jabbed a buckhorn cactus against
+the engineer's thigh, and when the latter tried to move out of reach
+they all grunted and danced with delight. They had been uneasy lest the
+white man might not wake.
+
+The sun, sailing westward in a burnished sea of blue, seemed to stand
+still for a moment and then dropped down behind the range, as if to
+escape from the hellish scene. The shadows served only to increase the
+gloom in the heart of the captive. Glancing over his shoulder toward the
+east, he observed that his captors had brought him down near to the edge
+of the plain. Having satisfied themselves that their victim had plenty
+of life left in him, the Indians began to arrange the fuel. With the
+return of consciousness came an inexpressible longing to live. Suddenly
+his iron will asserted itself, and appealing to his great strength,
+surged until the rawhide ropes were buried in his flesh. Not for a
+moment while he stood on his feet and fought them on the morning of that
+day had hope entirely deserted him. Four years of hardship, of
+privation, and adventure had so strengthened his courage that to give up
+was to die.
+
+Presently, when he had exhausted his strength and sat quietly, the
+Indians went on with the preliminaries. The gold in the west grew
+deeper, the shadows in the foothills darker, as the moments sped.
+Swiftly the captive's mind ran over the events of the past four years.
+This was his first failure, and this was the end of it all--of the
+years of working and waiting.
+
+Clenching his fists, he lifted his hot face to the dumb sky, but no
+sound escaped from his parched and parted lips. Suddenly a light shone
+on the semicircle of feather-framed faces in front of him, and he heard
+the familiar crackling of burning boughs. Glancing toward the ground he
+saw that the fagots were on fire. He felt the hot breath of flame, and
+then for the first time realized what torture meant. Again he surged,
+and surged again, the cedars crackled, the red fiends danced. Another
+effort, the rawhide parted and he stood erect. With both hands freed he
+felt new strength, new hope. He tried to free himself from the pyre, but
+his feet were fettered, and he fell among his captors. Two or three of
+them seized him, but he shook them off and stood up again.
+
+But it was useless. From every side the Indians rushed upon him and bore
+him to the ground. Still he fought and struggled, and as he fought the
+air seemed full of strange, wild sounds, of shouts and shots and
+hoof-beating on the dry, hard earth. He seemed to see, as through a
+veil, scores of Indians, Indians afoot and on horseback, naked Indians
+and Indians in soldier clothes. Once he thought he saw a white face
+gleam just as he got to his feet, but at that moment the big chief stood
+before him, his battle-axe uplifted. The engineer's head was whirling.
+Instinctively he tried to use the strong right arm, but it had lost its
+cunning. The roar of battle grew apace, the axe descended, the left arm
+went up and took the blow of the handle, but the edge of the weapon
+reached over and split the white man's chin. As he fell heavily to the
+earth the light went out again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Save for the stars that stood above him it was still dark when Bradford
+woke. He felt blankets beneath him, and asked in a whisper: "Who's
+here?"
+
+"Major North, me call him," said the Pawnee scout, who was watching over
+the wounded man.
+
+A moment later the gallant Major was leaning over Bradford, encouraging
+him, assuring him that he was all right, but warning him of the danger
+of making the least bit of noise.
+
+
+IV
+
+With all his strength and pluck, it took time for Bradford to
+recuperate. His next work was in Washington, where, with notes and maps,
+his strong personality and logical arguments, he caused the Government
+to overrule an expert who wanted to change an important piece of road,
+and who had arbitrarily fixed the meeting of the mountains and plains
+far up in the foothills.[1]
+
+When Bradford returned to the West he found that the whole country had
+suddenly taken a great and growing interest in the transcontinental
+line. Many of the leading newspapers had dug up their old war
+correspondents and sent them out to the front.
+
+These gifted prevaricators found the plain, unvarnished story of each
+day's work as much as they cared to send in at night, for the builders
+were now putting down four and five miles of road every working day.
+Such road building the world had never seen, and news of it now ran
+round the earth. At night these tireless story-tellers listened to the
+strange tales told by the trail-makers, then stole away to their tents
+and wrote them out for the people at home, while the heroes of the
+stories slept.
+
+The track-layers were now climbing up over the crest of the continent,
+the locaters were dropping down the Pacific slope, with the prowling
+pathfinders peeping over into the Utah Valley. Before the road reached
+Salt Lake City the builders were made aware of the presence, power, and
+opposition of Brigham Young. The head of the church had decreed that the
+road must pass to the south of the lake, and as the Central Pacific had
+surveyed a line that way, and General Dodge had declared in favor of the
+northern route, the Mormons threw their powerful influence to the
+Southern. The Union Pacific was boycotted, and all good Mormons
+forbidden to aid the road in any way.
+
+Here, again, the chief engineer brought Bradford's diplomacy to bear on
+Brigham and won him over.
+
+While the Union Pacific was building west, the Central Pacific had been
+building east, and here, in the Salt Lake basin, the advance forces of
+the two companies met. The United States Congress directed that the
+rails should be joined wherever the two came together, but the bonus
+($32,000 to the mile) left a good margin to the builders in the valley,
+so, instead of joining the rails, the pathfinders only said "Howdy do!"
+and then "Good-bye!" and kept going. The graders followed close upon the
+heels of the engineers, so that by the time the track-layers met the two
+grades paralleled each other for a distance of two hundred miles. When
+the rails actually met, the Government compelled the two roads to couple
+up. It had been a friendly contest that left no bad blood. Indeed they
+were all willing to stop, for the iron trail was open from the Atlantic
+to the Pacific.
+
+
+V
+
+The tenth day of May, 1869, was the date fixed for the driving of the
+last spike and the official opening of the line. Special trains,
+carrying prominent railway and Government officials, were hurrying out
+from the East, while up from the Golden Gate came another train
+bringing the flower of 'Frisco to witness, and some of them to take an
+active part in, the celebration. The day was like twenty-nine other May
+days that month in the Salt Lake Valley, fair and warm, but with a cool
+breeze blowing over the sagebrush. The dusty army of trail-makers had
+been resting for two days, waiting for the people to come in clean store
+clothes, to make speeches, to eat and drink, and drive the golden spike.
+Some Chinese laborers had opened a temporary laundry near the camp, and
+were coining money washing faded blue overalls for their white comrades.
+Many of the engineers and foremen had dressed up that morning, and a few
+had fished out a white shirt. Judah and Strawbridge, of the Central, had
+little chips of straw hats that had been harvested in the summer of '65.
+Here and there you saw a sombrero, the wide hat of the cowboy, and the
+big, soft, shapeless head cover of the Mormon, with a little bunch of
+whiskers on his chin. General Dodge came from his arsenal car, that
+stood on an improvised spur, in a bright, new uniform. Of the special
+trains, that of Governor Stanford was first to arrive, with its
+straight-stacked locomotive and Celestial servants. Then the U.P. engine
+panted up, with its burnished bands and balloon stack, that reminded you
+of the skirts the women wore, save that it funnelled down. When the
+ladies began to jump down, the cayuses of the cowboys began to snort and
+side-step, for they had seen nothing like these tents the women stood up
+in.
+
+Elaborate arrangements had been made for transmitting the news of the
+celebration to the world. All the important telegraph offices of the
+country were connected with Promontory, Utah, that day, so that the blow
+of the hammer driving the last spike was communicated by the click of
+the instrument to every office reached by the wires. From the Atlantic
+to the Pacific the people were rejoicing and celebrating the event, but
+the worn heroes who had dreamed it over and over for five years, while
+they lay in their blankets with only the dry, hard earth beneath them,
+seemed unable to realize that the work was really done and that they
+could now go home, those who had homes to go to, eat soft bread, and
+sleep between sheets.
+
+Out under an awning, made by stretching a blanket between a couple of
+dump-carts, Bradford lay, reading a 'Frisco paper that had come by
+Governor Stanford's special; but even that failed to hold his thoughts.
+His heart was away out on the Atlantic coast, and he would be hurrying
+that way on the morrow, the guest of the chief engineer. He had lost his
+mother when a boy, and his father just a year previous to his
+banishment, but he had never lost faith in the one woman he had loved,
+and he had loved her all his life, for they had been playmates. Now all
+this fuss about driving the last spike was of no importance to him. The
+one thing he longed for, lived for, was to get back to "God's country."
+He heard the speeches by Governor Stanford for the Central, and General
+Dodge for the Union Pacific; heard the prayer offered up by the Rev. Dr.
+Todd, of Pittsfield; heard the General dictate to the operator:
+
+"All ready," and presently the operator sang out the reply from the far
+East:
+
+"All ready here!" and then the silver hammer began beating the golden
+spike into the laurel tie, which bore a silver plate, upon which was
+engraved:
+
+          "The Last Tie
+  Laid in the Completion of the Pacific
+            Railroads.
+          May 10, 1869."
+
+After the ceremony there was handshaking among the men and some kissing
+among the women, as the two parties--one from either coast--mingled, and
+then the General's tent boy came under the blanket to call Bradford, for
+the General wanted him at once. Somehow Bradford's mind flew back to his
+first meeting with this boy. He caught the boy by the arms, held him
+off, and looked at him. "Say, boy," he asked, "have I changed as much as
+you have? Why, only the other day you were a freckled beauty in
+high-water trousers. You're a man now, with whiskers and a busted lip.
+Say, have I changed, too?"
+
+"Naw; you're just the same," said the boy. "Come now, the Gen's
+waitin'."
+
+"Judge Manning," said General Dodge, in his strong, clear voice, "you
+have been calling us 'heroes'; now I want to introduce the one hero of
+all this heroic band--the man who has given of muscle and brain all that
+a magnificent and brilliant young man could give, and who deserves the
+first place on the roll of honor among the great engineers of our time."
+
+As the General pronounced the Judge's name Bradford involuntarily
+clenched his fists and stepped back. The Judge turned slowly, looking
+all the while at the General, thrilled by his eloquent earnestness, and
+catching something of the General's admiration for so eminent a man.
+
+"Mr. Bradford," the General concluded, "this is Judge Manning, of
+Boston, who came to our rescue financially and helped us to complete
+this great work to which you have so bravely and loyally contributed."
+
+"Mr. _Bradford_, did you say?"
+
+"Well, yes. He's only Jim Bradford out here, where we are in a hurry,
+but he'll be Mr. Bradford in Boston, and the biggest man in town when he
+gets back."
+
+All nervousness had gone from Bradford, and he looked steadily into the
+strong face before him.
+
+"Jim Bradford," the millionnaire repeated, still holding the engineer's
+hand.
+
+"Yes, Judge Manning, I'm Jim Bradford," said the bearded pathfinder,
+trying to smile and appear natural.
+
+Suddenly realizing that some explanation was due the General, the Judge
+turned and said, but without releasing the engineer's hand: "Why, I know
+this young man--knew his father. We were friends from boyhood."
+
+Slowly he returned his glance to Bradford. "Will you come into my car in
+an hour from now?" he asked.
+
+"Thank you," said Bradford, nodding, and with a quick, simultaneous
+pressure of hands, the two men parted.
+
+
+VI
+
+Bradford has often since felt grateful to the Judge for that five years'
+sentence, but never has he forgotten the happy thought that prompted the
+capitalist to give him this last hour, in which to get into a fresh suit
+and have his beard trimmed. Bradford wore a beard always now, not
+because a handsome beard makes a handsome man handsomer, but because it
+covered and hid the hideous scar in his chin that had been carved there
+by the Sioux chief.
+
+When the black porter bowed and showed Bradford into Mr. Manning's
+private car, the pleasure of their late meeting and the Judge's kindly
+greeting vanished instantly. It was all submerged and swept away,
+obliterated and forgotten in the great wave of inexpressible joy that
+now filled and thrilled his throbbing heart, for it was Mary Manning who
+came forward to greet him. For nearly an hour she and her father had
+been listening to the wonderful story of the last five years of the
+engineer's life. When the wily General caught the drift of the young
+lady's mind, and had been informed of the conditional engagement of the
+young people, he left nothing unsaid that would add to the fame and
+glory of the trail-maker. With radiant face she heard of his heroism,
+tireless industry, and wonderful engineering feats; but when the
+narrator came to tell how he had been captured and held and tortured by
+the Indians, she slipped her trembling hand into the hand of her
+father, and when he saw her hot tears falling he lifted the hand and
+kissed it, leaving upon it tears of his own.
+
+The Judge now produced his cigar case, and the General, bowing to the
+young lady, followed the great financier to the other end of the car,
+leaving Mary alone, for they had seen Bradford coming up the track.
+
+The dew of her sweet sorrow was still upon her face when Bradford
+entered, but the sunshine of her smile soon dried it up. The hands he
+reached for escaped him. They were about his face; then their great joy
+and the tears it brought blinded them, and the wild beating of their
+happy hearts drowned their voices so that they could neither see nor
+hear, and neither has ever been able to say just what happened.
+
+On the day following this happy meeting, when the consolidated special
+was rolling east-ward, while the Judge and the General smoked in the
+latter's car, the tent boy brought a telegram back to the happy pair. It
+was delivered to Miss Manning, and she read it aloud:
+
+                         "WASHINGTON, May 11, 1869.
+
+  "GENERAL G.M. DODGE:
+
+"In common with millions I sat yesterday and heard the mystic taps of
+the telegraph battery announce the nailing of the last spike in the
+Great Pacific Road. All honor to you, to Durant, to Jack and Dan
+Casement, to Reed and the thousands of brave followers who have wrought
+out this glorious problem, spite of changes, storms, and even doubts of
+the incredulous, and all the obstacles you have now happily surmounted!
+
+                                 "W.T. SHERMAN,
+
+                                 "_General_."
+
+"Well!" she exclaimed, letting her hands and the telegram fall in her
+lap, "he doesn't even mention my hero."
+
+"Oh, yes, he does, my dear," said Bradford, laughing. "I'm one of the
+'thousands of brave followers.'"
+
+Then they both laughed and forgot it, for they were too happy to bother
+with trifles.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: The subsidy from the Government was $16,000 a mile on the
+plains, and $48,000 a mile in the mountains.]
+
+
+
+
+THE BELLE OF ATHABASCA
+
+
+Athabasca Belle did not burst upon Smith the Silent all at once, like a
+rainbow or a sunrise in the desert. He would never say she had been
+thrust upon him. She was acquired, he said, in an unguarded moment.
+
+The trouble began when Smith was pathfinding on the upper Athabasca for
+the new transcontinental. Among his other assets Smith had two camp
+kettles. One was marked with the three initials of the new line, which,
+at that time, existed only on writing material, empty pots, and equally
+empty parliamentary perorations. The other was not marked at all. It was
+the personal property of Jaquis, who cooked for Smith and his outfit.
+The Belle was a fine looking Cree--tall, strong, _magnifique_. Jaquis
+warmed to her from the start, but the Belle was not for Jaquis, himself
+a Siwash three to one. She scarcely looked at him, and answered him
+only when he asked if she'd _encore_ the pork and beans. But she looked
+at Smith. She would sit by the hour, her elbow on her knee and her chin
+in her hand, watching him wistfully, while he drew crazy, crooked lines
+or pictured mountains with rivers running between them--all of which,
+from the Belle's point of view, was not only a waste of time, but had
+absolutely nothing to do with the case.
+
+The Belle and her brown mother came to the camp of the Silent first one
+glorious morn in the moon of August, with a basket of wild berries and a
+pair of beaded moccasins. Smith bought both--the berries for Jaquis, out
+of which he built strange pies, and the moccasins for himself. He called
+them his night slippers, but as a matter of fact there was no night on
+the Athabasca at that time. The day was divided into three shifts, one
+long and two short ones,--daylight, dusk, and dawn. So it was daylight
+when the Belle first fixed her large dark eyes upon the strong, handsome
+face of Smith the Silent, as he sat on his camp stool, bent above a map
+he was making. Belle's mother, being old in years and unafraid, came
+close, looked at the picture for a moment, and exclaimed: "Him Jasper
+Lake," pointing up the Athabasca.
+
+"You know Jasper Lake?" asked the engineer, glancing up for the first
+time.
+
+"_Oui_," said the old woman (Belle's step-father was half French); "know
+'im ver' well."
+
+Smith looked her over as a matter of habit, for he allowed no man or
+woman to get by him with the least bit of information concerning the
+country through which his imaginary line lay. Then he glanced at Belle
+for fully five seconds, then back to his blue print. Nobody but a
+he-nun, or a man already wedded to the woods, could do that, but to the
+credit of the camp it will go down that the chief was the only man in
+the outfit who failed to feel her presence. As for Jaquis, the alloyed
+Siwash, he carried the scar of that first meeting for six months, and
+may, for aught I know, take it with him to his little swinging grave.
+Even Smith remembers to this day how she looked, standing there on her
+two trim ankles, that disappeared into her hand-turned sandals or faded
+in the flute and fringe of her fawn skin skirt. Her full bosom rose and
+fell, and you could count the beat of her wild heart in the throb of
+her throat. Her cheeks showed a faint flush of red through the dark
+olive,--the flush of health and youth,--her nostrils dilated, like those
+of an Ontario high-jumper, as she drank life from the dewy morn, while
+her eye danced with the joy of being alive. Jaquis sized and summed her
+up in the one word "magnific." But in that moment, when she caught the
+keen, piercing eye of the engineer, the Belle had a stroke that comes
+sooner or later to all these wild creatures of the wilderness, but comes
+to most people but once in a lifetime. She never forgot the gleam of
+that one glance, though the Silent one was innocent enough.
+
+It was during the days that followed, when she sat and watched him at
+his work, or followed him for hours in the mountain fastnesses, that the
+Belle of Athabasca lost her heart.
+
+When he came upon a bit of wild scenery and stopped to photograph it,
+the Belle stood back of him, watching his every movement, and when he
+passed on she followed, keeping always out of sight.
+
+The Belle's mother haunted him. As often as he broke camp and climbed a
+little higher upstream, the brown mother moved also, and with her the
+Belle.
+
+"What does this old woman want?" asked the engineer of Jaquis one
+evening when, returning to his tent, he found the fat Cree and her
+daughter camping on his trail.
+
+"She want that pot," said Jaquis.
+
+"Then for the love of We-sec-e-gea, god of the Crees," said Smith, "give
+it into her hands and bid her begone."
+
+Jaquis did as directed, and the old Indian went away, but she left the
+girl.
+
+The next day Smith started on a reconnoissance that would occupy three
+or four days. As he never knew himself when he would return, he never
+took the trouble to inform Jaquis, the tail of the family.
+
+After breakfast the Belle went over to her mother's. She would have
+lunched with her mother from the much coveted kettle, but the Belle's
+mother told her that she should return to the camp of the white man, who
+was now her lord and master. So the Belle went back and lunched with
+Jaquis, who otherwise must have lunched alone. Jaquis tried to keep her,
+and wooed her in his half-wild way; but to her sensitive soul he was
+repulsive. Moreover, she felt that in some mysterious manner her mother
+had transferred her, together with her love and allegiance, to Smith the
+Silent, and to him she must be true. Therefore she returned to the Cree
+camp.
+
+As the sinking sun neared the crest of the Rockies, the young Indian
+walked back to the engineer's camp. As she strode along the new trail
+she plucked wildflowers by the wayside and gathered leaves and wove them
+into vari-colored wreaths, swinging along with the easy grace of a wild
+deer.
+
+Now some women would say she had not much to make her happy, but she was
+happy nevertheless. She loved a man--to her the noblest, most god-like
+creature of his kind,--and she was happy in abandoning herself to him.
+She had lived in this love so long, had felt and seen it grow from
+nothing to something formidable, then to something fine, until now it
+filled her and thrilled her; it overspread everything, outran her
+thoughts, brought the far-off mountains nearer, shortened the trail
+between her camp and his, gave a new glow to the sunset, a new glory to
+the dawn and a fresher fragrance to the wildflowers; the leaves
+whispered to her, the birds came, nearer and sang sweeter; in short it
+was her life--the sunshine of her soul. And that's the way a wild woman
+loves.
+
+And she was to see him soon. Perhaps he would speak to her, or smile on
+her. If only he gave a passing glance she would be glad and content to
+know that he was near. Alas, he came not at all. She watched with the
+stars through the short night, slept at dawn, and woke to find Jaquis
+preparing the morning meal. She thought to question Jaquis, but her
+interest in the engineer, and the growing conviction that his own star
+sank as his master's rose, rendered him unsafe as a companion to a young
+bride whose husband was in the hills and unconscious of the fact that he
+was wedded to anything save the wilderness and his work.
+
+Jaquis not only refused to tell her where the engineer was operating,
+but promised to strangle her if she mentioned his master's name again.
+
+At last the long day died, the sunset was less golden, and the stars
+sang sadder than they sang the day before. She watched the west, into
+which he had gone and out of which she hoped he might return to her.
+Another round of dusk and dawn and there came another day, with its
+hours that hung like ages. When she sighed her mother scolded and Jaquis
+swore. When at last night came to curtain the hills, she stole out under
+the stars and walked and walked until the next day dawned. A lone wolf
+howled to his kith, but they were not hungry and refused to answer his
+call. Often, in the dark, she fancied she heard faint, feline footsteps
+behind her. Once a big black bear blocked her trail, staring at her with
+lifted muzzle wet with dew and stained with berry juice. She did not
+faint nor scream nor stay her steps, but strode on. Now nearer and
+nearer came the muffled footsteps behind her. The black bear backed from
+the trail and kept backing, pivoting slowly, like a locomotive on a
+turntable, and as she passed on, stood staring after her, his small eyes
+blinking in babylike bewilderment. And so through the dusk and dark and
+dawn this love-mad maiden walked the wilderness, innocent of arms, and
+with no one near to protect her save the little barefooted bowman whom
+the white man calls the God of Love.
+
+Meanwhile away to the west, high in the hills, where the Findlay flowing
+into the Pine makes the Peace, then cutting through the crest of the
+continent makes a path for the Peace, Smith and his little army,
+isolated, remote, with no cable connecting them with the great cities of
+civilization, out of touch with the telegraph, away from the war
+correspondent, with only the music of God's rills for a regimental band,
+were battling bravely in a war that can end only with the conquest of a
+wilderness. Ah, these be the great generals--these unheralded heroes
+who, while the smoke of slaughter smudges the skies and shadows the sun,
+wage a war in which they kill only time and space, and in the end,
+without despoiling the rest of the world, win homes for the homeless.
+These are the heroes of the Anglo-Saxon race.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Finding no trace of the trail-makers, the Belle faced the rising sun and
+sought the camp of the Crees.
+
+The mysterious shadow with the muffled tread, that had followed her
+from the engineer's camp, shrank back into the bush as she passed down
+the trail. That was Jaquis. He watched her as she strode by him,
+uncertain as to whether he loved or hated her, for well he knew why she
+walked the wilderness all night alone. Now the Gitche in his unhappy
+heart made him long to lift her in his arms and carry her to camp, and
+then the bad god, Mitche, would assert himself and say to the savage
+that was in him, "Go, kill her. She despises her race and flings herself
+at the white man's feet." And so, impelled by passion and stayed by
+love, he followed her. The white man within him made him ashamed of his
+skulking, and the Indian that was in him guided him around her and home
+by a shorter trail.
+
+That night the engineers returned, and when Smith saw the Cree in the
+camp he jumped on Jaquis furiously.
+
+"Why do you keep this woman here?" he demanded.
+
+"I--keep? Me?" quoth Jaquis, blinking as bewildered as the black bear
+had blinked at the Belle.
+
+"Who but you?--you heathen!" hissed the engineer.
+
+Now Jaquis, calling up the ghosts of his dead sires, asserted that it
+was the engineer himself who was "keeping" the Cree. "You bought
+her--she's yours," said Jaquis, in the presence of the company.
+
+"You ill-bred ----" Smith choked, and reached for a tent prop. The next
+moment his hand was at the Indian's throat. With a quick twist of his
+collar band he shut off the Siwash's wind, choking him to the earth.
+
+"What do you mean?" he demanded, and Jaquis, coughing, put up his hands.
+"I meant no lie," said he. "Did you not give to her mother the camp
+kettle? She has it, marked G.T.P."
+
+"And what of that?"
+
+"_Voila_," said Jaquis, "because of that she gave to you the Belle of
+Athabasca."
+
+Smith dropped his stick, releasing the Indian.
+
+"I did not mean she is sold to you. She is trade--trade for the empty
+pot, the Belle--the beautiful. From yesterday to this day she followed
+you, far, very far, to the foot of the Grande Cote, and nothing harmed
+her. The mountain lion looked on her in terror, the timber wolf took to
+the hills, the black bear backed from the trail and let her pass in
+peace," said Jaquis, with glowing enthusiasm. It was the first time he
+had talked of her, save to the stars and to We-sec-e-gea, and he glowed
+and grew eloquent in praise of her.
+
+"You take her," said Smith, with one finger levelled at the head of the
+cook, "to the camp of the Crees. Say to her mother that your master is
+much obliged for the beautiful gift, but he's too busy to get married
+and too poor to support a wife."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the uttermost rim of the ring of light that came from the
+flickering fire la Belle the beautiful heard and saw all that had passed
+between the two men. She did not throw herself at the feet of the white
+man. Being a wild woman she did not weep nor cry out with the pain of
+his words, that cut like cold steel into her heart. She leaned against
+an aspen tree, stroking her throat with her left hand, swallowing with
+difficulty. Slowly from her girdle she drew a tiny hunting-knife, her
+one weapon, and toyed with it. She put the hilt to the tree, the point
+to her bare breast, and breathed a prayer to We-sec-e-gea, god of the
+Crees. She had only to throw the weight of her beautiful body on the
+blade, sink without a moan to the moss, and pass, leaving the camp
+undisturbed.
+
+Smith marked the faintest hint of sarcasm in the half smile of the
+Indian as he turned away.
+
+"Come here," he cried. Jaquis approached cautiously. "Now, you skulking
+son of a Siwash, this is to be skin for skin. If any harm comes to that
+young Cree you go to your little hammock in the hemlocks--you
+understand?"
+
+"_Oui, Monsieur_," said Jaquis.
+
+"Very well, then; remember--skin for skin."
+
+Now to the Belle, watching from her shelter in the darkness, there was
+something splendid in this. To hear her praises sung by the Siwash, then
+to have the fair god, who had heard that story, champion her, to take
+the place of her protector, was all new to her. "Ah, good God," she
+sighed; "it is better, a thousand times better, to love and lose him
+than to waste one's life, never knowing this sweet agony."
+
+She felt in a vague way that she was soaring above the world and its
+woes. At times, in the wild tumult of her tempestuous soul, she seemed
+to be borne beyond it all, through beautiful worlds. Love, for her, had
+taken on great white wings, and as he wafted her out of the wilderness
+and into her heaven, his talons tore into her heart and hurt like hell,
+yet she could rejoice because of the exquisite pleasure that surpassed
+the pain.
+
+"Sweet We-sec-e-gea," she sighed, "good god of my dead, I thank thee for
+the gift of this great love that stays the steel when my aching heart
+yearns for it. I shall not destroy myself and distress him, disturbing
+him in his great work, whatever it is; but live--live and love him, even
+though he send me away."
+
+She kissed the burnished blade and returned it to her belt.
+
+When Jaquis, circling the camp, failed to find her, he guessed that she
+was gone, and hurried after her along the dim, starlit trail. When he
+had overtaken her, they walked on together. Jaquis tried now to renew
+his acquaintance with the handsome Cree and to make love to her. She
+heard him in absolute silence. Finally, as they were nearing the Cree
+camp, he taunted her with having been rejected by the white man.
+
+"And my shame is yours," said she softly. "I love him; he sends me away.
+You love me; I send you from me--it is the same."
+
+Jaquis, quieted by this simple statement, said good-night and returned
+to the tents, where the pathfinders were sleeping peacefully under the
+stars.
+
+And over in the Cree camp the Belle of Athabasca, upon her bed of
+boughs, slept the sleep of the innocent, dreaming sweet dreams of her
+fair god, and through them ran a low, weird song of love, and in her
+dream Love came down like a beautiful bird and bore her out of this life
+and its littleness, and though his talons tore at her heart and hurt,
+yet was she happy because of the exquisite pleasure that surpassed all
+pain.
+
+
+
+
+PATHFINDING IN THE NORTHWEST
+
+
+It was summer when my friend Smith, whose real name is Jones, heard that
+the new transcontinental line would build by the way of Peace River Pass
+to the Pacific. He immediately applied, counting something, no doubt, on
+his ten years of field work in Washington, Oregon, and other western
+states, and five years pathfinding in Canada.
+
+The summer died; the hills and rills and the rivers slept, but while
+they slept word came to my friend Smith the Silent, and he hurriedly
+packed his sleds and set out.
+
+His orders were, like the orders of Admiral Dewey, to do certain
+things--not merely to try. He was to go out into the northern night
+called winter, feel his way up the Athabasca, over the Smoky, follow the
+Peace River, and find the pass through the Rockies.
+
+If the simple story of that winter campaign could be written out it
+would be finer than fiction. But it will never be. Only Smith the
+Silent knows, and he won't tell.
+
+Sometimes, over the pipe, he forgets and gives me glimpses into the
+winter camp, with the sun going out like a candle: the hastily made camp
+with the half-breed spotting the dry wood against the coming moment when
+night would drop over the forest like a curtain over a stage; the
+"lean-to" between the burning logs, where he dozes or dreams, barely
+beyond the reach of the flames; the silence all about, Jaquis pulling at
+his pipe, and the huskies sleeping in the snow like German babies under
+the eiderdown. Sometimes, out of the love of bygone days, he tells of
+long toilsome journeys with the sun hiding behind clouds out of which an
+avalanche of snow falls, with nothing but the needle to tell where he
+hides; of hungry dogs and half starved horses, and lakes and rivers
+fifty and a hundred miles out of the way.
+
+Once, he told me, he sent an engineer over a low range to spy out a
+pass. By the maps and other data they figured that he would be gone
+three days, but a week went by and no word from the pathfinder. Ten days
+and no news. On the thirteenth day, when Smith was preparing to go in
+search of the wanderer, the running gear of the man and the framework of
+the dogs came into camp. He was able to smile and say to Smith that he
+had been ten days without food, save a little tea. For the dogs he had
+had nothing.
+
+A few days rest and they were on the trail again, or on the "go" rather;
+and you might know that disciple of Smith the Silent six months or six
+years before he would, unless you worked him, refer to that ten days'
+fast. They think no more of that than a Jap does of dying. It's all in
+the day's work.
+
+Suddenly, Smith said, the sun swung north, the days grew longer. The sun
+grew hot and the snow melted on the south hills; the hushed rivers,
+rending their icy bonds, went roaring down to the Lakes and out towards
+the Arctic Ocean. And lo, suddenly, like the falling of an Arctic night,
+the momentary spring passed and it was summer time.
+
+Then it was that Smith came into Edmonton to make his first report, and
+here we met for the first time for many snows.
+
+Joyously, as a boy kicks the cover off on circus morning, this Northland
+flings aside her winter wraps and stands forth in her glorious garb of
+summer. The brooklets murmur, the rivers sing, and by their banks and
+along the lakes waterfowl frolic, and overhead glad birds, that seem to
+have dropped from the sky, sing joyfully the almost endless song of
+summer. At the end of the long day, when the sun, as if to make up for
+its absence, lingers, loath to leave us in the twilight, beneath their
+wings the song-birds hide their heads, then wake and sing, for the sun
+is swinging up over the horizon where the pink sky, for an hour, has
+shown the narrow door through which the day is dawning.
+
+The dogs and sleds have been left behind and now, with Jaquis the
+half-breed "boy" leading, followed closely by Smith the Silent, we go
+deeper and deeper each day into the pathless wilderness.
+
+To be sure it is not all bush, all forest. At times we cross wide
+reaches of wild prairie lands. Sometimes great lakes lie immediately in
+front of us, compelling us to change our course. Now we come to a wide
+river and raft our outfit over, swimming our horses. Weeks go by and we
+begin to get glimpses of the Rockies rising above the forest, and we
+push on. The streams become narrower as we ascend, but swifter and more
+dangerous.
+
+We do not travel constantly now, as we have been doing. Sometimes we
+keep our camp for two or three days. The climbing is hard, for Smith
+must get to the top of every peak in sight, and so I find it "good
+hunting" about the camp.
+
+Jaquis is a fairly good cook, and what he lacks we make up with good
+appetites, for we live almost constantly out under the sun and stars.
+
+Pathfinders always lay up on Sunday, and sometimes, the day being long,
+Smith steals out to the river and comes back with a mountain trout as
+long as a yardstick.
+
+The scenery is beyond description. Now we pass over the shoulder of a
+mountain with a river a thousand feet below. Sometimes we trail for
+hours along the shore of a limpid lake that seems to run away to the
+foot of the Rockies.
+
+Far away we get glimpses of the crest of the continent, where the Peace
+River gashes it as if it had been cleft by the sword of the Almighty;
+and near the Rockies, on either bank, grand battlements rise that seem
+to guard the pass as the Sultan's fortresses frown down on the
+Dardanelles.
+
+Now we follow a narrow trail that was not a trail until we passed. A
+careless pack-horse, carrying our blankets, slips from the path and goes
+rolling and tumbling down the mountain side. A thousand feet below lies
+an arm of the Athabasca. Down, down, and over and over the pack-horse
+goes, and finally fetches up on a ledge five hundred feet below the
+trail. "By damn," says Jaquis, "dere is won bronco bust, eh?"
+
+Smith and Jaquis go down to cut the cinches and save the pack, and lo,
+up jumps our cayuse, and when he is repacked he takes the trail as good
+as new. The pack and the low bush save his life.
+
+In any other country, to other men, this would be exciting, but it's all
+in the day's work with Smith and Jaquis.
+
+The pack-pony that had been down the mountain is put in the lead
+now--that is, in the lead of the pack animals; for he has learned his
+lesson, he will be careful. And yet we are to have other experiences
+along this same river.
+
+Suddenly, down a side canon, a mountain stream rushes, plunging into the
+Athabasca, joyfully, like a sea-bather into the surf. Jaquis calls this
+side-stream "the mill-tail o' hell." Smith the Silent prepares to cross.
+It's all very simple. All you need is a stout pole, a steady nerve, and
+an utter disregard for the hereafter.
+
+When Smith is safe on the other shore we drive the horses into the
+stream. They shudder and shrink from the ice-cold water, but Jaquis and
+I urge them, and in they plunge. My, what a struggle! Their wet feet on
+the slippery boulders in the bottom of the stream, the swift current
+constantly tripping them--it was thrilling to see and must have been
+agony for the animals.
+
+Midway, where the current was strongest, a mouse-colored cayuse carrying
+a tent lost his feet. The turbulent tide slammed him up on top of a
+great rock, barely hidden beneath the water, and he got to his feet like
+a cat that has fallen upon the edge of an eave-trough. Trembling, the
+cayuse called to Smith, and Smith, running downstream, called back,
+urging the animal to leave the refuge and swim for it. The pack-horse
+perched on the rock gazes wistfully at the shore. The waters, breaking
+against his resting-place, wash up to his trembling knees. About him the
+wild river roars, and just below leaps over a ten-foot fall into the
+Athabasca.
+
+All the other horses, having crossed safely, shake the water from their
+dripping sides and begin cropping the tender grass. We could have heard
+that horse's heart beat if we could have hushed the river's roar.
+
+Smith called again, the cayuse turned slightly, and whether he leaped
+deliberately or his feet slipped on the slippery stones, forcing him to
+leap, we could not say, but he plunged suddenly into the stream,
+uttering a cry that echoed up the canon and over the river like the cry
+of a lost soul.
+
+The cruel current caught him, lifted him, and plunged him over the drop,
+and he was lost instantly in the froth and foam of the falls.
+
+Far down, at a bend of the Athabasca, something white could be seen
+drifting towards the shore. That night Smith the Silent made an entry in
+his little red book marked "Grand Trunk Pacific," and tented under the
+stars.
+
+
+
+
+THE CURE'S CHRISTMAS GIFT
+
+  "A country that is bad or good,
+  Precisely as your claim pans out;
+  A land that's much misunderstood,
+  Misjudged, maligned and lied about."
+
+
+When the pathfinders for the New National Highway pushed open the side
+door and peeped through to the Pacific they not only discovered a short
+cut to Yokohama, but opened to the world a new country, revealing the
+last remnant of the Last West.
+
+Edmonton is the outfiling point, of course, but Little Slave Lake is the
+real gateway to the wilderness. Here we were to make our first stop (we
+were merely exploring), and from this point our first portage was to the
+Peace River, at Chinook, where we would get into touch once more with
+the Hudson's Bay Company.
+
+Jim Cromwell, the free trader who was in command of Little Slave, made
+us welcome, introducing us _ensemble_ to his friend, a former H.B.
+factor, to the Yankee who was looking for a timber limit, to the
+"Literary Cuss," as he called the young man in corduroys and a wide
+white hat, who was endeavoring to get past "tradition," that has damned
+this Dominion both in fiction and in fact for two hundred years, and do
+something that had in it the real color of the country.
+
+At this point the free trader paused to assemble the Missourian. This
+iron-gray individual shook himself out, came forward, and gripped our
+hands, one after another.
+
+The free trader would not allow us to make camp that night. We were
+sentenced to sup and lodge with him, furnishing our own bedding, of
+course, but baking his bread.
+
+The smell of cooking coffee and the odor of frying fish came to us from
+the kitchen, and floating over from somewhere the low, musical, well
+modulated voice of Cromwell, conversing in Cree, as he moved about among
+his mute and apparently inoffensive camp servants.
+
+The day died hard. The sun was still shining at 9 P.M. At ten
+it was twilight, and in the dusk we sat listening to tales of the far
+North, totally unlike the tales we read in the story-books. Smith the
+Silent, who was in charge of our party, was interested in the country,
+of course, its physical condition, its timber, its coal, and its mineral
+possibilities. He asked about its mountains and streams, its possible
+and impossible passes; but the "Literary Cuss" and I were drinking
+deeply of weird stories that were being told quite incautiously by the
+free trader, the old factor, and by the Missourian. We were like
+children, this young author and I, sitting for the first time in a
+theatre. The flickering camp fire that we had kindled in the open served
+as a footlight, while the Gitch Lamp, still gleaming in the west,
+glanced through the trees and lit up the faces of the three great actors
+who were entertaining us without money and without price. The Missourian
+was the star. He had been reared in the lap of luxury, had run away from
+college where he had been installed by a rich uncle, his guardian, and
+jumped down to South America. He had ridden with the Texas Rangers and
+with President Diaz's Regulators, had served as a scout on the plains
+and worked with the Mounted Police, but was now "retired."
+
+All of which we learned not from him directly, but from the stories he
+told and from his bosom friend, the free trader, whose guests we were,
+and whose word, for the moment at least, we respected.
+
+The camp fire burned down to a bed of coals, the Gitch Lamp went out. In
+the west, now, there was only a glow of gold, but no man moved.
+
+Smith the Pathfinder and our host the free trader bent over a map. "But
+isn't this map correct?" Smith would ask, and when in doubt Jim would
+call the Missourian. "No," said the latter, "you can't float down that
+river because it flows the other way, and that range of mountains is two
+hundred miles out."
+
+Gradually we became aware that all this vast wilderness, to the world
+unknown, was an open book to this quiet man who had followed the buffalo
+from the Rio Grande to the Athabasca where he turned, made a last stand,
+and then went down.
+
+When the rest had retired the free trader and I sat talking of the Last
+West, of the new trail my friends were blazing, and of the wonderfully
+interesting individual whom we called the Missourian.
+
+"He had a prospecting pard," said Jim, "whom he idolized. This man,
+whose name was Ramsey, Jack Ramsey, went out in '97 between the Coast
+Range and the Rockies, and now this sentimental old pioneer says he will
+never leave the Peace River until he finds Ramsey's bones.
+
+"You see," Cromwell continued, "friendship here and what goes for
+friendship outside are vastly different. The matter of devoting one's
+life to a friend or to a duty, real or fancied, is only a trifle to
+these men who abide in the wilderness. I know of a Chinaman and a Cree
+who lived and died the most devoted friends. You see the Missourian
+hovering about the last camping-place of his companion. Behold the
+factor! He has left the Hudson Bay Company after thirty years because he
+has lost his life's best friend, a man who spoke another language, whose
+religion was not the brand upon which the factor had been brought up in
+England; yet they were friends."
+
+The camp fire had gone out. In the south we saw the first faint flush
+of dawn as Cromwell, knocking the ashes from his pipe, advised me to go
+to bed. "You get the old factor to tell you the story of his friend the
+cure, and of the cure's Christmas gift," Cromwell called back, and I
+made a point of getting the story, bit by bit, from the florid factor
+himself, and you shall read it as it has lingered in my memory.
+
+When the new cure came to Chinook on the Upper Peace River, he carried a
+small hand-satchel, his blankets, and a crucifix. His face was drawn,
+his eyes hungry, his frame wasted, but his smile was the smile of a man
+at peace with the world. The West--the vast, undiscovered Canadian
+West--jarred on the sensitive nerves of this Paris-bred priest. And yet,
+when he crossed the line that marks what we are pleased to call
+"civilization," and had reached the heart of the real Northwest, where
+the people were unspoiled, natural, and honest, where a handful of Royal
+Northwest Mounted Police kept order in an empire that covers a quarter
+of a continent, he became deeply interested in this new world, in the
+people, in the imperial prairies, the mountains, and the great wide
+rivers that were racing down to the northern sea.
+
+The factor at the Hudson's Bay post, whose whole life since he had left
+college in England had been passed on the Peace River, at York Factory,
+and other far northern stations over which waved the Hudson's Bay
+banner, warmed to the new cure from their first meeting, and the cure
+warmed to him. Each seemed to find in the other a companion that neither
+had been able to find among the few friends of his own faith.
+
+And so, through the long evenings of the northern winter, they sat in
+the cure's cabin study or by the factor's fire, and talked of the things
+which they found interesting, including politics, literature, art, and
+Indians. Despite the great gulf that rolled between the two creeds in
+which they had been cradled, they found that they were in accord three
+times in five--a fair average for men of strong minds and inherent
+prejudices. At first the cure was anxious to get at the real work of
+"civilizing" the natives.
+
+"Yes," the factor would say, blowing the smoke upward, "the Indian
+should be civilized--slowly--the slower the better."
+
+The cure would pretend to look surprised as he relit his pipe. Once the
+cure asked the factor why he was so indifferent to the welfare of the
+Crees, who were the real producers, without whose furs there would be no
+trade, no post, no job for the ruddy-faced factor. The priest was
+surprised that the factor should appear to fail to appreciate the
+importance of the trapper.
+
+"I do," said the factor.
+
+"Then why do you not help us to lift him to the light?"
+
+"I like him," was the laconic reply.
+
+"Then why don't you talk to him of his soul?"
+
+"Haven't the nerve," said the factor, shaking his head and blowing more
+smoke.
+
+The cure shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I say," said the florid factor, facing the pale priest. "Did you see me
+decorating the old chief, Dunraven, yesterday?"
+
+"Yes, I presume you were giving him a _pour boire_ in advance to secure
+the greater catch of furs next season," said the priest, with his usual
+sad yet always pleasant smile.
+
+"A very poor guess for one so wise," said the factor. "_Attendez_," he
+continued. "This post used to be closed always in winter. The tent doors
+were tied fast on the inside, after which the man who tied them would
+crawl out under the edge of the canvas. When winter came, the snow,
+banked about, held the tent tightly down, and the Hudson's Bay business
+was bottled at this point until the springless summer came to wake the
+sleeping world.
+
+"Last winter was a hard winter. The snow was deep and game scarce. One
+day a Cree Indian found himself in need of tea and tobacco, and more in
+need of a new pair of trousers. Passing the main tent one day, he was
+sorely tempted. Dimly, through the parchment pane, he could see great
+stacks of English tweeds, piles of tobacco, and boxes of tea, but the
+tent was closed. He was sorely tried. He was hungry--hungry for a horn
+of tea and a twist of the weed, and cold, too. Ah, _bon pere_, it is
+hard to withstand cold and hunger with only a canvas between one and the
+comforts of life!"
+
+"_Oui, Monsieur!_" said the cure, warmly, touched by the pathos of the
+tale.
+
+"The Indian walked away (we know that by his footprints), but returned
+to the tent. The hunger and the cold had conquered. He took his
+hunting-knife and slit the deerskin window and stepped inside. Then he
+approached the pile of tweed trousers and selected a large pair, putting
+down from the bunch of furs he had on his arms to the value of eight
+skins--the price his father and grandfather had paid. He visited the
+tobacco pile and helped himself, leaving four skins on the tobacco. When
+he had taken tea he had all his heart desired, and having still a number
+of skins left, he hung them upon a hook overhead and went away.
+
+"When summer dawned and a clerk came to open the post, he saw the slit
+in the window, and upon entering the tent saw the eight skins on the
+stack of tweeds, the four skins on the tobacco, and the others on the
+chest, and understood.
+
+"Presently he saw the skins which the Indian had hung upon the hook,
+took them down, counted them carefully, appraised them, and made an
+entry in the Receiving Book, in which he credited
+'Indian-cut-the-window, 37 skins.'
+
+"Yesterday Dunraven came to the post and confessed.
+
+"It was to reward him for his honesty that I gave him the fur coat and
+looped the big brass baggage check in his buttonhole. _Voila!_"
+
+The cure crossed his legs and then recrossed them, tossed his head from
+side to side, drummed upon the closed book which lay in his lap, and
+showed in any number of ways, peculiar to nervous people, his amazement
+at the story and his admiration for the Indian.
+
+"Little things like that," said the factor, filling his pipe, "make me
+timid when talking to a Cree about 'being good.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When summer came, and with it the smell of flowers and the music of
+running streams, the factor and his friend the cure used to take long
+tramps up into the highlands, but the cure's state of health was a
+handicap to him. The factor saw the telltale flush in the priest's face
+and knew that the "White Plague" had marked him; yet he never allowed
+the cure to know that he knew. That summer a little river steamer was
+sent up from Athabasca Lake by the Chief Commissioner who sat in the
+big office at Winnipeg, and upon this the factor and his friend took
+many an excursion up and down the Peace. The friendship that had grown
+up between the factor and the new cure formed the one slender bridge
+that connected the Anglican and the Catholic camps. Even the "heathen
+Crees" marvelled that these white men, praying to the same God, should
+dwell so far apart. Wing You, who had wandered over from Ramsay's Camp
+on the Pine River, explained it all to Dunraven: "Flenchman and
+Englishman," said Wing. "No ketchem same Glod. You--Clee," continued the
+wise Oriental, "an' Englishman good flend--ketchem same Josh; you call
+'im We-sec-e-gea, white man call 'im God."
+
+And so, having the same God, only called by different names, the Crees
+trusted the factor, and the factor trusted the Crees. Their business
+intercourse was on the basis of skin for skin, furs being the recognized
+coin of the country.
+
+"Why do you not pay them in cash, take cash in turn, and let them have
+something to rattle?" asked the cure one day.
+
+"They won't have it," said the factor. "Silver Skin, brother to
+Dunraven, followed a party of prospectors out to Edmonton last fall and
+tried it. He bought a pair of gloves, a red handkerchief, and a pound of
+tobacco, and emptied his pockets on the counter, so that the clerk in
+the shop might take out the price of the goods. According to his own
+statement, the Indian put down $37.80. He took up just six-thirty-five.
+When the Cree came back to God's country he showed me what he had left
+and asked me to check him up. When I had told him the truth, he walked
+to the edge of the river and sowed the six-thirty-five broadcast on the
+broad bosom of the Peace."
+
+And so, little by little, the patient priest got the factor's
+view-point, and learned the great secret of the centuries of success
+that has attended the Hudson's Bay Company in the far North.
+
+And little by little the two men, without preaching, revealed to the
+Indians and the Oriental the mystery of Life--vegetable life at
+first--of death and life beyond. They showed them the miracle of the
+wheat.
+
+On the first day of June they put into a tiny grave a grain of wheat.
+They told the Blind Ones that the berry would suffer death, decay, but
+out of that grave would spring fresh new flags that would grow and blow,
+fanned by the balmy chinook winds, and wet by the dews of heaven.
+
+On the first day of September they harvested seventy-two stalks and
+threshed from the seventy-two stalks seven thousand two hundred grains
+of wheat. They showed all this to the Blind Ones and they saw. The cure
+explained that we, too, would go down and die, but live again in another
+life, in a fairer world.
+
+The Cree accepted it all in absolute silence, but the Oriental, with his
+large imagination, exclaimed, pointing to the tiny heap of golden grain:
+"Me ketchem die, me sleep, byme by me wake up in China--seven
+thousand--heap good." The cure was about to explain when the factor put
+up a warning finger. "Don't cut it too fine, father," said he. "They're
+getting on very well."
+
+That was a happy summer for the two men, working together in the garden
+in the cool dawn and chatting in the long twilight that lingers on the
+Peace until 11 P.M. Alas! as the summer waned the factor saw
+that his friend was failing fast. He could walk but a short distance now
+without resting, and when the red rose of the Upper Athabasca caught the
+first cold kiss of Jack Frost, the good priest took to his bed. Wing
+You, the accomplished cook, did all he could to tempt him to eat and
+grow strong again. Dunraven watched from day to day for an opportunity
+to "do something"; but in vain. The faithful factor made daily visits to
+the bedside of his sick friend. As the priest, who was still in the
+springtime of his life, drew nearer to the door of death, he talked
+constantly of his beloved mother in far-off France--a thing unusual for
+a priest, who is supposed to burn his bridges when he leaves the world
+for the church.
+
+Often when he talked thus, the factor wanted to ask his mother's name
+and learn where she lived, but always refrained.
+
+Late in the autumn the factor was called to Edmonton for a general
+conference of all the factors in the employ of the Honorable Company of
+gentlemen adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay. With a heavy heart he
+said good-bye to the failing priest.
+
+When he had come within fifty miles of Chinook, on the return trip, he
+was wakened at midnight by Dunraven, who had come out to ask him to
+hurry up as the cure was dying, but wanted to speak to the factor first.
+
+Without a word the Englishman got up and started forward, Dunraven
+leading on the second lap of his "century."
+
+It was past midnight again when the _voyageurs_ arrived at the river.
+There was a dim light in the cure's cabin, to which Dunraven led them,
+and where the Catholic bishop and an Irish priest were on watch. "So
+glad to see you," said the bishop. "There is something he wants from
+your place, but he will not tell Wing. Speak to him, please."
+
+"Ah, _Monsieur_, I'm glad that you are come--I'm weary and want to be
+off."
+
+"The long _traverse_, eh?"
+
+"_Oui, Monsieur_--_le grand voyage_."
+
+"Is there anything I can do for you?" asked the Englishman. The dying
+priest made a movement as if hunting for something. The bishop, to
+assist, stepped quickly to his side. The patient gave up the quest of
+whatever he was after and looked languidly at the factor. "What is it,
+my son?" asked the bishop, bending low. "What would you have the factor
+fetch from his house?"
+
+"Just a small bit of cheese," said the sick man, sighing wearily.
+
+"Now, that's odd," mused the factor, as he went off on his strange
+errand.
+
+When the Englishman returned to the cabin, the bishop and the priest
+stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. Upon a bench on the narrow
+veranda Dunraven sat, resting after his hundred-mile tramp, and on the
+opposite side of the threshold Wing You lay sleeping in his blankets, so
+as to be in easy call if he were wanted.
+
+When the two friends were alone, the sick man signalled, and the factor
+drew near.
+
+"I have a great favor--a very great favor to ask of you," the priest
+began, "and then I'm off. Ah, _mon Dieu!_" he panted. "It has been hard
+to hold out. Jesus has been kind."
+
+"It's damned tough at your time, old fellow," said the factor, huskily.
+
+"It's not my time, but His."
+
+"Yes--well I shall be over by and by."
+
+"And those faithful dogs--Dunraven and Wing--thank them for--"
+
+"Sure! If _I_ can pass," the factor broke in, a little confused.
+
+"Thank them for me--for their kindnesses--and care. Tell them to
+remember the sermon of the wheat. And now, good friend," said the
+priest, summoning all his strength, "_attendez_!"
+
+He drew a thin, white hand from beneath the cover, carrying a tiny
+crucifix. "I want you to send this to my beloved mother by registered
+post; send it yourself, please, so that she may have it before the end
+of the year. This will be my last Christmas gift to her. And the one
+that comes from her to me--that is for you, to keep in remembrance of
+me. And write to her--oh, so gently tell her--Jesus--help me," he
+gasped, sitting upright. "She lives in Rue ---- O Mary, Mother of Jesus,"
+he cried, clutching at the collar of his gown; and then he fell back
+upon his bed, and his soul swept skyward like a toy balloon when the
+thin thread snaps.
+
+When the autumn sun smiled down on Chinook and the autumn wind sighed in
+by the door and out by the open window where the dead priest lay, Wing
+and Dunraven sat on the rude bench in the little veranda, going over it
+all, each in his own tongue, but uttering never a word, yet each to the
+other expressing the silence of his soul.
+
+The factor, in the seclusion of his bachelor home, held the little cross
+up and examined it critically. "To be sent to his mother, she lives in
+Rue ---- Ah, if I could have been but a day sooner; yet the bishop must
+know," he added, putting the crucifix carefully away.
+
+The good people in the other world, beyond the high wall that separated
+the two Christian Tribes, had been having shivers over the factor and
+his fondness for the Romans; but when he volunteered to assist at the
+funeral of his dead friend, _his_ people were shocked. In that scant
+settlement there were not nearly enough priests to perform, properly,
+the funeral services, so the factor fell in, mingling his deep full
+voice with the voices of the bishop and the Irish brother, and grieving
+even as they grieved.
+
+And the Blind Ones, Wing and Dunraven, came also, paying a last tearless
+tribute to the noble dead.
+
+When it was all over and the post had settled down to routine, the
+factor found in his mail, one morning, a long letter from the Chief
+Commissioner at Winnipeg. It told the factor that he was in bad repute,
+that the English Church bishop had been grieved, shocked, and
+scandalized through seeing the hitherto respectable factor going over to
+the Catholics. Not only had he fraternized with them, but had actually
+taken part in their religious ceremonies. And to crown it all, he had
+carried, a respectable Cree and the Chinese cook along with him.
+
+The factor's placid face took on a deep hue, but only for a moment. He
+filled his pipe, poking the tobacco down hard with his thumb. Then he
+took the Commissioner's letter, twisted it up, touched it to the tiny
+fire that blazed in the grate, and lighted his pipe. He smoked in
+silence for a few moments and then said to himself, being alone, "Huh!"
+
+"Ah, that from the bishop reminds me," said the factor. "I must run
+over and see the other one."
+
+When the factor had related to the French-Canadian bishop what had
+passed between the dead cure and himself, the bishop seemed greatly
+annoyed. "Why, man, he had no mother!"
+
+"The devil he didn't--I beg pardon--I say he asked me to send this to
+his mother. He started to tell me where she lived and then the call
+came. It was the dying request of a dear friend. I beg of you tell me
+his mother's name, that I may keep my word."
+
+"It is impossible, my son. When he came into the church he left the
+world. He was bound by the law of the church to give up father, mother,
+sister, brother--all."
+
+"The church be--do you mean to say--"
+
+"Peace, my son, you do not understand," said the bishop, lifting the
+little cross which he had taken gently from the factor at the beginning
+of the interview.
+
+Now the factor was not in the habit of having his requests ignored and
+his judgment questioned.
+
+"Do you mean to say you will _not_ give me the name and address of the
+dead man's mother?"
+
+"It's absolutely impossible. Moreover, I am shocked to learn that our
+late brother could so far forget his duty at the very door of death. No,
+son, a thousand times no," said the bishop.
+
+"Then give me the crucifix!" demanded the factor, fiercely.
+
+"That, too, is impossible; that is the property of the church."
+
+"Well," said the factor, filling his pipe again and gazing into the
+flickering fire, "they're all about the same. And they're all right,
+too, I presume--all but Wing and Dunraven and me."
+
+
+
+
+THE MYSTERIOUS SIGNAL
+
+
+As Waterloo lingered in the memory of the conquered Corsican, so
+Ashtabula was burned into the brain of Bradish. Out of that awful wreck
+he crawled, widowed and childless. For a long time he did not realize,
+for his head was hurt in that frightful crash.
+
+By the time he was fit to leave the hospital they had told him, little
+by little, that all his people had perished.
+
+He made his way to the West, where he had a good home and houses to rent
+and a hole in the hillside that was just then being changed from a
+prospect to a mine.
+
+The townspeople, who had heard of the disaster, waited for him to speak
+of it--but he never did. The neighbors nodded, and he nodded to them and
+passed on about his business. The old servant came and asked if she
+should open the house, and he nodded. The man-servant--the woman's
+husband--came also, and to him Bradish nodded; and at noon he had
+luncheon alone in the fine new house that had just been completed a year
+before the catastrophe.
+
+About once a week Bradish would board the midnight express, ride down
+the line for a few hundred miles, and double back.
+
+When he went away they knew he had gone, and when he came back they knew
+he had returned and that was as much as his house-keeper, his agent, or
+the foreman at the mines could tell you.
+
+One would have thought that the haunting memory of Ashtabula would have
+kept him at home for the rest of his life; but he seemed to travel for
+the sake of the ride only, or for no reason, as a deaf man walks on the
+railroad-track.
+
+Gradually he extended his trips, taking the Midland over into Utah; and
+once or twice he had been seen on the rear end of the California Limited
+as it dropped down the western water-shed of Raton Range.
+
+One night, when the Limited was lapping up the landscape and the Desert
+was rushing in under her pilot and streaking out below the last sleeper
+like tape from a ticker, the danger signal sounded in the engine cab,
+the air went on full, the passengers braced themselves against the seats
+in front of them, or held their breath in their berths as the train came
+to a dead stop.
+
+The conductor and the head man hurried forward shouting, "What's the
+matter?" to the engineer.
+
+The driver, leaning from his lofty window, asked angrily, "What in
+thunder's the matter with you? I got a stop signal from behind."
+
+"You'd better lay off and have a good sleep," said the conductor.
+
+"I'll put you to sleep for a minute if you ever hint that I was not
+awake coming down Canon Diablo," shouted the engineer, releasing his
+brakes. As the long, heavy train glided by, the trainmen swung up like
+sailors, and away went the Limited over the long bridge, five minutes to
+the bad.
+
+A month later the same thing happened on the East end. The engineer was
+signalled and stopped on a curve with the point of his pilot on a high
+bridge.
+
+This time the captain and the engineer were not so brittle of temper.
+They discussed the matter, calling on the fireman, who had heard
+nothing, being busy in the coal-tank.
+
+The head brakeman, crossing himself, said it was the "unseen hand" that
+had been stopping the Limited on the Desert. It might be a warning, he
+said, and walked briskly out on the bridge looking for dynamite, ghosts,
+and things.
+
+When he had reached the other end of the bridge, he gave the go-ahead
+signal and the train pulled out. As they had lost seven minutes, it was
+necessary for the conductor to report "cause of delay;" and that was the
+first hint the officials of any of the Western lines had of the "unseen
+hand."
+
+Presently trainmen, swapping yarns at division stations, heard of the
+mysterious signal on other roads.
+
+The Columbia Limited, over on the Short Line, was choked with her head
+over Snake River, at the very edge of Pendleton. When they had pulled in
+and a fresh crew had taken the train on, the in-coming captain and his
+daring driver argued over the incident and they each got ten days,--not
+for the delay, but because they could not see to sign the call-book next
+morning and were not fit to be seen by other people.
+
+The next train stopped was the International Limited on the Grand Trunk,
+then the Sunset by the South Coast.
+
+The strange phenomenon became so general that officials lost patience.
+One road issued an order to the effect that any engineer who heard
+signals when there were no signals should get thirty days for the first
+and his time for the second offence.
+
+Within a week from the appearance of the unusual and unusually offensive
+bulletin, "Baldy" Hooten heard the stop signal as he neared a little
+Junction town where his line crossed another on an overhead bridge.
+
+When the signal sounded, the fireman glanced over at the driver, who
+dived through the window up to his hip pockets.
+
+When the engine had crashed over the bridge, the driver pulled himself
+into the cab again, and once more the signal. The fireman, amazed,
+stared at the engineer. The latter jerked the throttle wide open; seeing
+which, the stoker dropped to the deck and began feeding the hungry
+furnace. Ten minutes later the Limited screamed for a regular stop, ten
+miles down the line. As the driver dropped to the ground and began
+touching the pins and links with the back of his bare hand, to see if
+they were all cool, the head brakeman trotted forward whispering
+hoarsely, "The ol' man's aboard."
+
+The driver waved him aside with his flaring torch, and up trotted the
+blue-and-gold conductor with his little silver white-light with a
+frosted flue. "Why didn't you stop at Pee-Wee Junction?" he hissed.
+
+"Is Pee-Wee a stop station?"
+
+"On signal."
+
+"I didn't see no sign."
+
+"_I_ pulled the bell."
+
+"Go on now, you ghost-dancer," said the engineer.
+
+"You idiot!" gasped the exasperated conductor. "Don't you know the old
+man's on, that he wanted to stop at Pee-Wee to meet the G.M. this
+morning, that a whole engineering outfit will be idle there for half a
+day, and you'll get the guillotine?"
+
+"Whew, you have _shore_ got 'em."
+
+"Isn't your bell working?" asked a big man who had joined the group
+under the cab window.
+
+"I think so, sir," said the driver, as he recognized the superintendent.
+"Johnny, try that cab bell," he shouted, and the fire-boy sounded the
+big brass gong.
+
+"Why didn't you take it at Pee-Wee?" asked the old man, holding his
+temper beautifully.
+
+The driver lifted his torch and stared almost rudely into the face of
+the official in front of him. "Why, Mr. Skidum," said he slowly, "I
+didn't hear no signal."
+
+The superintendent was blocked.
+
+As he turned and followed the conductor into the telegraph office, the
+driver, gloating in his high tower of a cab, watched him.
+
+"He's an old darling," said he to the fire-boy, "and I'm ready to die
+for him any day; but I can't stop for him in the face of bulletin 13.
+Thirty days for the first offence, and then fire," he quoted, as he
+opened the throttle and steamed away, four minutes late.
+
+The old man drummed on the counter-top in the telegraph office, and then
+picked up a pad and wrote a wire to his assistant:--
+
+"Cancel general order No. 13."
+
+The night man slipped out in the dawn and called the day man who was the
+station master, explaining that the old man was at the station and
+evidently unhappy.
+
+The agent came on unusually early and endeavored to arrange for a light
+engine to carry the superintendent back to the Junction.
+
+At the end of three hours they had a freight engine that had left its
+train on a siding thirty miles away and rolled up to rescue the stranded
+superintendent.
+
+Now, every railway man knows that when one thing goes wrong on a
+railroad, two more mishaps are sure to follow; so, when the rescuing
+crew heard over the wire that the train they had left on a siding,
+having been butted by another train heading in, had started back down
+grade, spilled over at the lower switch, and blocked the main line, they
+began to expect something to happen at home.
+
+However, the driver had to go when the old man was in the cab and the
+G.M. with a whole army of engineers and workmen waiting for him at
+Pee-Wee; so he rattled over the switches and swung out on the main line
+like a man who was not afraid.
+
+Two miles up the road the light engine, screaming through a cut,
+encountered a flock of sheep, wallowed through them, left the track, and
+slammed the four men on board up against the side of the cut.
+
+Not a bone was broken, though all of them were sore shaken, the engineer
+being unconscious when picked up.
+
+"Go back and report," said the old man to the conductor. "You look after
+the engineer," to the fireman.
+
+"Will you flag west, sir?" asked the conductor.
+
+"Yes,--I'll flag into Pee-Wee," said the old man, limping down the line.
+
+To be sure, the superintendent was an intelligent man and not the least
+bit superstitious; but he couldn't help, as he limped along, connecting
+these disasters, remotely at least, with general order No. 13.
+
+In time the "unseen signal" came to be talked of by the officials as
+well as by train and enginemen. It came up finally at the annual
+convention of General Passenger Agents at Chicago and was discussed by
+the engineers at Atlanta, but was always ridiculed by the eastern
+element.
+
+"I helped build the U.P.," said a Buffalo man, "and I want to tell you
+high-liners you can't drink squirrel-whiskey at timber-line without
+seein' things nights."
+
+That ended the discussion.
+
+Probably no road in the country suffered from the evil effects of the
+mysterious signal as did the Inter-Mountain Air Line.
+
+The regular spotters failed to find out, and the management sent to
+Chicago for a real live detective who would not be predisposed to accept
+the "mystery" as such, but would do his utmost to find the cause of a
+phenomenon that was not only interrupting traffic but demoralizing the
+whole service.
+
+As the express trains were almost invariably stopped at night, the
+expert travelled at night and slept by day. Months passed with only two
+or three "signals." These happened to be on the train opposed to the
+one in which the detective was travelling at that moment. They brought
+out another man, and on his first trip, taken merely to "learn the
+road," the train was stopped in broad daylight. This time the stop
+proved to be a lucky one; for, as the engineer let off the air and
+slipped round a curve in a canon, he found a rock as big as a box car
+resting on the track.
+
+The detective was unable to say who sounded the signal. The train crew
+were overawed. They would not even discuss the matter.
+
+With a watchman, unknown to the trainmen, on every train, the officials
+hoped now to solve the mystery in a very short time.
+
+The old engineer, McNally, who had found the rock in the canon, had
+boasted in the lodge-room, in the round-house and out, that if ever he
+got the "ghost-sign," he'd let her go. Of course he was off his guard
+this time. He had not expected the "spook-stop" in open day. And right
+glad he was, too, that he stopped _that_ day.
+
+A fortnight later McNally, on the night run, was going down Crooked
+Creek Canon watching the fireworks in the heavens. A black cloud hung
+on a high peak, and where its sable skirts trailed along the range the
+lightning leaped and flashed in sheets and chains. Above the roar of
+wheels he could hear the splash, and once in a while he could feel the
+spray, of new-made cataracts as the water rushed down the mountain side,
+choking the culverts.
+
+At Crag View there was, at that time, a high wooden trestle stilted up
+on spliced spruce piles with the bark on.
+
+It used to creak and crack under the engine when it was new. McNally was
+nearing it now. It lay, however, just below a deep rock cut that had
+been made in a mountain crag and beyond a sharp curve.
+
+McNally leaned from his cab window, and when the lightning flashed, saw
+that the cut was clear of rock and released the brakes slightly to allow
+the long train to slip through the reverse curve at the bridge. Curves
+cramp a train, and a smooth runner likes to feel them glide smoothly.
+
+As the black locomotive poked her nose through the cut, the engineer
+leaned out again; but the after-effect of the flash of lightning left
+the world in inky blackness.
+
+Back in a darkened corner of the drawing-room of the rearmost sleeper
+the sleuth snored with both eyes and ears open.
+
+Suddenly he saw a man, fully dressed, leap from a lower berth in the
+last section and make a grab for the bell-rope. The man missed the rope;
+and before he could leap again the detective landed on the back of his
+neck, bearing him down. At that moment the conductor came through; and
+when he saw the detective pull a pair of bracelets from his hip-pocket,
+he guessed that the man underneath must be wanted, and joined in the
+scuffle. In a moment the man was handcuffed, for he really offered no
+resistance. As they released him he rose, and they squashed him into a
+seat opposite the section from which he had leaped a moment before. The
+man looked not at his captors, who still held him, but pressed his face
+against the window. He saw the posts of the snow-shed passing, sprang
+up, flung the two men from him as a Newfoundland would free himself from
+a couple of kittens, lifted his manacled hands, leaped toward the
+ceiling, and bore down on the signal-rope.
+
+The conductor, in the excitement, yelled at the man, bringing the rear
+brakeman from the smoking-room, followed by the black boy bearing a
+shoe-brush.
+
+Once more they bore the bad man down, and then the conductor grabbed the
+rope and signalled the engineer ahead.
+
+Men leaped from their berths, and women showed white faces between the
+closely drawn curtains.
+
+Once more the conductor pulled the bell, but the train stood still.
+
+One of the passengers picked up the man's hand-grip that had fallen from
+his berth, and found that the card held in the leather tag read:
+
+  "JOHN BRADISH."
+
+"Go forward," shouted the conductor to the rear brakeman, "and get 'em
+out of here,--tell McNally we've got the ghost."
+
+The detective released his hold on his captive, and the man sank limp in
+the corner seat.
+
+The company's surgeon, who happened to be on the car, came over and
+examined the prisoner. The man had collapsed completely.
+
+When the doctor had revived the handcuffed passenger and got him to sit
+up and speak, the porter, wild-eyed, burst in and shouted: "De bridge is
+gone."
+
+A death-like hush held the occupants of the car.
+
+"De hangin' bridge is sho' gone," repeated the panting porter, "an' de
+engine, wi' McNally in de cab's crouchin' on de bank, like a black cat
+on a well-cu'b. De watah's roahin' in de deep gorge, and if she drap she
+gwine drag--"
+
+The doctor clapped his hand over the frightened darky's mouth, and the
+detective butted him out to the smoking-room.
+
+The conductor explained that the porter was crazy, and so averted a
+panic.
+
+The detective came back and faced the doctor. "Take off the irons," said
+the surgeon, and the detective unlocked the handcuffs.
+
+Now the doctor, in his suave, sympathetic way, began to question
+Bradish; and Bradish began to unravel the mystery, pausing now and again
+to rest, for the ordeal through which he had just passed had been a
+great mental and nervous strain.
+
+He began by relating the Ashtabula accident that had left him wifeless
+and childless, and, as the story progressed, seemed to find infinite
+relief in relating the sad tale of his lonely life. It was like a
+confession. Moreover, he had kept the secret so long locked in his
+troubled breast that it was good to pour it out.
+
+The doctor sat directly in front of the narrator, the detective beside
+him, while interested passengers hung over the backs of seats and
+blocked the narrow aisle. Women, with faces still blanched, sat up in
+bed listening breathlessly to the strange story of John Bradish.
+
+Shortly after returning to their old home, he related, he was awakened
+one night by the voice of his wife calling in agonized tones, "John!
+John!" precisely as she had cried to him through the smoke and steam and
+twisted debris at Ashtabula. He leaped from his bed, heard a mighty
+roar, saw a great light flash on his window, and the midnight express
+crashed by.
+
+To be sure it was only a dream, he said to himself, intensified by the
+roar of the approaching train; and yet he could sleep no more that
+night. Try as he would, he could not forget it; and soon he realized
+that a growing desire to travel was coming upon him. In two or three
+days' time this desire had become irresistible. He boarded the midnight
+train and took a ride. But this did not cure him. In fact, the more he
+travelled the more he wanted to travel. Soon after this he discovered
+that he had acquired another habit. He wanted to stop the train. Against
+these inclinations he had struggled, but to no purpose. Once, when he
+felt that he must take a trip, he undressed and went to bed. He fell
+asleep, and slept soundly until he heard the whistle of the midnight
+train. Instantly he was out of bed, and by the time they had changed
+engines he was at the station ready to go.
+
+The mania for stopping trains had been equally irresistible. He would
+bite his lips, his fingers, but he would also stop the train.
+
+The moment the mischief (for such it was, in nearly every instance) was
+done, he would suffer greatly in dread of being found out. But to-night,
+as on the occasion of the daylight stop in the canon, he had no warning,
+no opportunity to check himself, nor any desire to do so. In each
+instance he had heard, dozing in the day-coach and sleeping soundly in
+his berth, the voice cry: "John! John!" and instantly his brain was
+ablaze with the light of burning wreckage. In the canon he had only
+felt, indefinitely, the danger ahead; but to-night he saw the bridge
+swept away, and the dark gorge that yawned in front of them. Instantly
+upon hearing the cry that woke him, he saw it all.
+
+"When I realized that the train was still moving, that my first effort
+to stop had failed, I flung these strong men from me with the greatest
+ease. I'm sure I should have burst those steel bands that bound my
+wrists if it had been necessary.
+
+"Thank God it's all over. I feel now that I am cured,--that I can settle
+down contented."
+
+The man drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead,
+keeping his face to the window for a long time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the conductor went forward, he found that it was as the porter had
+pictured. The high bridge had been carried away by a water-spout; and on
+the edge of the opening the engine trembled, her pilot pointing out
+over the black abyss.
+
+McNally, having driven his fireman from the deck, stood in the cab
+gripping the air-lever and watching the pump. At that time we used what
+is technically known as "straight air"; so that if the pump stopped the
+air played out.
+
+The conductor ordered the passengers to leave the train.
+
+The rain had ceased, but the lightning was still playing about the
+summit of the range, and when it flashed, those who had gone forward saw
+McNally standing at his open window, looking as grand and heroic as the
+captain on the bridge of his sinking ship.
+
+A nervous and somewhat thoughtless person came close under the cab to
+ask the engineer why he didn't back up.
+
+There was no answer. McNally thought it must be obvious to a man with
+the intelligence of an oyster, that to release the brakes would be to
+let the heavy train shove him over the bank, even if his engine had the
+power to back up, which she had not.
+
+The trainmen were working quietly, but very effectively, unloading. The
+day coaches had been emptied, the hand-brakes set, and all the wheels
+blocked with links and pins and stones, when the link between the engine
+and the mail-car snapped and the engine moved forward.
+
+McNally heard the snap and felt her going, leaped from the window,
+caught and held a scrub cedar that grew in a rock crevice, and saw his
+black steed plunge down the dark canon, a sheer two thousand feet.
+
+McNally had been holding her in the back motion with steam in her
+cylinders; and now, when she leaped out into space, her throttle flew
+wide, a knot in the whistle-rope caught in the throttle, opening the
+whistle-valve as well. Down, down she plunged,--her wheels whirling in
+mid-air, a solid stream of fire escaping from her quivering stack, and
+from her throat a shriek that almost froze the blood in the veins of the
+onlookers. Fainter and farther came the cry, until at last the wild
+waters caught her, held her, hushed her, and smothered out her life.
+
+
+
+
+CHASING THE WHITE MAIL
+
+
+Over the walnuts and wine, as they say in Fifth Avenue, the gray-haired
+gentleman and I lingered long after the last of the diners had left the
+cafe car. One by one the lights were lowered. Some of the table-stewards
+had removed their duck and donned their street clothes. The shades were
+closely drawn, so that people could not peep in when the train was
+standing. The chief steward was swinging his punch on his finger and
+yawning. My venerable friend, who was a veritable author's angel, was a
+retired railway president with plenty of time to talk.
+
+"We had, on the Vandalia," he began after lighting a fresh cigar, "a
+dare-devil driver named Hubbard--'Yank' Hubbard they called him. He was
+a first-class mechanic, sober and industrious, but notoriously reckless,
+though he had never had a wreck. The Superintendent of Motive Power had
+selected him for the post of master-mechanic at Effingham, but I had
+held him up on account of his bad reputation as a wild rider.
+
+"We had been having a lot of trouble with California fruit
+trains,--delays, wrecks, cars looted while in the ditch,--and I had made
+the delay of a fruit train almost a capital offence. The bulletin was, I
+presume, rather severe, and the enginemen and conductors were not taking
+it very well.
+
+"One night the White Mail was standing at the station at East St. Louis
+(that was before the first bridge was built) loading to leave. My car
+was on behind, and I was walking up and down having a good smoke. As I
+turned near the engine, I stopped to watch the driver of the White Mail
+pour oil in the shallow holes on the link-lifters without wasting a
+drop. He was on the opposite side of the engine, and I could see only
+his flitting, flickering torch and the dipping, bobbing spout of his
+oiler.
+
+"A man, manifestly another engineer, came up. The Mail driver lifted his
+torch and said, 'Hello, Yank,' to which the new-comer made no direct
+response. He seemed to have something on his mind. 'What are you out
+on?' asked the engineer, glancing at the other's overalls. 'Fast
+freight--perishable--must make time--no excuse will be taken,' he
+snapped, quoting and misquoting from my severe circular. 'Who's in that
+Kaskaskia?' he asked, stepping up close to the man with the torch.
+
+"'The ol' man,' said the engineer.
+
+"'No! ol' man, eh? Well! I'll give him a canter for his currency this
+trip,' said Yank, gloating. 'I'll follow him like a scandal; I'll stay
+with him this night like the odor of a hot box. Say, Jimmie,' he
+laughed, 'when that tintype of yours begins to lay down on you, just
+bear in mind that my pilot is under the ol' man's rear brake-beam, and
+that the headlight of the 99 is haunting him.'
+
+"'Don't get gay, now,' said the engineer of the White Mail.
+
+"'Oh, I'll make him think California fruit is not all that's perishable
+on the road to-night,' said Yank, hurrying away to the round-house.
+
+"Just as we were about to pull out, our engineer, who was brother to
+Yank, found a broken frame and was obliged to go to the house for
+another locomotive. We were an hour late when we left that night,
+carrying signals for the fast freight. As we left the limits of the
+yard, Hubbard's headlight swung out on the main line, picked up two
+slender shafts of silver, and shot them under our rear end. The first
+eight or ten miles were nearly level. I sat and watched the headlight of
+the fast freight. He seemed to be keeping his interval until we hit the
+hill at Collinsville. There was hard pounding then for him for five or
+six miles. Just as the Kaskaskia dropped from the ridge between the east
+and west Silver Creek, the haunting light swept round the curve at
+Hagler's tank. I thought he must surely take water here; but he plunged
+on down the hill, coming to the surface a few minutes later on the high
+prairie east of Saint Jacobs.
+
+"Highland, thirty miles out, was our first stop. We took water there;
+and before we could get away from the tank, Hubbard had his twin shafts
+of silver under my car. We got a good start here, but our catch engine
+proved to be badly coaled and a poor steamer. Up to this time she had
+done fairly well, but after the first two hours she began to lose.
+Seeing no more of the freight train, I turned in, not a little pleased
+to think that Mr. Yank's headlight would not haunt me again that trip. I
+fell asleep, but woke again when the train stopped, probably at
+Vandalia. I had just begun to doze again when our engine let out a
+frightful scream for brakes. I knew what that meant,--Hubbard was behind
+us. I let my shade go up, and saw the light of the freight train shining
+past me and lighting up the water-tank. I was getting a bit nervous,
+when I felt our train pulling out.
+
+"Of course Hubbard had to water again; but as he had only fifteen loads,
+and a bigger tank, he could go as far as the Mail could without
+stopping. Moreover, we were bound to stop at county seats; and as often
+as we did so we had the life scared out of us, for there was not an
+air-brake freight car on the system at that time. What a night that must
+have been for the freight crew! They were on top constantly, but I
+believe the beggars enjoyed it all. Any conductor but Jim Lawn would
+have stopped and reported the engineer at the first telegraph station.
+Still, I have always had an idea that the train-master was tacitly in
+the conspiracy, for his bulletin had been a hot one delivered orally by
+the Superintendent, whom I had seen personally.
+
+"Well, along about midnight Hubbard's headlight got so close, and kept
+so close, that I could not sleep. His brother, who was pulling the Mail,
+avoided whistling him down; for when he did he only showed that there
+_was_ danger, and published his bad brother's recklessness. The result
+was that when the Mail screamed I invariably braced myself. I don't
+believe I should have stood it, only I felt it would all be over in
+another hour; for we should lose Yank at Effingham, the end of the
+freight's division. It happened, however, that there was no one to
+relieve him, or no engine rather; and Yank went through to Terre Haute.
+I was sorry, but I hated to show the white feather. I knew our fresh
+engine would lose him, with his tired fireman and dirty fire. Once or
+twice I saw his lamp, but at Longpoint we lost him for good. I went to
+bed again, but I could not sleep. I used to boast that I could sleep in
+a boiler-maker's shop; but the long dread of that fellow's pilot had
+unnerved me. I had wild, distressing dreams.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The next morning, when I got to my office, I found a column of news cut
+from a morning paper. It had the usual scare-head, and began by
+announcing that the White Mail, with General Manager Blank's car
+Kaskaskia, came in on time, carrying signals for a freight train. The
+second section had not arrived, 'as we go to press.' I think I swore
+softly at that point. Then I read on, for there was a lot more. It
+seemed, the paper stated, that a gang of highwaymen had planned to rob
+the Mail at Longpoint, which had come to be regarded as a regular robber
+station. One of the robbers, being familiar with train rules, saw the
+signal lights on the Mail and mistook it for a special, which is often
+run as first section of a fast train, and they let it pass. They flagged
+the freight train, and one of the robbers, who was doubtless new at the
+business, caught the passing engine and climbed into the cab. The
+engineer, seeing the man's masked face at his elbow, struck it a fearful
+blow with his great fist. The amateur desperado sank to the floor, his
+big, murderous gun rattling on the iron plate of the coal-deck. Yank,
+the engineer, grabbed the gun, whistled off-brakes, and opened the
+throttle. The sudden lurch forward proved too much for a weak link, and
+the train parted, leaving the rest of the robbers and the train crew to
+fight it out. As soon as the engineer discovered that the train had
+parted, he slowed down and stopped.
+
+"When he had picketed the highwayman out on the tank-deck with a piece
+of bell-cord, one end of which was fixed to the fellow's left foot and
+the other to the whistle lever, Yank set his fireman, with a white light
+and the robber's gun, on the rear car and flagged back to the rescue.
+The robbers, seeing the blunder they had made, took a few parting shots
+at the trainmen on the top of the train, mounted their horses, and rode
+away.
+
+"When the train had coupled up again, they pulled on up to the next
+station, where the conductor reported the cause of delay, and from which
+station the account of the attempted robbery had been wired.
+
+"I put the paper down and walked over to a window that overlooked the
+yards. The second section of the White Mail was coming in. As the engine
+rolled past, Yank looked up; and there was a devilish grin on his black
+face. The fireman was sitting on the fireman's seat, the gun across his
+lap. A young fellow, wearing a long black coat, a bell-rope, and a
+scared look, was sweeping up the deck.
+
+"When I returned to my desk, the Superintendent of Motive Power was
+standing near it. When I sat down, he spread a paper before me. I
+glanced at it and recognized Yank Hubbard's appointment to the post of
+master-mechanic at Effingham.
+
+"I dipped a pen in the ink-well and wrote across it in red, 'O--K.'"
+
+
+
+
+OPPRESSING THE OPPRESSOR
+
+
+"Is this the President's office?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Can I see the President?"
+
+"Yes,--I'm the President."
+
+The visitor placed one big boot in a chair, hung his soft hat on his
+knee, dropped his elbow on the hat, let his chin fall in the hollow of
+his hand, and waited.
+
+The President of the Santa Fe, leaning over a flat-topped table, wrote
+leisurely. When he had finished, he turned a kindly face to the visitor
+and asked what could be done.
+
+"My name's Jones."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I presume you know about me,--Buffalo Jones, of Garden City."
+
+"Well," began the President, "I know a lot of Joneses, but where is
+Garden City?"
+
+"Down the road a piece, 'bout half-way between Wakefield and Turner's
+Tank. I want you folks to put in a switch there,--that's what I've come
+about. I'd like to have it in this week."
+
+"Anybody living at Garden City?"
+
+"Yes, all that's there's livin'."
+
+"About how many?"
+
+"One and a half when I'm away,--Swede and Injin."
+
+The President of the Santa Fe smiled and rolled his lead pencil between
+the palms of his hands. Mr. Jones watched him and pitied him, as one
+watches and pities a child who is fooling with firearms. "He don't know
+I'm loaded," thought Jones.
+
+"Well," said the President, "when you get your town started so that
+there will be some prospect of getting a little business, we shall be
+only too glad to put in a spur for you."
+
+Jones had been looking out through an open window, watching the
+law-makers of Kansas going up the wide steps of the State House. The
+fellows from the farm climbed, the town fellows ran up the steps.
+
+"Spur!" said Jones, wheeling around from the window and walking toward
+the President's desk, "I don't want no spur; I want a side track
+that'll hold fifty cars, and I want it this week,--see?"
+
+"Now look here, Mr. Jones, this is sheer nonsense. We get wind at
+Wakefield and water at Turner's Tank; now, what excuse is there for
+putting in a siding half-way between these places?"
+
+Again Mr. Jones, rubbing the point of his chin with the ball of his
+thumb, gave the President a pitying glance.
+
+"Say!" said Jones, resting the points of his long fingers on the table,
+"I'm goin' to build a town. You're goin' to build a side track. I've
+already set aside ten acres of land for you, for depot and yards. This
+land will cost you fifty dollars per, _now_. If I have to come back
+about this side track, it'll cost you a hundred. Now, Mr. President, I
+wish you good-mornin'."
+
+At the door Jones paused and looked back. "Any time this week will do;
+good-mornin'."
+
+The President smiled and turned to his desk. Presently he smiled again;
+then he forgot all about Mr. Jones and the new town, and went on with
+his work.
+
+Mr. Jones went down and out and over to the House to watch the men make
+laws.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In nearly every community, about every capital, State or National, you
+will find men who are capable of being influenced. This is especially
+true of new communities through which a railway is being built. It has
+always been so, and will be, so long as time expires. I mean the time of
+an annual pass. It is not surprising, then, that in Kansas at that time,
+the Grasshopper period,--before prohibition, Mrs. Nation, and religious
+dailies,--the company had its friends, and that Mr. Jones, an honest
+farmer with money to spend, had his.
+
+Two or three days after the interview with Mr. Jones, the President's
+"friend" came over to the railroad building. He came in quietly and
+seated himself near the President, as a doctor enters a sick-room or a
+lawyer a prison cell. "I know you don't want me," he seemed to say, "but
+you need me."
+
+When his victim had put down his pen, the politician asked, "Have you
+seen Buffalo Jones?"
+
+The President said he had seen the gentleman.
+
+"I think it would be a good scheme to give him what he wants," said the
+Honorable member of the State legislature.
+
+But the President could not agree with his friend; and at the end of
+half an hour, the Honorable member went away not altogether satisfied.
+He did not relish the idea of the President trying to run the road
+without his assistance. One of the chief excuses for his presence on
+earth and in the State legislature was "to take care of the road." Now,
+he had gotten up early in order to see the President without being seen,
+and the President had waved him aside. "Well," he said, "I'll let Jones
+have the field to-day."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days later, when the President opened his desk, he found a brief
+note from his confidential assistant,--not the Honorable one, but an
+ordinary man who worked for the company for a stated salary. The note
+read:--
+
+"If Buffalo Jones calls to-day please see him.--I am leaving town.
+G.O.M."
+
+But Buffalo did not call.
+
+Presently the General Manager came in, and when he was leaving the room
+he turned and asked, "Have you seen Jones?"
+
+"Yes," said the President of the Santa Fe, "I've seen Jones."
+
+The General Manager was glad, for that took the matter from his hands
+and took the responsibility from his drooping shoulders.
+
+About the time the President got his mind fixed upon the affairs of the
+road again, Colonel Holiday came in. Like the Honorable gentleman, he
+too entered by the private door unannounced; for he was the Father of
+the Santa Fe. Placing his high hat top side down on the table, the
+Colonel folded his hands over the golden head of his cane and inquired
+of the President if he had seen Jones.
+
+The President assured the Colonel, who in addition to being the Father
+of the road was a director.
+
+The Colonel picked up his hat and went out, feeling considerable relief:
+for _his_ friend in the State Senate had informed him at the Ananias
+Club on the previous evening, that Jones was going to make trouble for
+the road. The Colonel knew that a good, virtuous man with money to spend
+could make trouble for anything or anybody, working quietly and
+unobtrusively among the equally virtuous members of the State
+legislature. The Colonel had been a member of that august body.
+
+In a little while the General Manager came back; and with him came
+O'Marity, the road-master.
+
+"I thought you said you had seen Jones," the General Manager began.
+
+Now the President, who was never known to be really angry, wheeled on
+his revolving chair.
+
+"I--_have_--seen Jones."
+
+"Well, O'Marity says Jones has not been 'seen.' His friend, who comes
+down from Atchison every Sunday night on O'Marity's hand-car, has been
+good enough to tell O'Marity just what has been going on in the House.
+There must be some mistake. It seems to me that if this man Jones had
+been seen properly, he would subside. What's the matter with your
+friend--Ah, here comes the Honorable gentleman now."
+
+The President beckoned with his index finger and his friend came in.
+Looking him in the eye, the President asked in a stage whisper: "Have
+you--seen--Jones?"
+
+"No, sir," said the Honorable gentleman. "I had no authority to see
+him."
+
+"It's damphunny," said O'Marity, "if the President 'ave seen 'im, 'e
+don't quit."
+
+"I certainly saw a man called Jones,--Buffalo Jones of Garden City. He
+wanted a side track put in half-way between Wakefield and Turner's
+Tank."
+
+"And you told him, 'Certainly, we'll do it at once,'" said the General
+Manager.
+
+"No," the President replied, "I told him we would not do it at once,
+because there was no business or prospect of business to justify the
+expense."
+
+"Ah--h," said the Manager.
+
+O'Marity whistled softly.
+
+The Honorable gentleman smiled, and looked out through the open window
+to where the members of the State legislature were going up the broad
+steps to the State House.
+
+"Mr. Rong," the Manager began, "it is all a horrible mistake. You have
+never 'seen' Jones. Not in the sense that we mean. When you see a
+politician or a man who herds with politicians, he is supposed to be
+yours,--you are supposed to have acquired a sort of interest in him,--an
+interest that is valued so long as the individual is in sight. You are
+entitled to his support and influence, up to, and including the date on
+which your influence expires." All the time the Manager kept jerking his
+thumb toward the window that held the Honorable gentleman, using the
+President's friend as a living example of what he was trying to explain.
+
+"Is Jones a member?"
+
+"No, Mr. Rong, but he controls a few members. It is easier, you
+understand, to acquire a drove of steers by buying a bunch than by
+picking them up here and there, one at a time."
+
+"I protest," said the Honorable member, "against the reference to
+members of the legislature as 'cattle.'"
+
+Neither of the railway men appeared to hear the protest.
+
+"I think I understand now," said the President. "And I wish, Robson, you
+would take this matter in hand. I confess that I have no stomach for
+such work."
+
+"Very well," said the Manager. "Please instruct your--your--" and he
+jerked his thumb toward the Honorable gentleman--"your _friend_ to send
+Jones to my office."
+
+The Honorable gentleman went white and then flushed red, but he waited
+for no further orders. As he strode towards the door, Robson, with a
+smooth, unruffled brow, but with a cold smile playing over his handsome
+face, with mock courtesy and a wide sweep of his open hand, waved the
+visitor through the open door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Mr. Jones wishes to see you," said the chief clerk.
+
+"Oh, certainly--show Mr. Jones--Ah, good-morning, Mr. Jones, glad to see
+you. How's Garden City? Going to let us in on the ground floor, Mr. Rong
+tells me. Here, now, fire up; take this big chair and tell me all about
+your new town."
+
+Jones took a cigar cautiously from the box. When the Manager offered him
+a match he lighted up gingerly, as though he expected the thing to blow
+up.
+
+"Now, Mr. Jones, as I understand it, you want a side track put in at
+once. The matter of depot and other buildings will wait, but I want you
+to promise to let us have at least ten acres of ground. Perhaps it would
+be better to transfer that to us at once. I'll see" (the Manager pressed
+a button). "Send the chief engineer to me, George," as the chief clerk
+looked in.
+
+All this time Jones smoked little short puffs, eyeing the Manager and
+his own cigar. When the chief engineer came in he was introduced to Mr.
+Jones, the man who was going to give Kansas the highest boom she had
+ever had.
+
+While Jones stood in open-mouthed amazement, the Manager instructed the
+engineer to go to Garden City when it would suit Mr. Jones, lay out a
+siding that would hold fifty loads, and complete the job at the earliest
+possible moment.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Jones, have you got transportation over our line?"
+
+Mr. Jones managed to gasp the one word, "No."
+
+"Buz-z-zz," went the bell. "George, make out an annual for Mr.
+Jones,--Comp. G.M."
+
+Jones steadied himself by resting an elbow on the top of the Manager's
+desk. The chief engineer was writing in a little note-book.
+
+"Now, Mr. Jones--ah, your cigar's out!--how much is this ten acres to
+cost us?--a thousand dollars, I believe you told Mr. Rong."
+
+"Yes, I did tell him that; but if this is straight and no jolly, it
+ain't goin' to cost you a cent."
+
+"Well, that's a _great_ deal better than most towns treat us," said the
+Manager. "Now, Mr. Jones, you will have to excuse me; I have some
+business with the President. Don't fail to look in on me when you come
+to town; and rest assured that the Santa Fe will leave nothing undone
+that might help your enterprise."
+
+With a hearty handshake the Manager, usually a little frigid and remote,
+passed out, leaving Mr. Jones to the tender mercies of the chief
+engineer.
+
+Up to this point there is nothing unusual in this story. The remarkable
+part is the fact that the building of a side track in an open plain
+turned out to be good business. In a year's time there was a neat
+station and more sidings. The town boomed with a rapidity that amazed
+even the boomers. To be sure, it had its relapses; but still, if you
+look from the window as the California Limited crashes by, you will see
+a pretty little town when you reach the point on the time-table called
+
+        "Garden City."
+
+
+
+
+THE IRON HORSE AND THE TROLLEY
+
+
+I
+
+Two prospectors had three claims in a new camp in British Columbia, but
+they had not the $7.50 to pay for having them recorded. They told their
+story to Colonel Topping, author of "The Yellowstone Park," and the
+Colonel advanced the necessary amount. In time the prospectors returned
+$5.00 of the loan, and gave the Colonel one of the claims for the
+balance, but more for his kindness to them; for they reckoned it a bully
+good prospect. Because they considered it the best claim in the camp,
+they called it Le Roi. Subsequently the Colonel sold this "King," that
+had cost him $2.50, for $30,000.00.
+
+The new owners of Le Roi stocked the claim; and for the following two or
+three years, when a man owed a debt that he was unwilling to pay, he
+paid it in Le Roi stock. If he felt like backing a doubtful horse, he
+put up a handful of mining stock to punish the winner. There is in the
+history of this interesting mine a story of a man swapping a lot of Le
+Roi stock for a burro. The former owner of the donkey took the stock and
+the man it came from into court, declaring that the paper was worthless,
+and that he had been buncoed. As late as 1894, a man who ran a
+restaurant offered 40,000 shares of Le Roi stock for four barrels of
+Canadian whiskey; but the whiskey man would not trade that way.
+
+In the meantime, however, men were working in the mine; and now they
+began to ship ore. It was worth $27.00 a ton, and the stock became
+valuable. Scattered over the Northwest were 500,000 shares that were
+worth $500,000.00. Nearly all the men who had put money into the
+enterprise were Yankees,--mining men from Spokane, just over the border.
+These men began now to pick up all the stray shares that could be found;
+and in a little while eight-tenths of the shares were held by men living
+south of the line. At Northport, in Washington, they built one of the
+finest smelters in the Northwest, hauled their ore over there, and
+smelted it. The ore was rich in gold and copper. They put in a 300
+horse-power hoisting-engine and a 40-drill air-compressor,--the largest
+in Canada,--taking all the money for these improvements out of the mine.
+The thing was a success, and news of it ran down to Chicago. A party of
+men with money started for the new gold fields, but as they were buying
+tickets three men rushed in and took tickets for Seattle. These were
+mining men; and those who had bought only to British Columbia cashed in,
+asked for transportation to the coast, and followed the crowd to the
+Klondike.
+
+In that way Le Roi for the moment was forgotten.
+
+
+II
+
+The Lieutenant-Governor of the Northwest Territories, who had been a
+journalist and had a nose for news, heard of the new camp. All the while
+men were rushing to the Klondike, for it is the nature of man to go from
+home for a thing that he might secure under his own vine.
+
+The Governor visited the new camp. A man named Ross Thompson had staked
+out a town at the foot of Le Roi dump and called it Rossland. The
+Governor put men to work quietly in the mine and then went back to his
+plank palace at Regina, capital of the Northwest Territories,--to a
+capital that looked for all the world like a Kansas frontier town that
+had just ceased to be the county seat. Here for months he waited,
+watching the "Imperial Limited" cross the prairie, receiving delegations
+of half-breeds and an occasional report from one of the common miners in
+Le Roi. If a capitalist came seeking a soft place to invest, the
+Governor pointed to the West-bound Limited and whispered in the
+stranger's ear. To all letters of inquiry coming from Ottawa or
+England,--letters from men who wanted to be told where to dig for
+gold,--he answered, "Klondike."
+
+By and by the Governor went to Rossland again. The mine, of which he
+owned not a single share of stock, was still producing. When he left
+Rossland he knew all about the lower workings, the value and extent of
+the ore body.
+
+By this time nearly all the Le Roi shares were held by Spokane people.
+The Governor, having arranged with a wealthy English syndicate, was in
+a position to buy the mine; but the owners did not seem anxious to sell.
+Eventually, however, when he was able to offer them an average of $7.50
+for shares that had cost the holders but from ten to sixty cents a
+share, about half of them were willing to sell; the balance were not.
+Now the Governor cared nothing for this "balance" so long as he could
+secure a majority,--a controlling interest in the mine,--for the English
+would have it in no other way. A few thousand scattering shares he had
+already picked up, and now, from the faction who were willing to sell,
+he secured an option on 242,000 shares, which, together with the odd
+shares already secured, would put his friends in control of the
+property.
+
+As news of the proposed sale got out, the gorge that was yawning between
+the two factions grew wider.
+
+Finally, when the day arrived for the transfer to be made, the faction
+opposed to the sale prepared to make trouble for those who were selling,
+to prevent the moving of the seal of the company to Canada--in short, to
+stop the sale. They did not go with guns to the secretary and keeper of
+the seal and say, "Bide where ye be"; but they went into court and swore
+out warrants for the arrest of the secretary and those of the directors
+who favored the sale, charging them with conspiracy.
+
+It was midnight in Spokane.
+
+A black locomotive, hitched to a dark day-coach, stood in front of the
+Great Northern station. The dim light of the gauge lamp showed two
+nodding figures in the cab. Out on the platform a man walked up and
+down, keeping an eye on the engine, that was to cost him a cool $1000.00
+for a hundred-mile run. Presently a man with his coat-collar about his
+ears stepped up into the gangway, shook the driver, and asked him where
+he was going.
+
+"Goin' to sleep."
+
+The man would not be denied, however, and when he became too pressing,
+the driver got up and explained that the cab of his engine was his
+castle, and made a move with his right foot.
+
+"Hold," cried his tormentor, "do you know that you are about to lay
+violent hands upon an officer o' the law?"
+
+"No," said the engineer, "but I'll lay a violent foot up agin the
+crown-sheet o' your trousers if you don't jump."
+
+The man jumped.
+
+Now the chief despatcher came from the station, stole along the shadow
+side of the car, and spoke to the man who had ordered the train.
+
+A deputy sheriff climbed up on the rear end of the special, tried the
+door, shaded his eyes, and endeavored to look into the car.
+
+"Have you the running orders?" asked the man who was paying for the
+entertainment.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Let her go, then."
+
+All this was in a low whisper; and now the despatcher climbed up on the
+fireman's side and pressed a bit of crumpled tissue-paper into the
+driver's hand.
+
+"Pull out over the switches slowly, and when you are clear of the yards
+read your orders an' fly."
+
+The driver opened the throttle gently, the big wheels began to revolve,
+and the next moment the sheriff and one of his deputies boarded the
+engine. They demanded to know where that train was bound for.
+
+"The train," said the driver, tugging at the throttle, "is back there at
+the station. I'm goin' to the round-house."
+
+When the sheriff, glancing back, saw that the coach had been cut off, he
+swung himself down.
+
+"They've gi'n it up," said the deputy.
+
+"I reckon--what's that?" said the sheriff. It was the wild, long whistle
+of the lone black engine just leaving the yards. The two officers faced
+each other and stood listening to the flutter of the straight stack of
+the black racer as she responded to the touch of the erstwhile drowsy
+driver, who was at that moment laughing at the high sheriff, and who
+would return to tell of it, and gloat in the streets of Spokane.
+
+The sheriff knew that three of the men for whom he held warrants were at
+Hillier, seven miles on the way to Canada. This engine, then, had been
+sent to pick them up and bear them away over the border. An electric
+line paralleled the steam way to Hillier, and now the sheriff boarded a
+trolley and set sail to capture the engine, leaving one deputy to guard
+the special car.
+
+By the time the engineer got the water worked out of his cylinders, the
+trolley was creeping up beside his tank. He saw the flash from the wire
+above as the car, nodding and dipping like a light boat in the wake of a
+ferry, shot beneath the cross-wires, and knew instantly that she was
+after him.
+
+An electric car would not be ploughing through the gloom at that rate,
+without a ray of light, merely for the fun of the thing. A smile of
+contempt curled the lip of the driver as he cut the reverse-lever back
+to the first notch, put on the injector, and opened the throttle yet a
+little wider.
+
+The two machines were running almost neck and neck now. The trolley
+cried, hissed, and spat fire in her mad effort to pass the locomotive. A
+few stray sparks went out of the engine-stack, and fell upon the roof of
+the racing car. At intervals of half a minute the fireman opened the
+furnace door; and by the flare of light from the white-hot fire-box the
+engine-driver could see the men on the teetering trolley,--the
+motor-man, the conductor, the sheriff, and his deputy.
+
+Slowly now the black flier began to slip away from the electric machine.
+
+The driver, smiling across the glare of the furnace door at his silent,
+sooty companion, touched the throttle again; and the great engine drew
+away from the trolley, as a jack-rabbit who has been fooling with a
+yellow dog passes swiftly out of reach of his silly yelp.
+
+Now the men on the trolley heard the wild, triumphant scream of the iron
+horse whistling for Hillier. The three directors of Le Roi had been
+warned by wire, and were waiting, ready to board the engine.
+
+The big wheels had scarcely stopped revolving when the men began to get
+on. They had barely begun to turn again when the trolley dashed into
+Hillier. The sheriff leaped to the ground and came running for the
+engine. The wheels slipped; and each passing second brought the mighty
+hand of the law, now outstretched, still nearer to the tail of the tank.
+She was moving now, but the sheriff was doing better. Ten feet separated
+the pursued and the pursuer. She slipped again, and the sheriff caught
+the corner of the engine-tank. By this time the driver had got the sand
+running; and now, as the wheels held the rail, the big engine bounded
+forward, almost shaking the sheriff loose. With each turn of the wheels
+the speed was increasing. The sheriff held on; and in three or four
+seconds he was taking only about two steps between telegraph poles, and
+then--he let go.
+
+
+III
+
+While the locomotive and the trolley were racing across the country the
+Governor, who was engineering it all, invested another thousand. He
+ordered another engine, and when she backed onto the coach the deputy
+sheriff told the driver that he must not leave the station. The engineer
+held his torch high above his head, looked the deputy over, and then
+went on oiling his engine. In the meantime the Governor had stored his
+friends away in the dark coach, including the secretary with the
+company's great seal. Now the deputy became uneasy.
+
+He dared not leave the train to send a wire to his chief at Hillier, for
+the sheriff had said, "Keep your eye on the car."
+
+The despatcher, whose only interest in the matter was to run the trains
+and earn money for his employer, having given written and verbal orders
+to the engineer, watched his chance and, when the sheriff was pounding
+on the rear door, dodged in at the front, signalling with the bell-rope
+to the driver to go. Frantically now the deputy beat upon the rear door
+of the car, but the men within only laughed as the wheels rattled over
+the last switch and left the lights of Spokane far behind.
+
+Away they went over a new and crooked track, the sand and cinders
+sucking in round the tail of the train to torment the luckless deputy.
+Away over hills and rills, past Hillier, where the sheriff still stood
+staring down the darkness after the vanishing engine; over switches and
+through the Seven Devils, while the unhappy deputy hung to the rear
+railing with one hand and crossed himself.
+
+Each passing moment brought the racing train still nearer the
+border,--to that invisible line that marks the end of Yankeeland and the
+beginning of the British possessions. The sheriff knew this and beat
+loudly upon the car door with an iron gun. The Governor let the sash
+fall at the top of the door and spoke, or rather yelled, to the deputy.
+
+To the Governor's amazement, the sheriff pushed the bottle aside. Dry
+and dusty as he was, he would not drink. He was too mad to swallow. He
+poked his head into the dark coach and ordered the whole party to
+surrender.
+
+"Just say what you want," said a voice in the gloom, "and we'll pass it
+out to you."
+
+The sheriff became busy with some curves and reverse curves now, and
+made no reply.
+
+Presently the Governor came to the window in the rear door again and
+called up the sheriff.
+
+"We are now nearing the border," he said to the man on the platform.
+"They won't know you over there. Here you stand for law and order, and I
+respect you, though I don't care to meet you personally; but over the
+border you'll only stand for your sentence,--two years for carrying a
+cannon on your hip,--and then they'll take you away to prison."
+
+The sheriff made no answer.
+
+"Now we're going to slow down at the line to about twenty miles an hour,
+more or less; and if you'll take a little friendly advice, you'll fall
+off."
+
+The train was still running at a furious pace. The whistle sounded,--one
+long, wild scream,--and the speed of the train slackened.
+
+"Here you are," the Governor called, and the sheriff stood on the lower
+step.
+
+The door opened and the Governor stepped out on the platform, followed
+by his companions.
+
+"I arrest you," the sheriff shouted, "all of you."
+
+"But you can't,--you're in British Columbia," the men laughed.
+
+"Let go, now," said the Governor, and a moment later the deputy picked
+himself up and limped back over the border.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE BLACK CANON
+
+
+One Christmas, at least, will live long in the memory of the men and
+women who hung up their stockings at La Veta Hotel in Gunnison in 18--.
+Ah, those were the best days of Colorado. Then folks were brave and true
+to the traditions of Red Hoss Mountain, when "money flowed like liquor,"
+and coal strikes didn't matter, for the people all had something to
+burn.
+
+The Yankee proprietor of the dining-stations on this mountain line had
+made them as famous almost as the Harvey houses on the Santa Fe were;
+which praise is pardonable, since the Limited train with its cafe car
+has closed them all.
+
+But the best of the bunch was La Veta, and the presiding genius was Nora
+O'Neal, the lady manager. Many an R. & W. excursionist reading this
+story will recall her smile, her great gray eyes, her heaps of dark
+brown hair, and the mountain trout that her tables held.
+
+It will be remembered that at that time the main lines of the Rio Grande
+lay by the banks of the Gunnison, through the Black Canon, over Cerro
+Summit, and down the Uncompaghre and the Grande to Grand Junction, the
+gate of the Utah Desert.
+
+John Cassidy was an express messenger whose run was over this route and
+whose heart and its secret were in the keeping of Nora O'Neal.
+
+From day to day, from week to week, he had waited her answer, which was
+to come to him "by Christmas."
+
+And now, as only two days remained, he dreaded it, as he had hoped and
+prayed for it since the aspen leaves began to gather their gold. He knew
+by the troubled look she wore when off her guard that Nora was thinking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of the men who were gunning in Gunnison in the early 80's were
+fearless men, who, when a difference of opinion arose, faced each other
+and fought it out; but there had come to live at La Veta a thin, quiet,
+handsome fellow, who moved mysteriously in and out of the camp, slept a
+lot by day, and showed a fondness for faro by night. When a name was
+needed he signed "Buckingham." His icy hand was soft and white, and his
+clothes fitted him faultlessly. He was handsome, and when he paid his
+bill at the end of the fourth week he proposed to Nora O'Neal. He was so
+fairer, physically, than Cassidy and so darker, morally, that Nora could
+not make up her mind at all, at all.
+
+In the shadow time, between sunset and gas-light, on the afternoon of
+the last day but one before Christmas, Buck, as he came to be called,
+leaned over the office counter and put a folded bit of white paper in
+Nora's hand, saying, as he closed her fingers over it: "Put this powder
+in Cassidy's cup." He knew Cassidy merely as the messenger whose freight
+he coveted, and not as a contestant for Nora's heart and hand,--a hand
+he prized, however, as he would a bob-tailed flush, but no more.
+
+As for Cassidy, he would be glad, waking, to find himself alive; and if
+this plan miscarried, Buck should be able to side-step the gallows.
+Anyway, dope was preferable to death.
+
+Nora opened her hand, and in utter amazement looked at the paper. Some
+one interrupted them. Buck turned away, and Nora shoved the powder down
+deep into her jacket pocket, feeling vaguely guilty.
+
+No. 7, the Salt Lake Limited, was an hour late that night. The regular
+dinner (we called it supper then) was over when Shanley whistled in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the headlight of the Rockaway engine gleamed along the hotel windows,
+Nora went back to see that everything was ready.
+
+In the narrow passage between the kitchen and the dining-room she met
+Buckingham. "What are you doing here?" she demanded.
+
+"Now, my beauty," said Buck, laying a cold hand on her arm, "don't be
+excited."
+
+She turned her honest eyes to him and he almost visibly shrank from
+them, as she had shuddered at the strange, cold touch of his hand.
+
+"Put that powder in Cassidy's cup," he said, and in the half-light of
+the little hallway she saw his cruel smile.
+
+"And kill Cassidy, the best friend I have on earth?"
+
+"It will not kill him, but it may save his life. I shall be in his car
+to-night. Sabe? Do as I tell you. He will only fall asleep for a little
+while, otherwise--well, he may oversleep himself." She would have passed
+on, but he stayed her. "Where is it?" he demanded, with a meaning
+glance.
+
+She touched her jacket pocket, and he released his hold on her arm.
+
+The shuffle and scuffle of the feet of hungry travellers who were piling
+into the dining-room had disturbed them. Nora passed on to the rear,
+Buck out to sit down and dine with the passengers, who always had a
+shade the best of the bill.
+
+From his favorite seat, facing the audience, he watched the trainmen
+tumbling into the alcove off the west wing, in one corner of which a
+couple of Pullman porters in blue and gold sat at a small table, feeding
+with their forks and behaving better than some of their white comrades
+behaved.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cassidy came in a moment later, sat down, and looked over to see if his
+rival was in his accustomed place. The big messenger looked steadily at
+the other man, who had never guessed the messenger's secret, and the
+other man looked down.
+
+Already his supper, steaming hot, stood before him, while the table-girl
+danced attendance for the tip she was always sure of at the finish. She
+studied his tastes and knew his wants, from rare roast down to the
+small, black coffee with which he invariably concluded his meal.
+
+When Buck looked up again he saw Nora approach the table, smile at
+Cassidy, and put a cup of coffee down by his plate.
+
+The trainmen were soon through with their supper, being notoriously
+rapid feeders,--which disastrous habit they acquire while on freight,
+when they are expected to eat dinner and do an hour's switching in
+twenty minutes.
+
+Unusually early for him, Buck passed out. Nora purposely avoided him,
+but watched him from the unlighted little private office. She saw him
+light a cigar and stroll down the long platform. At the rear of the last
+Pullman he threw his cigar away and crossed quickly to the shadow side
+of the train. She saw him pass along, for there were no vestibules
+then, and made no doubt he was climbing into Cassidy's car. As the
+messenger reached for his change, the cashier-manager caught his hand,
+drew it across the counter, leaned toward him, saying excitedly: "Be
+careful to-night, John; don't fall asleep or nod for a moment. Oh, be
+careful!" she repeated, with ever-increasing intensity, her hot hand
+trembling on his great wrist; "be careful, come back safe, and you shall
+have your answer."
+
+When Cassidy came back to earth he was surrounded by half a dozen
+good-natured passengers, men and women, who had come out of the
+dining-room during the ten or fifteen seconds he had spent in Paradise.
+
+A swift glance at the faces about told him that they had seen, another
+at Nora that she was embarrassed; but in two ticks of the office clock
+he protected her, as he would his safe; for his work and time had
+trained him to be ready instantly for any emergency.
+
+"Good-night, sister," he called cheerily, as he hurried toward the door.
+
+"Good-night, John," said Nora, glancing up from the till, radiant with
+the excitement of her "sweet distress."
+
+"Oh, by Jove!" said a man.
+
+"Huh!" said a woman, and they looked like people who had just missed a
+boat.
+
+With her face against the window, Nora watched the red lights on the
+rear of No. 7 swing out to the main line.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Closing the desk, she climbed to her room on the third floor and knelt
+by the window. Away out on the shrouded vale she saw the dark train
+creeping, a solid stream of fire flowing from the short stack of the
+"shotgun"; for Peasley was pounding her for all she was worth in an
+honest effort to make up the hour that Shanley had lost in the
+snowdrifts of Marshall Pass. Presently she heard the muffled roar of the
+train on a trestle, and a moment later saw the Salt Lake Limited
+swallowed by the Black Canon, in whose sunless gorges many a driver died
+before the scenery settled after having been disturbed by the builders
+of the road.
+
+Over ahead in his quiet car Cassidy sat musing, smoking, and wondering
+why Nora should seem so anxious about him. Turning, he glanced about.
+Everything looked right, but the girl's anxiety bothered him.
+
+Picking up a bundle of way-bills, he began checking up. The engine
+screamed for Sapinero, and a moment later he felt the list as they
+rounded Dead Man's Curve.
+
+Unless they were flagged, the next stop would be at Cimarron, at the
+other end of the canon.
+
+His work done, the messenger lighted his pipe, settled himself in his
+high-backed canvas camp-chair, and put his feet up on his box for a good
+smoke. He tried to think of a number of things that had nothing whatever
+to do with Nora, but somehow she invariably elbowed into his thoughts.
+
+He leaned over and opened his box--not the strong-box, but the wooden,
+trunk-like box that holds the messenger's street-coat when he's on duty
+and his jumper when he's off. On the under side of the lifted lid he had
+fixed a large panel picture of Nora O'Neal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Buckingham, peering over a piano-box, behind which he had hidden at
+Gunnison, saw and recognized the photograph; for the messenger's white
+light stood on the little safe near the picture. For half an hour he had
+been watching Cassidy, wondering why he did not fall asleep. He had seen
+Nora put the cup down with her own hand, to guard, as he thought,
+against the possibility of a mistake. What will a woman not dare and do
+for the man she loves? He sighed softly. He recalled now that he had
+always exercised a powerful influence over women,--that is, the few he
+had known,--but he was surprised that this consistent Catholic girl
+should be so "dead easy."
+
+"And now look at this one hundred and ninety-eight pounds of egotism
+sitting here smiling on the likeness of the lady who has just dropped
+bug-dust in his coffee. It's positively funny."
+
+Such were the half-whispered musings of the would-be robber.
+
+He actually grew drowsy waiting for Cassidy to go to sleep. The car
+lurched on a sharp curve, dislodging some boxes. Buck felt a strange,
+tingling sensation in his fingers and toes. Presently he nodded.
+
+Cassidy sat gazing on the pictured face that had hovered over him in all
+his dreams for months, and as he gazed, seemed to feel her living
+presence. He rose as if to greet her, but kept his eyes upon the
+picture.
+
+Suddenly realizing that something was wrong in his end of the car, Buck
+stood up, gripping the top of the piano-box. The scream of the engine
+startled him. The car crashed over the switch-frog at Curecanti, and
+Curecanti's Needle stabbed the starry vault above. The car swayed
+strangely and the lights grew dim.
+
+Suddenly the awful truth flashed through his bewildered brain.
+
+"O-o-o-oh, the wench!" he hissed, pulling his guns.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Cassidy, absorbed in the photo, heard a door slam; and it came to him
+instantly that Nora had boarded the train at Gunnison, and that some one
+was showing her over to the head end. As he turned to meet her, he saw
+Buck staggering toward him, holding a murderous gun in each hand.
+Instantly he reached for his revolver, but a double flash from the guns
+of the enemy blinded him and put out the bracket-lamps. As the
+messenger sprang forward to find his foe, the desperado lunged against
+him. Cassidy grabbed him, lifted him bodily, and smashed him to the
+floor of the car; but with the amazing tenacity and wonderful agility of
+the trained gun-fighter, Buck managed to fire as he fell. The big bullet
+grazed the top of Cassidy's head, and he fell unconscious across the
+half-dead desperado.
+
+Buck felt about for his gun, which had fallen from his hand; but already
+the "bug-dust" was getting in its work. Sighing heavily, he joined the
+messenger in a quiet sleep.
+
+At Cimarron they broke the car open, revived the sleepers, restored the
+outlaw to the Ohio State Prison, from which he had escaped, and the
+messenger to Nora O'Neal.
+
+
+
+
+JACK RAMSEY'S REASON
+
+
+When Bill Ross romped up over the range and blew into Edmonton in the
+wake of a warm chinook, bought tobacco at the Hudson's Bay store, and
+began to regale the gang with weird tales of true fissures, paying
+placers, and rich loads lying "virgin," as he said, in Northern British
+Columbia, the gang accepted his tobacco and stories for what they were
+worth; for it is a tradition up there that all men who come in with the
+Mudjekeewis are liars.
+
+That was thirty years ago.
+
+The same chinook winds that wafted Bill Ross and his rose-hued romances
+into town have winged them, and the memory of them, away.
+
+In the meantime Ross reformed, forgot, the people forgave and made him
+Mayor of Edmonton.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Jack Ramsey called at the capital of British Columbia and told of a
+territory in that great Province where the winter winds blew warm,
+where snow fell only once in a while and was gone again with the first
+peep of the sun; of a mountain-walled wonderland between the Coast Range
+and the Rockies, where flowers bloomed nine months in the year and gold
+could be panned on almost any of the countless rivers, men said he had
+come down from Alaska, and that he lied.
+
+To be sure, they did not say that to Jack,--they only telegraphed it one
+to another over their cigars in the club. Some of them actually believed
+it, and one man who had made money in California and later in Leadville
+said he _knew_ it was so; for, said he, "Jack Ramsey never says or does
+a thing without a 'reason.'"
+
+At the end of a week this English-bred Yankee had organized the "Chinook
+Mining and Milling Company, Limited."
+
+This man was at the head of the scheme, with Jack Ramsey as Managing
+Director.
+
+Ramsey was a prospector by nature made proficient by practice. He had
+prospected in every mining camp from Mexico to Moose Factory. If he were
+to find a real bonanza, his English-American friend used to say, he
+would be miserable for the balance of his days, or rather his
+to-morrows. He lived in his to-morrows,--in these and in dreams. He
+loved women, wine, and music, and the laughter of little children; but
+better than all these he loved the wilderness and the wildflowers and
+the soft, low singing of mountain rills. He loved the flowers of the
+North, for they were all sweet and innocent. On all the two thousand
+five hundred miles of the Yukon, he used to say, there is not one
+poisonous plant; and he reasoned that the plants of the Peace and the
+Pine and the red roses of the Upper Athabasca would be the same.
+
+And so, one March morning, he sailed up the Sound to enter his
+mountain-walled wonderland by the portal of Port Simpson, which opens on
+the Pacific. His English-American friend went up as far as Simpson, and
+when the little coast steamer poked her prow into Work Channel he
+touched the President of the Chinook Mining and Milling Company and
+said, "The Gateway to God's world."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The head of the C.M. & M. Company was not surprised when Christmas came
+ahead of Jack Ramsey's preliminary report. Jack was a careful,
+conservative prospector, and would not send a report unless there was a
+good and substantial reason for writing it out.
+
+In the following summer a letter came,--an extremely short one,
+considering what it contained; for it told, tersely, of great prospects
+in the wonderland. It closed with a request for a new rifle, some
+garden-seeds, and an H.B. letter of credit for five hundred dollars.
+
+After a warm debate among the directors it was agreed the goods should
+go.
+
+The following summer--that is, the second summer in the life of the
+Chinook Company--Dawson dawned on the world. That year about half the
+floating population of the Republic went to Cuba and the other half to
+the Klondike.
+
+As the stream swelled and the channel between Vancouver Island and the
+mainland grew black with boats, the President of the C.M. & M. Company
+began to pant for Ramsey, that he might join the rush to the North. That
+exciting summer died and another dawned, with no news from Ramsey.
+
+When the adventurous English-American could withstand the strain no
+longer, he shipped for Skagway himself. He dropped off at Port Simpson
+and inquired about Ramsey.
+
+Yes, the Hudson people said, it was quite probable that Ramsey had
+passed in that way. Some hundreds of prospectors had gone in during the
+past three years, but the current created by the Klondike rush had drawn
+most of them out and up the Sound.
+
+One man declared that he had seen Ramsey ship for Skagway on the
+"Dirigo," and, after a little help and a few more drinks, gave a minute
+description of a famous nugget pin which the passing pilgrim said the
+prospector wore.
+
+And so the capitalist took the next boat for Skagway.
+
+By the time he reached Dawson the death-rattle had begun to assert
+itself in the bosom of the boom. The most diligent inquiry failed to
+reveal the presence of the noted prospector. On the contrary, many
+old-timers from Colorado and California declared that Ramsey had never
+reached the Dike--that is, not since the boom. In a walled tent on a
+shimmering sand-bar at the mouth of the crystal Klondike, Captain Jack
+Crawford, the "Poet Scout," severely sober in that land of large
+thirsts, wearing his old-time halo of lady-like behavior and hair, was
+conducting an "Ice Cream Emporium and Soft-drink Saloon."
+
+"No," said the scout, with the tips of his tapered fingers trembling on
+an empty table, straining forward and staring into the stranger's face;
+"no, Jack Ramsey has not been here; and if what you say be true--he
+sleeps alone in yonder fastness. Alas, poor Ramsey!--Ah knew 'im well";
+and he sank on a seat, shaking with sobs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The English-American, on his way out, stopped at Simpson again. From a
+half-breed trapper he heard of a white man who had crossed the Coast
+Range three grasses ago. This white man had three or four head of
+cattle, a Cree servant, and a queer-looking cayuse with long ears and a
+mournful, melancholy cry. This latter member of the gang carried the
+outfit.
+
+Taking this half-caste Cree to guide him, the mining man set out in
+search of the long-lost Ramsey. They crossed the first range and
+searched the streams north of the Peace River pass, almost to the crest
+of the continent, but found no trace of the prospector.
+
+When the summer died and the wilderness was darkened by the Northern
+night, the search was abandoned.
+
+The years drifted into the past, and finally the Chinook Mining and
+Milling Company went to the wall. The English-American promoter,
+smarting under criticism, reimbursed each of his associates and took
+over the office, empty ink-stands and blotting paper, and so blotted out
+all records of the one business failure of his life.
+
+But he could not blot out Jack Ramsey from his memory. There was a
+"reason," he would say, for Ramsey's silence.
+
+One day, when in Edmonton, he met Mayor Ross, who had come into the
+country by the back door some thirty years ago. The tales coaxed from
+the Mayor's memory corresponded with Ramsey's report; and having nothing
+but time and money, the ex-President of the C.M. & M. Company determined
+to go in _via_ the Peace River pass and see for himself. He made the
+acquaintance of Smith "The Silent," as he was called, who was at that
+time pathfinding for the Grand Trunk Pacific, and secured permission to
+go in with the engineers.
+
+At Little Slave Lake he picked up Jim Cromwell, a free-trader, who
+engaged to guide the mining man into the wonderland he had described.
+
+The story of Ramsey and his rambles appealed to Cromwell, who talked
+tirelessly, and to the engineer, who listened long; and in time the
+habitants of Cromwell's domains, which covered a country some seven
+hundred miles square, all knew the story and all joined in the search.
+
+Beyond the pass of the Peace an old Cree caught up with them and made
+signs, for he was deaf and dumb. But strange as it may seem, somehow,
+somewhere, he had heard the story of the lost miner and knew that this
+strange white man was the miner's friend.
+
+Long he sat by the camp fire, when the camp was asleep, trying, by
+counting on his fingers and with sticks, to make Cromwell understand
+what was on his mind.
+
+When day dawned, he plucked Cromwells' sleeve, then walked away fifteen
+or twenty steps, stopped, unrolled his blankets, and lay down, closing
+his eyes as if asleep. Presently he got up, rubbed his eyes, lighted his
+pipe, smoked for awhile, then knocked the fire out on a stone. Then he
+got up, stamped the fire out as though it had been a camp fire, rolled
+up his blankets, and travelled on down the slope some twenty feet and
+repeated the performance. On the next march he made but ten feet. He
+stopped, put his pack down, seated himself on the trunk of a fallen tree
+and, with his back to Cromwell, began gesticulating, as if talking to
+some one, nodding and shaking his head. Then he got a pick and began
+digging.
+
+At the end of an hour Cromwell and the engineer had agreed that these
+stations were day's marches and the rests camping places. In short, it
+was two and a half "sleeps" to what he wanted to show them,--a prospect,
+a gold mine maybe,--and so Cromwell and the English-American detached
+themselves and set out at the heels of the mute Cree in search of
+something.
+
+On the morning of the third day the old Indian could scarcely control
+himself, so eager was he to be off.
+
+All through the morning the white men followed him in silence. Noon
+came, and still the Indian pushed on.
+
+At two in the afternoon, rounding the shoulder of a bit of highland
+overlooking a beautiful valley, they came suddenly upon a half-breed boy
+playing with a wild goose that had been tamed.
+
+Down in the valley a cabin stood, and over the valley a small drove of
+cattle were grazing.
+
+Suddenly from behind the hogan came the weird wail of a Colorado canary,
+who would have been an ass in Absalom's time.
+
+They asked the half-breed boy his name, and he shook his head. They
+asked for his father, and he frowned.
+
+The mute old Indian took up a pick, and they followed him up the slope.
+Presently he stopped at a stake upon which they could still read the
+faint pencil-marks:--
+
+        C.M.
+        M. Co.
+        L'T'D
+
+The old Indian pointed to the ground with an expression which looked to
+the white men like an interrogation. Cromwell nodded, and the Indian
+began to dig. Cromwell brought a shovel, and they began sinking a shaft.
+
+The English-American, with a sickening, sinking sensation, turned toward
+the cabin. The boy preceded him and stood in the door. The man put his
+hand on the boy's head and was about to enter when he caught sight of a
+nugget at the boy's neck. He stooped and lifted it. The boy shrank back,
+but the man, going deadly pale, clutched the child, dragging the nugget
+from his neck.
+
+Now all the Indian in the boy's savage soul asserted itself, and he
+fought like a little demon. Pitying the child in its impotent rage, the
+man gave him the nugget and turned away.
+
+Across the valley an Indian woman came walking rapidly, her arms full of
+turnips and onions and other garden-truck. The white man looked and
+loathed her; for he felt confident that Ramsey had been murdered, his
+trinkets distributed, and his carcass cast to the wolves.
+
+When the boy ran to meet the woman, the white man knew by his behavior
+that he was her child. When the boy had told his mother how the white
+man had behaved, she flew into a rage, dropped her vegetables, dived
+into the cabin, and came out with a rifle in her hands. To her evident
+surprise the man seemed not to dread death, but stood staring at the
+rifle, which he recognized as the rifle he had sent to Ramsey. To his
+surprise she did not shoot, but uttering a strange cry, started up the
+slope, taking the gun with her. With rifle raised and flashing eyes she
+ordered the two men out of the prospect hole. Warlike as she seemed, she
+was more than welcome, for she was a woman and could talk. She talked
+Cree, of course, but it sounded good to Cromwell. Side by side the
+handsome young athlete and the Cree woman sat and exchanged stories.
+
+Half an hour later the Englishman came up and asked what the prospect
+promised.
+
+"Ah," said Cromwell, sadly, "this is another story. There is no gold in
+this vale, though from what this woman tells me the hills are full of
+it. However," he added, "I believe we have found your friend."
+
+"Yes?" queried the capitalist.
+
+"Yes," echoed Cromwell, "here are his wife and his child; and here,
+where we're grubbing, his grave."
+
+"Quite so, quite so," said the big, warm-hearted English-American,
+glaring at the ground; "and that was Ramsey's 'reason' for not
+writing."
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT WRECK ON THE PERE MARQUETTE
+
+
+The reader is not expected to believe this red tale; but if he will take
+the trouble to write the General Manager of the Pere Marquette Railroad,
+State of Michigan, U.S.A. enclosing stamped envelope for answer, I make
+no doubt that good man, having by this time recovered from the dreadful
+shock occasioned by the wreck, will cheerfully verify the story even to
+the minutest detail.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of course Kelly, being Irish, should have been a Democrat; but he was
+not. He was not boisterously or offensively Republican, but he was going
+to vote the prosperity ticket. He had tried it four years ago, and
+business had never been better on the Pere Marquette. Moreover, he had a
+new hand-car.
+
+The management had issued orders to the effect that there must be no
+coercion of employees. It was pretty well understood among the men that
+the higher officials would vote the Republican ticket and leave the
+little fellows free to do the same. So Kelly, being boss of the gang,
+could not, with "ju" respect to the order of the Superintendent, enter
+into the argument going on constantly between Burke and Shea on one side
+and Lucien Boseaux, the French-Canadian-Anglo-Saxon-Foreign-American
+Citizen, on the other. This argument always reached its height at
+noon-time, and had never been more heated than now, it being the day
+before election. "Here is prosper tee," laughed Lucien, holding up a
+half-pint bottle of _vin rouge_.
+
+"Yes," Burke retorted, "an' ye have four pound of cotton waste in the
+bottom o' that bucket to trow the grub t' the top. Begad, I'd vote for
+O'Bryan wid an empty pail--er none at all--before I'd be humbugged."
+
+"Un I," said Lucien, "would pour Messieur Rousveau vote if my baskett
+shall all the way up be cotton."
+
+"Sure ye would," said Shea, "and ate the cotton too, ef your masther
+told ye to. 'Tis the likes of ye, ye bloomin' furreighner, that kapes
+the thrust alive in this country."
+
+When they were like to come to blows, Kelly, with a mild show of
+superiority, which is second nature to a section boss, would interfere
+and restore order. All day they worked and argued, lifting low joints
+and lowering high centres; and when the red sun sank in the tree-tops,
+filtering its gold through the golden leaves, they lifted the car onto
+the rails and started home.
+
+When the men had mounted, Lucien at the forward handle and Burke and
+Shea side by side on the rear bar, they waited impatiently for Kelly to
+light his pipe and seat himself comfortably on the front of the car, his
+heels hanging near to the ties.
+
+There was no more talk now. The men were busy pumping, the "management"
+inspecting the fish-plates, the culverts, and, incidentally, watching
+the red sun slide down behind the trees.
+
+At the foot of a long slope, down which the men had been pumping with
+all their might, there was a short bridge. The forest was heavy here,
+and already the shadow of the woods lay over the right-of-way. As the
+car reached the farther end of the culvert, the men were startled by a
+great explosion. The hand-car was lifted bodily and thrown from the
+track.
+
+The next thing Lucien remembers is that he woke from a fevered sleep,
+fraught with bad dreams, and felt warm water running over his chest. He
+put his hand to his shirt-collar, removed it, and found it red with
+blood. Thoroughly alarmed, he got to his feet and looked, or rather
+felt, himself over. His fingers found an ugly ragged gash in the side of
+his neck, and the fear and horror of it all dazed him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He reeled and fell again, but this time did not lose consciousness.
+
+Finally, when he was able to drag himself up the embankment to where the
+car hung crosswise on the track, the sight he saw was so appalling he
+forgot his own wounds.
+
+On the side opposite to where he had fallen, Burke and Shea lay side by
+side, just as they had walked and worked and fought for years, and just
+as they would have voted on the morrow had they been spared.
+Immediately in front of the car, his feet over one rail and his neck
+across the other, lay the mortal remains of Kelly the boss, the stub of
+his black pipe still sticking between his teeth. As Lucien stooped to
+lift the helpless head his own blood, spurting from the wound in his
+neck, flooded the face and covered the clothes of the limp foreman.
+Finding no signs of life in the section boss, the wounded, and by this
+time thoroughly frightened, French-Canadian turned his attention to the
+other two victims. Swiftly now the realization of the awful tragedy came
+over the wounded man. His first thought was of the express now nearly
+due. With a great effort he succeeded in placing the car on the rails,
+and then began the work of loading the dead. Out of respect for the
+office so lately filled by Kelly, he was lifted first and placed on the
+front of the car, his head pillowed on Lucien's coat. Next he put Burke
+aboard, bleeding profusely the while; and then began the greater task of
+loading Shea. Shea was a heavy man, and by the time Lucien had him
+aboard he was ready to faint from exhaustion and the loss of blood.
+
+Now he must pump up over the little hill; for if the express should come
+round the curve and fall down the grade, the hand-car would be in
+greater danger than ever.
+
+After much hard work he gained the top of the hill, the hot blood
+spurting from his neck at each fall of the handle-bar, and went hurrying
+down the long easy grade to Charlevoix.
+
+To show how the trifles of life will intrude at the end, it is
+interesting to hear Lucien declare that one of the first thoughts that
+came to him on seeing the three prostrate figures was, that up to that
+moment the wreck had worked a Republican gain of one vote, with his own
+in doubt.
+
+But now he had more serious work for his brain, already reeling from
+exhaustion. At the end of fifteen minutes he found himself hanging onto
+the handle, more to keep from falling than for any help he was giving
+the car. The evening breeze blowing down the slope helped him, so that
+the car was really losing nothing in speed. He dared not relax his hold;
+for if his strength should give out and the car stop, the express would
+come racing down through the twilight and scoop him into eternity. So he
+toiled on, dazed, stupefied, fighting for life, surrounded by the dead.
+
+Presently above the singing of the wheels he heard a low sound, like a
+single, smothered cough of a yard engine suddenly reversed. Now he had
+the feeling of a man flooded with ice-water, so chilled was his blood.
+Turning his head to learn the cause of delay (he had fancied the pilot
+of an engine under his car), he saw Burke, one of the dead men, leap up
+and glare into his face. That was too much for Lucien, weak as he was,
+and twisting slightly, he sank to the floor of the car.
+
+Slowly Burke's wandering reason returned. Seeing Shea at his feet,
+bloodless and apparently unhurt, he kicked him, gently at first, and
+then harder, and Shea stood up. Mechanically the waking man took his
+place by Burke's side and began pumping, Lucien lying limp between them.
+Kelly, they reasoned, must have been dead some time, by the way he was
+pillowed.
+
+When Shea was reasonably sure that he was alive, he looked at his mate.
+
+"Phat way ar're ye feelin'?" asked Burke.
+
+"Purty good fur a corpse. How's yourself?"
+
+"Oh, so-so!"
+
+"Th' Lord is good to the Irish."
+
+"But luck ut poor Kelly."
+
+"'Tis too bad," said Shea, "an' him dyin' a Republican."
+
+"'Tis the way a man lives he must die."
+
+"Yes," said Shea, thoughtfully, "thim that lives be the sword must go be
+the board."
+
+When they had pumped on silently for awhile, Shea asked, "How did ye
+load thim, Burke?"
+
+"Why--I--I suppose I lifted them aboard. I had no derrick."
+
+"Did ye lift me, Burke?"
+
+"I'm damned if I know, Shea," said Burke, staring ahead, for Kelly had
+moved. "Keep her goin'," he added, and then he bent over the prostrate
+foreman. He lifted Kelly's head, and the eyes opened. He raised the head
+a little higher, and Kelly saw the blood upon his beard, on his coat, on
+his hands.
+
+"Are yez hurted, Kelly?" he asked.
+
+"Hurted! Man, I'm dyin'. Can't you see me heart's blood ebbin' over me?"
+And then Burke, crossing himself, laid the wounded head gently down
+again.
+
+By this time they were nearing their destination. Burke, seeing Lucien
+beyond human aid, took hold again and helped pump, hoping to reach
+Charlevoix in time to secure medical aid, or a priest at least, for
+Kelly.
+
+When the hand-car stopped in front of the station at Charlevoix, the
+employees watching, and the prospective passengers waiting, for the
+express train gathered about the car.
+
+"Get a docther!" shouted Burke, as the crowd closed in on them.
+
+In a few moments a man with black whiskers, a small hand-grip, and
+bicycle trousers panted up to the crowd and pushed his way to the car.
+
+"What's up?" he asked; for he was the company's surgeon.
+
+"Well, there's wan dead, wan dying, and we're all more or less kilt,"
+said Shea, pushing the mob back to give the doctor room.
+
+Lifting Lucien's head, the doctor held a small bottle under his nose,
+and the wounded man came out. Strong, and the reporter would say
+"willing hands," now lifted the car bodily from the track and put it
+down on the platform near the baggage-room.
+
+When the doctor had revived the French-Canadian and stopped the flow of
+blood, he took the boss in hand. Opening the man's clothes, he searched
+for the wound, but found none.
+
+They literally stripped Kelly to the waist; but there was not a scratch
+to be found upon his body. When the doctor declared it to be his opinion
+that Kelly was not hurt at all, but had merely fainted, Kelly was
+indignant.
+
+Of course the whole accident (Lucien being seriously hurt) had to be
+investigated, and this was the finding of the experts:--
+
+A tin torpedo left on the rail by a flagman was exploded by the wheel of
+the hand-car. A piece of tin flew up, caught Lucien in the neck, making
+a nasty wound. Lucien was thrown from the car, when it jumped the track,
+so violently as to render him unconscious. Kelly and Burke and Shea,
+picking themselves up, one after the other, each fainted dead away at
+the sight of so much blood.
+
+Lucien revived first, took in the situation, loaded the limp bodies, and
+pulled for home, and that is the true story of the awful wreck on the
+Pere Marquette.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF AN ENGLISHMAN
+
+
+A young Englishman stood watching a freight train pulling out of a new
+town, over a new track. A pinch-bar, left carelessly by a section gang,
+caught in the cylinder-cock rigging and tore it off.
+
+Swearing softly, the driver climbed down and began the nasty work of
+disconnecting the disabled machinery. He was not a machinist. Not all
+engine-drivers can put a locomotive together. In fact the best runners
+are just runners. The Englishman stood by and, when he saw the man
+fumble his wrench, offered a hand. The driver, with some hesitation,
+gave him the tools, and in a few minutes the crippled rigging was taken
+down, nuts replaced, and the rigging passed by the Englishman to the
+fireman, who threw it up on the rear of the tank.
+
+"Are you a mechanic?" asked the driver.
+
+"Yes, sir," said the Englishman, standing at least a foot above the
+engineer. "There's a job for me up the road, if I can get there."
+
+"And you're out of tallow?"
+
+The Englishman was not quite sure; but he guessed "tallow" was United
+States for "money," and said he was short.
+
+"All right," said the engine-driver; "climb on."
+
+The fireman was a Dutchman named Martin, and he made the Englishman
+comfortable; but the Englishman wanted to work. He wanted to help fire
+the engine, and Martin showed him how to do it, taking her himself on
+the hills. When they pulled into the town of E., the Englishman went
+over to the round-house and the foreman asked him if he had ever
+"railroaded." He said No, but he was a machinist. "Well, I don't want
+you," said the foreman, and the Englishman went across to the little
+eating-stand where the trainmen were having dinner. Martin moved over
+and made room for the stranger between himself and his engineer.
+
+"What luck?" asked the latter.
+
+"Hard luck," was the answer, and without more talk the men hurried on
+through the meal.
+
+They had to eat dinner and do an hour's switching in twenty minutes.
+That is an easy trick when nobody is looking. You arrive, eat dinner,
+then register in. That is the first the despatcher hears of you at E.
+You switch twenty minutes and register out. That is the last the
+despatcher hears of you at E. You switch another twenty minutes and go.
+That is called stealing time; and may the Manager have mercy on you if
+you're caught at it, for you've got to make up that last twenty minutes
+before you hit the next station.
+
+As the engineer dropped a little oil here and there for another dash,
+the Englishman came up to the engine. He could not bring himself to ask
+the driver for another ride, and he didn't need to.
+
+"You don't get de jobs?" asked Martin.
+
+"No."
+
+"Vell, dat's all right; you run his railroad some day."
+
+"I don't like the agent here," said the driver; "but if you were up at
+the other end of the yard, over on the left-hand side, he couldn't see
+you, and I couldn't see you for the steam from that broken
+cylinder-cock."
+
+Now they say an Englishman is slow to catch on, but this one was not;
+and as the engine rattled over the last switch, he climbed into the cab
+in a cloud of steam. Martin made him welcome again, pointing to a seat
+on the waste-box. The dead-head took off his coat, folded it carefully,
+laid it on the box, and reached for the shovel. "Not yet," said Martin,
+"dare is holes already in de fire; I must get dose yello smoke from de
+shtack off."
+
+The dead-head leaned from the window, watching the stack burn clear,
+then Martin gave him the shovel. Half-way up a long, hard hill the
+pointer on the steam-gauge began to go back. The driver glanced over at
+Martin, and Martin took the shovel. The dead-head climbed up on the tank
+and shovelled the coal down into the pit, that was now nearly empty. In
+a little while they pulled into the town of M.C., Iowa, at the crossing
+of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul. Here the Englishman had to
+change cars. His destination was on the cross-road, still one hundred
+and eighteen miles away. The engine-driver took the joint agent to one
+side, the agent wrote on a small piece of paper, folded it carefully,
+and gave it to the Englishman. "This may help you," said he; "be
+quick--they're just pulling out--run!"
+
+Panting, the Englishman threw himself into a way-car that was already
+making ten miles an hour. The train official unfolded the paper, read
+it, looked the Englishman over, and said, "All right."
+
+It was nearly night when the train arrived at W., and the dead-head
+followed the train crew into an unpainted pine hotel, where all hands
+fell eagerly to work. A man stood behind a little high desk at the door
+taking money; but when the Englishman offered to pay he said, "Yours is
+paid fer."
+
+"Not mine; nobody knows me here."
+
+"Then, 'f the devil don't know you better than I do you're lost, young
+man," said the landlord. "But some one p'inted to you and said, 'I pay
+fer him.' It ain't a thing to make a noise about. It don't make no
+difference to me whether it's Tom or Jerry that pays, so long as
+everybody represents."
+
+"Well, this is a funny country," mused the Englishman, as he strolled
+over to the shop. Now when he heard the voice of the foreman, with its
+musical burr, which stamped the man as a Briton from the Highlands, his
+heart grew glad. The Scotchman listened to the stranger's story without
+any sign of emotion or even interest; and when he learned that the man
+had "never railroaded," but had been all his life in the British
+Government service, he said he could do nothing for him, and walked
+away.
+
+The young man sat and thought it over, and concluded he would see the
+master-mechanic. On the following morning he found that official at his
+desk and told his story. He had just arrived from England with a wife
+and three children and a few dollars. "That's all right," said the
+master-mechanic; "I'll give you a job on Monday morning."
+
+This was Saturday, and during the day the first foreman with whom the
+Englishman had talked wired that if he would return to E. he could find
+work. The young man showed this wire to the master-mechanic. "I should
+like to work for you," said he; "you have been very kind to give me
+employment after the foreman had refused, but my family is near this
+place. They are two hundred miles or more from here."
+
+"I understand," said the kind-hearted official, "and you'd better go
+back to E."
+
+The Englishman rubbed his chin and looked out of the window. The train
+standing at the station and about to pull out would carry him back to
+the junction, but he made no effort to catch it, and the
+master-mechanic, seeing this, caught the drift of the young man's mind.
+"Have you transportation?" he asked. The stranger, smiling, shook his
+head. Turning to his desk, the master-mechanic wrote a pass to the
+junction and a telegram requesting transportation over the Iowa Central
+from the junction to the town of E.
+
+That Sunday the young man told his young wife that the new country was
+"all right." Everybody trusted everybody else. An official would give a
+stranger free transportation; a station agent could give you a pass, and
+even an engine-driver could carry a man without asking permission.
+
+He didn't know that all these men save the master-mechanic had violated
+the rules of the road and endangered their own positions and the chance
+of promotion by helping him; but he felt he was among good, kind people,
+and thanked them just the same.
+
+On Monday morning he went to work in the little shop. In a little while
+he was one of the trustworthy men employed in the place. "How do you
+square a locomotive?" he asked the foreman. "Here," said the foreman;
+"from this point to that."
+
+That was all the Englishman asked. He stretched a line between the given
+points and went to work.
+
+Two years from this the town of M. offered to donate to the railroad
+company $47,000 if the new machine shop could be located there, steam up
+and machinery running, on the first day of January of the following
+year.
+
+The general master-mechanic entrusted the work of putting in the
+machinery, after the walls had been built and the place roofed over, to
+the division master-mechanic, who looked to the local foreman to finish
+the job in time to win the subsidy.
+
+The best months of the year went by before work was begun. Frost came,
+and the few men tinkering about were chilled by the autumn winds that
+were wailing through the shutterless doors and glassless windows.
+Finally the foreman sent the Englishman to M. to help put up the
+machinery. He was a new man, and therefore was expected to take signals
+from the oldest man on the job,--a sort of straw-boss.
+
+The bridge boss--the local head of the wood-workers--found the
+Englishman gazing about, and the two men talked together. There was no
+foreman there, but the Englishman thought he ought to work anyway; so he
+and the wood boss stretched a line for a line-shaft, and while the
+carpenter's gang put up braces and brackets the Englishman coupled the
+shaft together, and in a few days it was ready to go up. As the young
+man worked and whistled away one morning, the boss carpenter came in
+with a military-looking gentleman, who seemed to own the place. "Where
+did you come from?" asked the new-comer of the machinist.
+
+"From England, sir."
+
+"Well, anybody could tell that. Where did you come from when you came
+here?"
+
+"From E."
+
+"Well, sir, can you finish this job and have steam up here on the first
+of January?"
+
+The Englishman blushed, for he was embarrassed, and glanced at the wood
+boss. Then, sweeping the almost empty shop with his eye, he said
+something about a foreman who was in charge of the work. "Damn the
+foreman," said the stranger; "I'm talking to you."
+
+The young man blushed again, and said he could work twelve or fourteen
+hours a day for a time if it were necessary, but he didn't like to make
+any rash promises about the general result.
+
+"Now look here," said the well-dressed man, "I want you to take charge
+of this job and finish it; employ as many men as you can handle, and
+blow a whistle here on New Year's morning--do you understand?"
+
+The Englishman thought he did, but he could hardly believe it. He
+glanced at the wood boss, and the wood boss nodded his head.
+
+"I shall do my best," said the Englishman, taking courage, "but I should
+like to know who gives these orders."
+
+"I'm the General Manager," said the man; "now get a move on you," and
+he turned and walked out.
+
+It is not to be supposed that the General Manager saw anything
+remarkable about the young man, save that he was six feet and had a good
+face. The fact is, the wood foreman had boomed the Englishman's stock
+before the Manager saw him.
+
+The path of the Englishman was not strewn with flowers for the next few
+months. Any number of men who had been on the road when he was in the
+English navy-yards felt that they ought to have had this little
+promotion. The local foremen along the line saw in the young Englishman
+the future foreman of the new shops, and no man went out of his way to
+help the stranger. But in spite of all obstacles, the shop grew from day
+to day, from week to week; so that as the old year drew to a close the
+machinery was getting into place. The young foreman, while a hard
+worker, was always pleasant in his intercourse with the employees, and
+in a little while he had hosts of friends. There is always a lot of
+extra work at the end of a big job, and now when Christmas came there
+was still much to do. The men worked night and day. The boiler that was
+to come from Chicago had been expected for some time. Everything was in
+readiness, and it could be set up in a day; but it did not come.
+Tracer-letters that had gone after it were followed by telegrams;
+finally it was located in a wreck out in a cornfield in Illinois on the
+last day of the year.
+
+A great many of the officials were away, and the service was generally
+demoralized during the holidays, so that the appropriation for which the
+Englishman was working at M. had for the moment been forgotten; the
+shops were completed, the machinery was in, but there was no boiler to
+boil water to make steam.
+
+That night, when the people of M. were watching the old year out and the
+new year in, the young Englishman with a force of men was wrecking the
+pump-house down by the station. The little upright boiler was torn out
+and placed in the machine shops, and with it a little engine was driven
+that turned the long line-shaft.
+
+At dawn they ran a long pipe through the roof, screwed a locomotive
+whistle on the top of it, and at six o'clock on New Year's morning the
+new whistle on the new shops at M. in Iowa, blew in the new year.
+Incidentally, it blew the town in for $47,000.
+
+This would be a good place to end this story, but the temptation is
+great to tell the rest.
+
+When the shops were opened, the young Englishman was foreman. This was
+only about twenty-five years ago. In a little while they promoted him.
+
+In 1887 he went to the Wisconsin Central. In 1890 he was made
+Superintendent of machinery of the Santa Fe route,--one of the longest
+roads on earth. It begins at Chicago, strong like a man's wrist, with a
+finger each on Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, and El Paso, and a
+thumb touching the Gulf at Galveston.
+
+The mileage of the system, at that time, was equal to one-half that of
+Great Britain; and upon the companies' payrolls were ten thousand more
+men than were then in the army of the United States. Fifteen hundred men
+and boys walk into the main shops at Topeka every morning. They work
+four hours, eat luncheon, listen to a lecture or short sermon in the
+meeting-place above the shops, work another four hours, and walk out
+three thousand dollars better off than they would have been if they had
+not worked.
+
+These shops make a little city of themselves. There is a perfect water
+system, fire-brigade with fire stations where the firemen sleep, police,
+and a dog-catcher.
+
+Here they build anything of wood, iron, brass, or steel that the company
+needs, from a ninety-ton locomotive to a single-barrelled mouse-trap,
+all under the eye of the Englishman who came to America with a good wife
+and three babies, a good head and two hands. This man's name is John
+Player. He is the inventor of the Player truck, the Player hand-car, the
+Player frog, and many other useful appliances.
+
+This simple story of an unpretentious man came out in broken sections as
+the special sped along the smooth track, while the General Manager
+talked with the resident director and the General Superintendent talked
+with his assistant, who, not long ago, was the conductor of a work-train
+upon which the G.S. was employed as brakeman. I was two days stealing
+this story, between the blushes of the mechanical Superintendent.
+
+He related, also, that a man wearing high-cut trousers and milk on his
+boot had entered his office when he had got to his first position as
+master-mechanic and held out a hand, smiling, "Vell, you don't know me
+yet, ain't it? I'm Martin the fireman; I quit ranchin' already, an' I
+want a jobs."
+
+Martin got a job at once. He got killed, also, in a little while; but
+that is part of the business on a new road.
+
+Near the shops at Topeka stands the railroad Young Men's Christian
+Association building. They were enlarging it when I was there. There are
+no "saloons" in Kansas, so Player and his company help the men to
+provide other amusements.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE LIMITED
+
+
+One Sabbath evening, not long ago, I went down to the depot in an
+Ontario town to take the International Limited for Montreal. She was on
+the blackboard five minutes in disgrace. "Huh!" grunted a commercial
+traveller. It was Sunday in the aforesaid Ontario town, and would be
+Sunday in Toronto, toward which he was travelling. Even if we were on
+time we should not arrive until 9.30--too late for church, too early to
+go to bed, and the saloons all closed and barred. And yet this restless
+traveller fretted and grieved because we promised to get into Toronto
+five minutes late. Alas for the calculation of the train despatchers,
+she was seven minutes overdue when she swept in and stood for us to
+mount. The get-away was good, but at the eastern yard limits we lost
+again. The people from the Pullmans piled into the cafe car and
+overflowed into the library and parlor cars. The restless traveller
+snapped his watch again, caught the sleeve of a passing trainman, and
+asked "'S matter?" and the conductor answered, "Waiting for No. 5." Five
+minutes passed and not a wheel turned; six, eight, ten minutes, and no
+sound of the coming west-bound express. Up ahead we could hear the
+flutter and flap of the blow-off; for the black flier was as restless as
+the fat drummer who was snapping his watch, grunting "Huh," and washing
+suppressed profanity down with _cafe noir_.
+
+Eighteen minutes and No. 5 passed. When the great black steed of steam
+got them swinging again we were twenty-five minutes to the bad. And how
+that driver did hit the curves! The impatient traveller snapped his
+watch again and said, refusing to be comforted, "She'll never make it."
+
+Mayhap the fat and fretful drummer managed to communicate with the
+engine-driver, or maybe the latter was unhappily married or had an
+insurance policy; and it is also possible that he is just the devil to
+drive. Anyway, he whipped that fine train of Pullmans, cafe, and parlor
+cars through those peaceful, lamplighted, Sabbath-keeping Ontario towns
+as though the whole show had cost not more than seven dollars, and his
+own life less.
+
+On a long lounge in the library car a well-nourished lawyer lay sleeping
+in a way that I had not dreamed a political lawyer could sleep. One
+gamey M.P.--double P, I was told--had been robbing this same lawyer of a
+good deal of rest recently, and he was trying at a mile a minute to
+catch up with his sleep. I could feel the sleeper slam her flanges
+against the ball of the rail as we rounded the perfectly pitched curves,
+and the little semi-quaver that tells the trained traveller that the man
+up ahead is moving the mile-posts, at least one every minute. At the
+first stop, twenty-five miles out, the fat drummer snapped his watch
+again, but he did not say, "Huh." We had made up five minutes.
+
+A few passengers swung down here, and a few others swung up; and off we
+dashed, drilling the darkness. I looked in on the lawyer again, for I
+would have speech with him; but he was still sleeping the sleep of the
+virtuous, with the electric light full on his upturned baby face, that
+reminds me constantly of the late Tom Reed.
+
+A woman I know was putting one of her babies to bed in lower 2, when we
+wiggled through a reverse curve that was like shooting White Horse
+Rapids in a Peterboro. The child intended for lower 2 went over into 4.
+"Never mind," said its mother, "we have enough to go around;" and so she
+left that one in 4 and put the next one in 2, and so on.
+
+At the next stop where you "Y" and back into the town, the people,
+impatient, were lined up, ready to board the Limited. When we swung over
+the switches again, we were only ten minutes late.
+
+As often as the daring driver eased off for a down grade I could hear
+the hiss of steam through the safety-valve above the back of the black
+flier, and I could feel the flanges against the ball of the rail, and
+the little tell-tale semi-quaver of the car.
+
+By now the babies were all abed; and from bunk to bunk she tucked them
+in, kissed them good-night, and then cuddled down beside the last one, a
+fair-haired girl who seemed to have caught and kept, in her hair and in
+her eyes, the sunshine of the three short summers through which she had
+passed.
+
+Once more I went and stood by the lounge where the lawyer lay, but I had
+not the nerve to wake him.
+
+The silver moon rose and lit the ripples on the lake that lay below my
+window as the last of the diners came from the cafe car. Along the shore
+of the sleeping lake our engine swept like a great, black, wingless bird
+of night. Presently I felt the frogs of South Parkdale; and when, from
+her hot throat she called "Toronto," the fat and fretful traveller
+opened his great gold watch. He did not snap it now, but looked into its
+open face and almost smiled; for we were touching Toronto on the tick of
+time.
+
+I stepped from the car, for I was interested in the fat drummer. I
+wanted to see him meet her, and hold her hand, and tell her what a
+really, truly, good husband he had been, and how he had hurried home. As
+he came down the short stair a friend faced him and said "Good-night,"
+where we say "Good-evening." "Hello, Bill," said the fat drummer. They
+shook hands languidly. The fat man yawned and asked, "Anything doing?"
+"Not the littlest," said Bill. "Then," said Jim (the fat man), "let us
+go up to the King Edward, sit down, and have a good, quiet smoke."
+
+
+
+
+THE CONQUEST OF ALASKA
+
+
+Immediately under the man with the money, who lived in London, there was
+the President in Chicago; then came the chief engineer in Seattle, the
+locating engineer in Skagway, the contractor in the grading camp, and
+Hugh Foy, the "boss" of the builders. Yet in spite of all this
+overhanging stratification, Foy was a big man. To be sure, none of these
+men had happened to get their positions by mere chance. They were men of
+character and fortitude, capable of great sacrifice.
+
+Mr. Close, in London, knew that his partner, Mr. Graves, in Chicago,
+would be a good man at the head of so cold and hopeless an enterprise as
+a Klondike Railway; and Mr. Graves knew that Erastus Corning Hawkins,
+who had put through some of the biggest engineering schemes in the West,
+was the man to build the road. The latter selected, as locating
+engineer, John Hislop, the hero, one of the few survivors of that wild
+and daring expedition that undertook, some twenty years ago, to survey a
+route for a railroad whose trains were to traverse the Grand Canon of
+Colorado, where, save for the song of the cataract, there is only shade
+and silence and perpetual starlight. Heney, a wiry, compact, plucky
+Canadian contractor, made oral agreement with the chief engineer and,
+with Hugh Foy as his superintendent of construction, began to grade what
+they called the White Pass and Yukon Railway. Beginning where the
+bone-washing Skagway tells her troubles to the tide-waters at the elbow
+of that beautiful arm of the Pacific Ocean called Lynn Canal, they
+graded out through the scattered settlement where a city stands to-day,
+cut through a dense forest of spruce, and began to climb the hill.
+
+When the news of ground-breaking had gone out to Seattle and Chicago,
+and thence to London, conservative capitalists, who had suspected Close
+Brothers and Company and all their associates in this wild scheme of
+temporary insanity, concluded that the sore affliction had come to stay.
+But the dauntless builders on the busy field where the grading camp was
+in action kept grubbing and grading, climbing and staking, blasting and
+building, undiscouraged and undismayed. Under the eaves of a dripping
+glacier, Hawkins, Hislop, and Heney crept; and, as they measured off the
+miles and fixed the grade by blue chalk-marks where stakes could not be
+driven, Foy followed with his army of blasters and builders. When the
+pathfinders came to a deep side canon, they tumbled down, clambered up
+on the opposite side, found their bearings, and began again. At one
+place the main wall was so steep that the engineer was compelled to
+climb to the top, let a man down by a rope, so that he could mark the
+face of the cliff for the blasters, and then haul him up again.
+
+It was springtime when they began, and through the long days of that
+short summer the engineers explored and mapped and located; and ever,
+close behind them, they could hear the steady roar of Foy's fireworks as
+the skilled blasters burst big boulders or shattered the shoulders of
+great crags that blocked the trail of the iron horse. Ever and anon,
+when the climbers and builders peered down into the ragged canon, they
+saw a long line of pack-animals, bipeds and quadrupeds,--some hoofed and
+some horned, some bleeding, some blind,--stumbling and staggering,
+fainting and falling, the fittest fighting for the trail and gaining the
+summit, whence the clear, green waters of the mighty Yukon would carry
+them down to Dawson,--the Mecca of all these gold-mad men. As often as
+the road-makers glanced at the pack-trains, they saw hundreds of
+thousands of dollars' worth of traffic going past or waiting
+transportation at Skagway, and each strained every nerve to complete the
+work while the sun shone.
+
+By midsummer they began to appreciate the fact that this was to be a
+hard job. When the flowers faded on the southern slopes, they were not
+more than half-way up the hill. Each day the sun swung lower across the
+canals, all the to-morrows were shorter than the yesterdays, and there
+was not a man among them with a shade of sentiment, or a sense of the
+beautiful, but sighed when the flowers died. Yes, they had learned to
+love this maiden, Summer, that had tripped up from the south, smiled on
+them, sung for a season, sighed, smiled once more, and then danced down
+the Lynn again.
+
+"I'll come back," she seemed to say, peeping over the shoulder of a
+glacier that stood at the stage entrance; "I'll come back, but ere I
+come again there'll be strange scenes and sounds on this rude stage so
+new to you. First, you will have a short season of melodrama by a
+melancholy chap called Autumn, gloriously garbed in green and gold, with
+splashes and dashes of lavender and lace, but sad, sweetly sad, and
+sighing always, for life is such a little while."
+
+With a sadder smile, she kissed her rosy fingers and was gone,--gone
+with her gorgeous garments, her ferns and flowers, her low, soft sighs
+and sunny skies, and there was not a man that was a man but missed her
+when she was gone.
+
+The autumn scene, though sombre and sad, was far from depressing, but
+they all felt the change. John Hislop seemed to feel it more than all
+the rest; for besides being deeply religious, he was deeply in love. His
+nearest and dearest friend, Heney--happy, hilarious Heney--knew, and he
+swore softly whenever a steamer landed without a message from
+Minneapolis,--the long-looked-for letter that would make Hislop better
+or worse. It came at length, and Hislop was happy. With his horse, his
+dog, and a sandwich,--but never a gun,--he would make long excursions
+down toward Lake Linderman, to Bennett, or over Atlin way. When the
+country became too rough for the horse, he would be left picketed near a
+stream with a faithful dog to look after him while the pathfinder
+climbed up among the eagles.
+
+In the meantime Foy kept pounding away. Occasionally a soiled pedestrian
+would slide down the slope, tell a wild tale of rich strikes, and a
+hundred men would quit work and head for the highlands. Foy would storm
+and swear and coax by turns, but to no purpose; for they were like so
+many steers, and as easily stampeded. When the Atlin boom struck the
+camp, Foy lost five hundred men in as many minutes. Scores of graders
+dropped their tools and started off on a trot. The prospector who had
+told the fable had thrown his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the
+general direction. Nobody had thought to ask how far. Many forgot to
+let go; and Heney's picks and shovels, worth over a dollar apiece, went
+away with the stampeders. As the wild mob swept on, the tethered
+blasters cut the cables that guyed them to the hills, and each loped
+away with a piece of rope around one ankle.
+
+Panting, they passed over the range, these gold-crazed Coxeys, without a
+bun or a blanket, a crust or a crumb, many without a cent or even a
+sweat-mark where a cent had slept in their soiled overalls.
+
+When Foy had exhausted the English, Irish, and Alaskan languages in
+wishing the men luck in various degrees, he rounded up the remnant of
+his army and began again. In a day or two the stampeders began to limp
+back hungry and weary, and every one who brought a pick or a shovel was
+re-employed. But hundreds kept on toward Lake Bennett, and thence by
+water up Windy Arm to the Atlin country, and many of them have not yet
+returned to claim their time-checks.
+
+The autumn waned. The happy wives of young engineers, who had been
+tented along the line during the summer, watched the wildflowers fade
+with a feeling of loneliness and deep longing for their stout-hearted,
+strong-limbed husbands, who were away up in the cloud-veiled hills; and
+they longed, too, for other loved ones in the lowlands of their
+childhood. Foy's blasters and builders buttoned their coats and buckled
+down to keep warm. Below, they could hear loud peals of profanity as the
+trailers, packers, and pilgrims pounded their dumb slaves over the
+trail. Above, the wind cried and moaned among the crags, constantly
+reminding them that winter was near at hand. The nights were longer than
+the days. The working day was cut from ten to eight hours, but the pay
+of the men had been raised from thirty to thirty-five cents an hour.
+
+One day a black cloud curtained the canon, and the workmen looked up
+from their picks and drills to find that it was November and night. The
+whole theatre, stage and all, had grown suddenly dark; but they knew, by
+the strange, weird noise in the wings, that the great tragedy of winter
+was on. Hislop's horse and dog went down the trail. Hawkins and Hislop
+and Heney walked up and down among the men, as commanding officers show
+themselves on the eve of battle. Foy chaffed the laborers and gave them
+more rope; but no amount of levity could prevail against the universal
+feeling of dread that seemed to settle upon the whole army. This weird
+Alaska, so wild and grand, so cool and sweet and sunny in summer, so
+strangely sad in autumn,--this many-mooded, little known Alaska that
+seemed doomed ever to be misunderstood, either over-lauded or lied
+about,--what would she do to them? How cruel, how cold, how weird, how
+wickedly wild her winters must be! Most men are brave, and an army of
+brave men will breast great peril when God's lamp lights the field; but
+the stoutest heart dreads the darkness. These men were sore afraid, all
+of them; and yet no one was willing to be the first to fall out, so they
+stood their ground. They worked with a will born of desperation.
+
+The wind moaned hoarsely. The temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees
+below zero, but the men, in sheltered places, kept pounding. Sometimes
+they would work all day cleaning the snow from the grade made the day
+before, and the next day it would probably be drifted full again. At
+times the task seemed hopeless; but Heney had promised to build to the
+summit of White Pass without a stop, and Foy had given Heney his hand
+across a table at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Skagway.
+
+At times the wind blew so frightfully that the men had to hold hands;
+but they kept pegging away between blasts, and in a little while were
+ready to begin bridging the gulches and deep side-canons. One day--or
+one night, rather, for there were no days then--a camp cook, crazed by
+the cold and the endless night, wandered off to die. Hislop and Heney
+found him, but he refused to be comforted. He wanted to quit, but Heney
+said he could not be spared. He begged to be left alone to sleep in the
+warm, soft snow, but Heney brought him back to consciousness and to
+camp.
+
+A premature blast blew a man into eternity. The wind moaned still more
+drearily. The snow drifted deeper and deeper, and one day they found
+that, for days and days, they had been blasting ice and snow when they
+thought they were drilling the rock. Heney and Foy faced each other in
+the dim light of a tent lamp that night. "Must we give up?" asked the
+contractor.
+
+"No," said Foy, slowly, speaking in a whisper; "we'll build on snow, for
+it's hard and safe; and in the spring we'll ease it down and make a
+road-bed."
+
+They did so. They built and bedded the cross-ties on the snow, ballasted
+with snow, and ran over that track until spring without an accident.
+
+They were making mileage slowly, but the awful strain was telling on the
+men and on the bank account. The president of the company was almost
+constantly travelling between Washington and Ottawa, pausing now and
+again to reach over to London for another bag of gold, for they were
+melting it up there in the arctic night--literally burning it up, were
+these dynamiters of Foy's.
+
+To conceive this great project, to put it into shape, present it in
+London, secure the funds and the necessary concessions from two
+governments, survey and build, and have a locomotive running in Alaska
+a year from the first whoop of the happy Klondiker, had been a mighty
+achievement; but it was what Heney would call "dead easy" compared with
+the work that confronted the President at this time. On July 20, 1897,
+the first pick was driven into the ground at White Pass; just a year
+later the pioneer locomotive was run over the road. More than once had
+the financial backers allowed their faith in the enterprise and in the
+future of the country beyond to slip away; but the President of the
+company had always succeeded in building it up again, for they had never
+lost faith in him, or in his ability to see things that were to most men
+invisible. In summer, when the weekly reports showed a mile or more or
+less of track laid, it was not so hard; but when days were spent in
+placing a single bent in a bridge, and weeks were consumed on a switch
+back in a pinched-out canon, it was hard to persuade sane men that
+business sense demanded that they pile on more fuel. But they did it;
+and, as the work went on, it became apparent to those interested in such
+undertakings that all the heroes of the White Pass were not in the
+hills.
+
+In addition to the elements, ever at war with the builders, they had
+other worries that winter. Hawkins had a fire that burned all the
+company's offices and all his maps and notes and records of surveys. Foy
+had a strike, incited largely by jealous packers and freighters; and
+there was hand-to-hand fighting between the strikers and their abettors
+and the real builders, who sympathized with the company.
+
+Brydone-Jack, a fine young fellow, who had been sent out as consulting
+engineer to look after the interests of the shareholders, clapped his
+hands to his forehead and fell, face down, in the snow. His comrades
+carried him to his tent. He had been silent, had suffered, perhaps for a
+day or two, but had said nothing. The next night he passed away. His
+wife was waiting at Vancouver until he could finish his work in Alaska
+and go home to her.
+
+With sad and heavy hearts Hawkins and Hislop and Heney climbed back to
+where Foy and his men were keeping up the fight. Like so many big
+lightning-bugs they seemed, with their dim white lamps rattling around
+in the storm. It was nearly all night then. God and his sunlight seemed
+to have forsaken Alaska. Once every twenty-four hours a little ball of
+fire, red, round, and remote, swung across the canon, dimly lighted
+their lunch-tables, and then disappeared behind the great glacier that
+guards the gateway to the Klondike.
+
+As the road neared the summit, Heney observed that Foy was growing
+nervous, and that he coughed a great deal. He watched the old fellow,
+and found that he was not eating well, and that he slept very little.
+Heney asked Foy to rest, but the latter shook his head. Hawkins and
+Hislop and Heney talked the matter over in Hislop's tent, called Foy in,
+and demanded that he go down and out. Foy was coughing constantly, but
+he choked it back long enough to tell the three men what he thought of
+them. He had worked hard and faithfully to complete the job, and now
+that only one level mile remained to be railed, would they send the old
+man down the hill? "I will not budge," said Foy, facing his friends;
+"an' when you gentlemen ar-re silibratin' th' vict'ry at the top o' the
+hill ahn Chuesday nixt, Hugh Foy'll be wood ye. Do you moind that,
+now?"
+
+Foy steadied himself by a tent-pole and coughed violently. His eyes were
+glassy, and his face flushed with the purplish flush that fever gives.
+
+"Enough of this!" said the chief engineer, trying to look severe. "Take
+this message, sign it, and send it at once."
+
+Foy caught the bit of white clip and read:--
+
+  "CAPTAIN O'BRIEN,
+
+              SKAGWAY.
+
+    "Save a berth for me on the 'Rosalie.'"
+
+They thought, as they watched him, that the old road-maker was about to
+crush the paper in his rough right hand; but suddenly his face
+brightened, he reached for a pencil, saying, "I'll do it," and when he
+had added "next trip" to the message, he signed it, folded it, and took
+it over to the operator.
+
+So it happened that, when the last spike was driven at the summit, on
+February 20, 1899, the old foreman, who had driven the first, drove the
+last, and it was _his_ last spike as well. Doctor Whiting guessed it was
+pneumonia.
+
+When the road had been completed to Lake Bennett, the owners came over
+to see it; and when they saw what had been done, despite the prediction
+that Dawson was dead and that the Cape Nome boom would equal that of the
+Klondike, they authorized the construction of another hundred miles of
+road which would connect with the Yukon below the dreaded White Horse
+Rapids. Jack and Foy and Hislop are gone; and when John Hislop passed
+away, the West lost one of the most modest and unpretentious, yet one of
+the best and bravest, one of the purest minded men that ever saw the sun
+go down behind a snowy range.
+
+
+
+
+NUMBER THREE
+
+
+One winter night, as the west-bound express was pulling out of Omaha, a
+drunken man climbed aboard. The young Superintendent, who stood on the
+rear platform, caught the man by the collar and hauled him up the steps.
+
+The train, from the tank to the tail-lights, was crammed full of
+passenger-people going home or away to spend Christmas. Over in front
+the express and baggage cars were piled full of baggage, bundles, boxes,
+trinkets, and toys, each intended to make some heart happier on the
+morrow, for it was Christmas Eve. It was to see that these passengers
+and their precious freight, already a day late, got through that the
+Superintendent was leaving his own fireside to go over the road.
+
+The snow came swirling across the plain, cold and wet, pasting the
+window and blurring the headlight on the black locomotive that was
+climbing laboriously over the kinks and curves of a new track. Here and
+there, in sheltered wimples, bands of buffalo were bunched to shield
+them from the storm. Now and then an antelope left the rail or a lone
+coyote crouched in the shadow of a telegraph-pole as the dim headlight
+swept the right of way. At each stop the Superintendent would jump down,
+look about, and swing onto the rear car as the train pulled out again.
+At one time he found that his seat had been taken, also his overcoat,
+which had been left hanging over the back. The thief was discovered on
+the blind baggage and turned over to the "city marshal" at the next
+stop.
+
+Upon entering the train again, the Superintendent went forward to find a
+seat in the express car. It was near midnight now. They were coming into
+a settlement and passing through prosperous new towns that were building
+up near the end of the division. Near the door the messenger had set a
+little green Christmas tree, and grouped about it were a red sled, a
+doll-carriage, some toys, and a few parcels. If the blond doll in the
+little toy carriage toppled over, the messenger would set it up again;
+and when passing freight out he was careful not to knock a twig from
+the tree. So intent was he upon the task of taking care of this
+particular shipment that he had forgotten the Superintendent, and
+started and almost stared at him when he shouted the observation that
+the messenger was a little late with his tree.
+
+"'Tain't mine," he said sadly, shaking his head. "B'longs to the fellow
+'t swiped your coat."
+
+"No!" exclaimed the Superintendent, as he went over to look at the toys.
+
+"If he'd only asked me," said the messenger, more to himself than to the
+Superintendent, "he could 'a' had mine and welcome."
+
+"Do you know the man?"
+
+"Oh, yes--he lives next door to me, and I'll have to face his wife and
+lie to her, and then face my own; but I can't lie to her. I'll tell her
+the truth and get roasted for letting Downs get away. I'll go to sleep
+by the sound of her sobs and wake to find her crying in her
+coffee--that's the kind of a Christmas I'll have. When he's drunk he's
+disgusting, of course; but when he's sober he's sorry. And Charley Downs
+is honest."
+
+"Honest!" shouted the Superintendent.
+
+"Yes, I know he took your coat, but that wasn't Charley Downs; it was
+the tarantula-juice he'd been imbibing in Omaha. Left alone he's as
+honest as I am; and here's a run that would trip up a missionary. For
+instance, leaving Loneville the other night, a man came running
+alongside the car and threw in a bundle of bills that looked like a bale
+of hay. Not a scrap of paper or pencil-mark, just a wad o' winnings with
+a wang around the middle. 'A Christmas gift for my wife,' he yelled.
+'How much?' I shouted. 'Oh, I dunno--whole lot, but it's tied good'; and
+then a cloud of steam from the cylinder-cocks came between us, and I
+haven't seen him since.
+
+"For the past six months Downs has tried hard to be decent, and has
+succeeded some; and this was to be the supreme test. For six months his
+wife has been saving up to send him to Omaha to buy things for
+Christmas. If he could do that, she argued, and come back sober, he'd be
+stronger to begin the New Year. Of course they looked to me to keep him
+on the rail, and I did. I shadowed him from shop to shop until he
+bought all the toys and some little trinkets for his wife. Always I
+found he had paid and ordered the things to be sent to the express
+office marked to me.
+
+"Well, finally I followed him to a clothing store, where, according to a
+promise made to his wife, he bought an overcoat, the first he had felt
+on his back for years. This he put on, of course, for it is cold in
+Omaha to-day; and I left him and slipped away to grab a few hours'
+sleep.
+
+"When I woke I went out to look for him, but could not find him, though
+I tried hard, and came to my car without supper. I found his coat,
+however, hung up in a saloon, and redeemed it, hoping still to find
+Charley before train time. I watched for him until we were signalled
+out, and then went back and looked through the train, but failed to find
+him.
+
+"Of course I am sorry for Charley," the messenger went on after a pause,
+"but more so for the poor little woman. She's worked and worked, and
+saved and saved, and hoped and dreamed, until she actually believed he'd
+been cured and that the sun would shine in her life again. Why, the
+neighbors have been talking across the back fence about how well Mrs.
+Downs was looking. My wife declared she heard her laugh the other day
+clear over to our house. Half the town knew about her dream. The women
+folks have been carrying work to her and then going over and helping her
+do it as a sort of surprise party. And now it's all off. To-morrow will
+be Christmas; and he'll be in jail, his wife in despair, and I in
+disgrace. Charley Downs a thief--in jail! It'll just break her heart!"
+
+The whistle proclaimed a stop, and the Superintendent swung out with a
+lump in his throat. This was an important station, and the last one
+before Loneville. Without looking to the right or left, the
+Superintendent walked straight to the telegraph office and sent the
+following message to the agent at the place where Downs had been
+ditched:--
+
+     "Turn that fellow loose and send him to Loneville on three--all
+     a joke.
+
+                                 "W.C.V., Superintendent."
+
+In a little while the train was rattling over the road again; and when
+the engine screamed for Loneville, the Superintendent stood up and
+looked at the messenger.
+
+"What'll I tell her?" the latter asked.
+
+"Well, he got left at Cactus sure enough, didn't he? If that doesn't
+satisfy her, tell her that he may get over on No. 3."
+
+When the messenger had turned his freight over to the driver of the
+Fargo wagon, he gathered up the Christmas tree and the toys and trudged
+homeward, looking like Santa Claus, so completely hidden was he by the
+tree and the trinkets. As he neared the Downs' home, the door swung
+open, the lamplight shone out upon him, and he saw two women smiling
+from the open door. It took but one glance at the messenger's face to
+show them that something was wrong, and the smiles faded. Mrs. Downs
+received the shock without a murmur, leaning on her friend and leaving
+the marks of her fingers on her friend's arm.
+
+The messenger put the toys down suddenly, silently; and feeling that the
+unhappy woman would be better alone, the neighbors departed, leaving her
+seated by the window, peering into the night, the lamp turned very low.
+
+The little clock on the shelf above the stove ticked off the seconds,
+measured the minutes, and marked the melancholy hours. The storm ceased,
+the stars came out and showed the quiet town asleep beneath its robe of
+white. The clock was now striking four, and she had scarcely stirred.
+She was thinking of the watchers of Bethlehem, when suddenly a great
+light shone on the eastern horizon. At last the freight was coming. She
+had scarcely noticed the messenger's suggestion that Charley might come
+in on three. Now she waited, with just the faintest ray of hope; and
+after a long while the deep voice of the locomotive came to her, the
+long black train crept past and stopped. Now her heart beat wildly.
+Somebody was coming up the road. A moment later she recognized her
+erring husband, dressed exactly as he had been when he left home, his
+short coat buttoned close up under his chin. When she saw him
+approaching slowly but steadily, she knew he was sober and doubtless
+cold. She was about to fling the door open to admit him when he stopped
+and stood still. She watched him. He seemed to be wringing his hands. An
+awful thought chilled her,--the thought that the cold and exposure had
+unbalanced his mind. Suddenly he knelt in the snow and turned his sad
+face up to the quiet sky. He was praying, and with a sudden impulse she
+fell upon her knees and they prayed together with only the window-glass
+between them.
+
+When the prodigal got to his feet, the door stood open and his wife was
+waiting to receive him. At sight of her, dressed as she had been when he
+left her, a sudden flame of guilt and shame burned through him; but it
+served only to clear his brain and strengthen his will-power, which all
+his life had been so weak, and lately made weaker for want of exercise.
+He walked almost hurriedly to the chair she set for him near the stove,
+and sank into it with the weary air of one who has been long in bed. She
+felt of his hands and they were not cold. She touched his face and found
+it warm. She pushed the dark hair from his pale forehead and kissed it.
+She knelt and prayed again, her head upon his knee. He bowed above her
+while she prayed, and stroked her hair. She felt his tears falling upon
+her head. She stood up, and when he lifted his face to hers, looked
+into his wide weeping eyes,--aye, into his very soul. She liked to see
+the tears and the look of agony on his face, for she knew by these signs
+how he suffered, and she knew why.
+
+When he had grown calm she brought a cup of coffee to him. He drank it,
+and then she led him to the little dining-room, where a midnight supper
+had been set for four, but, because of his absence, had not been
+touched. He saw the tree and the toys that the messenger had left, and
+spoke for the first time. "Oh, wife dear, have they all come? Are they
+all here? The toys and all?" and then, seeing the overcoat that the
+messenger had left on a chair near by, and which his wife had not yet
+seen, he cried excitedly, "Take that away--it isn't mine!"
+
+"Why, yes, dear," said his wife, "it must be yours."
+
+"No, no," he said; "I bought a coat like that, but I sold it. I drank a
+lot and only climbed on the train as it was pulling out of Omaha. In the
+warm car I fell asleep and dreamed the sweetest dream I ever knew. I had
+come home sober with all the things, you had kissed me, we had a great
+dinner here, and there stood the Christmas tree, the children were here,
+the messenger and his wife, and their children. We were all so happy! I
+saw the shadow fade from your face, saw you smile and heard you laugh;
+saw the old love-light in your eyes and the rose coming into your cheek.
+And then--'Oh, bitterness of things too sweet!'--I woke to find my own
+old trembling self again. It was all a dream. Looking across the aisle,
+I saw that coat on the back of an empty seat. I knew it was not mine,
+for I had sold mine for two miserable dollars. I knew, too, that the man
+who gave them to me got them back again before they were warm in my
+pocket. This thought embittered me, and, picking up the coat, I walked
+out and stood on the platform of the baggage car. At the next stop they
+took me off and turned me over to the city marshal,--for the coat
+belonged to the Superintendent.
+
+"It is like mine, except that it is real, and mine, of course, was only
+a good imitation. Take it away, wife--do take it away--it haunts me!"
+
+Pitying him, the wife put the coat out of his sight; and immediately he
+grew calm, drank freely of the strong coffee, but he could not eat.
+Presently he went over and began to arrange the little Christmas tree in
+the box his wife had prepared for it during his absence. She began
+opening the parcels, and when she could trust herself, began to talk
+about the surprise they would have for the children, and now and again
+to express her appreciation of some dainty trifle he had selected for
+her. She watched him closely, noting that his hand was unsteady, and
+that he was inclined to stagger after stooping for a little while.
+Finally, when the tree had been trimmed, and the sled for the boy and
+the doll-carriage for the girl were placed beneath it, she got him to
+lie down. When she had made him comfortable she kissed him again, knelt
+by his bed and prayed, or rather offered thanks, and he was asleep.
+
+Two hours later the subdued shouts of her babies, the exclamations of
+glad surprise that came in stage whispers from the dining-room, woke
+her, and she rose from the little couch where she had fallen asleep,
+already dressed to begin the day.
+
+It was four o'clock in the afternoon when she called the prodigal. When
+he had bathed his feverish face and put on the fresh clothes she had
+brought in for him and come into the dining-room, he saw his rosy dreams
+of the previous night fulfilled. The messenger and his wife shook hands
+with him and wished him a Merry Christmas. His children, all the
+children, came and kissed him. His wife was smiling, and the warm blood
+leaping from her happy heart actually put color in her cheeks.
+
+As Downs took the chair at the head of the table he bowed his head, the
+rest did likewise, and he gave thanks, fervently and without
+embarrassment.
+
+
+
+
+THE STUFF THAT STANDS
+
+
+It was very late in the fifties, and Lincoln and Douglas were engaged in
+animated discussion of the burning questions of the time, when Melvin
+Jewett journeyed to Bloomington, Illinois, to learn telegraphy.
+
+It was then a new, weird business, and his father advised him not to
+fool with it. His college chum said to him, as they chatted together for
+the last time before leaving school, that it would be grewsomely lonely
+to sit in a dimly lighted flag-station and have that inanimate machine
+tick off its talk to him in the sable hush of night; but Jewett was
+ambitious. Being earnest, brave, and industrious, he learned rapidly,
+and in a few months found himself in charge of a little wooden
+way-station as agent, operator, yard-master, and everything else. It was
+lonely, but there was no night work. When the shadows came and hung on
+the bare walls of his office the spook pictures that had been painted
+by his school chum, the young operator went over to the little tavern
+for the night.
+
+True, Springdale at that time was not much of a town; but the telegraph
+boy had the satisfaction of feeling that he was, by common consent, the
+biggest man in the place.
+
+Out in a hayfield, he could see from his window a farmer gazing up at
+the humming wire, and the farmer's boy holding his ear to the pole,
+trying to understand. All this business that so blinded and bewildered
+with its mystery, not only the farmer, but the village folks as well,
+was to him as simple as sunshine.
+
+In a little while he had learned to read a newspaper with one eye and
+keep the other on the narrow window that looked out along the line; to
+mark with one ear the "down brakes" signal of the north-bound freight,
+clear in the siding, and with the other to catch the whistle of the
+oncoming "cannon ball," faint and far away.
+
+When Jewett had been at Springdale some six or eight months, another
+young man dropped from the local one morning, and said, "_Wie gehts_,"
+and handed him a letter. The letter was from the Superintendent, calling
+him back to Bloomington to despatch trains. Being the youngest of the
+despatchers, he had to take the "death trick." The day man used to work
+from eight o'clock in the morning until four o'clock in the afternoon,
+the "split trick" man from four until midnight, and the "death trick"
+man from midnight until morning.
+
+We called it the "death trick" because, in the early days of
+railroading, we had a lot of wrecks about four o'clock in the morning.
+That was before double tracks and safety inventions had made travelling
+by rail safer than sleeping at home, and before trainmen off duty had
+learned to look not on liquor that was red. Jewett, however, was not
+long on the night shift. He was a good despatcher,--a bit risky at
+times, the chief thought, but that was only when he knew his man. He was
+a rusher and ran trains close, but he was ever watchful and wide awake.
+
+In two years' time he had become chief despatcher. During these years
+the country, so quiet when he first went to Bloomington, had been torn
+by the tumult of civil strife.
+
+With war news passing under his eye every day, trains going south with
+soldiers, and cars coming north with the wounded, it is not remarkable
+that the fever should get into the young despatcher's blood. He read of
+the great, sad Lincoln, whom he had seen and heard and known, calling
+for volunteers, and his blood rushed red and hot through his veins. He
+talked to the trainmen who came in to register, to enginemen waiting for
+orders, to yardmen in the yards, and to shopmen after hours; and many of
+them, catching the contagion, urged him to organize a company, and he
+did. He continued to work days and to drill his men in the twilight. He
+would have been up and drilling at dawn if he could have gotten them
+together. He inspired them with his quiet enthusiasm, held them by
+personal magnetism, and by unselfish patriotism kindled in the breast of
+each of his fifty followers a desire to do something for his country.
+Gradually the railroad, so dear to him, slipped back to second place in
+the affairs of the earth. His country was first. To be sure, there was
+no shirking of responsibility at the office, but the business of the
+company was never allowed to overshadow the cause in which he had
+silently but heartily enlisted. "Abe" Lincoln was, to his way of
+reasoning, a bigger man than the President of the Chicago and Alton
+Railroad--which was something to concede. The country must be cared for
+first, he argued; for what good would a road be with no country to run
+through?
+
+All day he would work at the despatcher's office, flagging fast freights
+and "laying out" local passenger trains, to the end that the soldiers
+might be hurried south. He would pocket the "cannon ball" and order the
+"thunderbolt" held at Alton for the soldiers' special. "Take siding at
+Sundance for troop train, south-bound," he would flash out, and glory in
+his power to help the government.
+
+All day he would work and scheme for the company (and the Union), and at
+night, when the silver moonlight lay on the lot back of the machine
+shops, he would drill and drill as long as he could hold the men
+together. They were all stout and fearless young fellows, trained and
+accustomed to danger by the hazard of their daily toil. They knew
+something of discipline, were used to obeying orders, and to reading
+and remembering regulations made for their guidance; and Jewett reasoned
+that they would become, in time, a crack company, and a credit to the
+state.
+
+By the time he had his company properly drilled, young Jewett was so
+perfectly saturated with the subject of war that he was almost unfit for
+duty as a despatcher. Only his anxiety about south-bound troop trains
+held his mind to the matter and his hand to the wheel. At night, after a
+long evening in the drill field, he would dream of great battles, and
+hear in his dreams the ceaseless tramp, tramp of soldiers marching down
+from the north to re-enforce the fellows in the fight.
+
+Finally, when he felt that they were fit, he called his company together
+for the election of officers. Jewett was the unanimous choice for
+captain, other officers were chosen, and the captain at once applied for
+a commission.
+
+The Jewetts were an influential family, and no one doubted the result of
+the young despatcher's request. He waited anxiously for some time, wrote
+a second letter, and waited again. "Any news from Springfield?" the
+conductor would ask, leaving the register, and the chief despatcher
+would shake his head.
+
+One morning, on entering his office, Jewett found a letter on his desk.
+It was from the Superintendent, and it stated bluntly that the
+resignation of the chief despatcher would be accepted, and named his
+successor.
+
+Jewett read it over a second time, then turned and carried it into the
+office of his chief.
+
+"Why?" echoed the Superintendent; "you ought to know why. For months you
+have neglected your office, and have worked and schemed and conspired to
+get trainmen and enginemen to quit work and go to war. Every day women
+who are not ready to be widowed come here and cry on the carpet because
+their husbands are going away with 'Captain' Jewett's company. Only
+yesterday a schoolgirl came running after me, begging me not to let her
+little brother, the red-headed peanut on the local, go as drummer-boy in
+'Captain' Jewett's company.
+
+"And now, after demoralizing the service and almost breaking up a half a
+hundred homes, you ask, 'Why?' Is that all you have to say?"
+
+"No," said the despatcher, lifting his head; "I have to say to you, sir,
+that I have never knowingly neglected my duty. I have not conspired. I
+have been misjudged and misunderstood; and in conclusion, I would say
+that my resignation shall be written at once."
+
+Returning to his desk, Jewett found the long-looked-for letter from
+Springfield. How his heart beat as he broke the seal! How timely--just
+as things come out in a play. He would not interrupt traffic on the
+Alton, but with a commission in his pocket would go elsewhere and
+organize a new company. These things flashed through his mind as he
+unfolded the letter. His eye fell immediately on the signature at the
+end. It was not the name of the Governor, who had been a close friend of
+his father, but of the Lieutenant-Governor. It was a short letter, but
+plain; and it left no hope. His request had been denied.
+
+This time he did not ask why. He knew why, and knew that the influence
+of a great railway company, with the best of the argument on its side,
+would outweigh the influence of a train despatcher and his friends.
+
+Reluctantly Jewett took leave of his old associates in the office, went
+to his room in the hotel, and sat for hours crushed and discouraged.
+Presently he rose, kicked the kinks out of his trousers, and walked out
+into the clear sunlight. At the end of the street he stepped from the
+side-walk to the sod path and kept walking. He passed an orchard and
+plucked a ripe peach from an overhanging bough. A yellow-breasted lark
+stood in a stubble-field, chirped two or three times, and soared,
+singing, toward the far blue sky. A bare-armed man, with a muley cradle,
+was cradling grain, and, far away, he heard the hum of a horse-power
+threshing machine. It had been months, it seemed years, since he had
+been in the country, felt its cooling breeze, smelled the fresh breath
+of the fields, or heard the song of a lark; and it rested and refreshed
+him.
+
+When young Jewett returned to the town he was himself again. He had been
+guilty of no wrong, but had been about what seemed to him his duty to
+his country. Still, he remembered with sadness the sharp rebuke of the
+Superintendent, a feeling intensified by the recollection that it was
+the same official who had brought him in from Springdale, made a train
+despatcher out of him, and promoted him as often as he had earned
+promotion. If he had seemed to be acting in bad faith with the officials
+of the road, he would make amends. That night he called his company
+together, told them that he had been unable to secure a commission,
+stated that he had resigned and was going away, and advised them to
+disband.
+
+The company forming at Lexington was called "The Farmers," just as the
+Bloomington company was known as the "Car-hands." "The Farmers" was
+full, the captain said, when Jewett offered his services. At the last
+moment one of the boys had "heart failure," and Jewett was taken in his
+place. His experience with the disbanded "Car-hands" helped him and his
+company immeasurably. It was only a few days after his departure from
+Bloomington that he again passed through, a private in "The Farmers."
+
+Once in the South, the Lexington company became a part of the 184th
+Illinois Infantry, and almost immediately engaged in fighting. Jewett
+panted to be on the firing-line, but that was not to be. The regiment
+had just captured an important railway which had to be manned and
+operated at once. It was the only means of supplying a whole army corps
+with bacon and beans. The colonel of his company was casting about for
+railroaders, when he heard of Private Jewett. He was surprised to find,
+in "The Farmers," a man of such wide experience as a railway official,
+so well posted on the general situation, and so keenly alive to the
+importance of the railroad and the necessity of keeping it open. Within
+a week Jewett had made a reputation. If there had been time to name him,
+he would doubtless have been called superintendent of transportation;
+but there was no time to classify those who were working on the road.
+They called him Jewett. In some way the story of the one-time captain's
+experience at Bloomington came to the colonel's ears, and he sent for
+Jewett. As a result of the interview, the young private was taken from
+the ranks, made a captain, and "assigned to special duty." His special
+duty was that of General Manager of the M. & L. Railroad, with
+headquarters in a car.
+
+Jewett called upon the colonel again, uninvited this time, and
+protested. He wanted to get into the fighting. "Don't worry, my boy,"
+said the good-natured colonel, "I'll take the fight out of you later on;
+for the present, Captain Jewett, you will continue to run this
+railroad."
+
+The captain saluted and went about his business.
+
+There had been some fierce fighting at the front, and the Yankees had
+gotten decidedly the worst of it. Several attempts had been made to rush
+re-enforcements forward by rail, but with poor success. The pilot
+engines had all been ditched. As a last desperate chance, Jewett
+determined to try a "black" train. Two engines were attached to a
+troop-train, and Jewett seated himself on the pilot of the forward
+locomotive. The lights were all put out. They were to have no pilot
+engine, but were to slip past the ambuscade, if possible, and take
+chances on lifted rails and absent bridges. It was near the end of a
+dark, rainy night. The train was rolling along at a good freight clip,
+the engines working as full as might be without throwing fire, when
+suddenly, from either side of the track, a yellow flame flared out,
+followed immediately by the awful roar of the muskets from whose black
+mouths the murderous fire had rushed. The bullets fairly rained on the
+jackets of the engines, and crashed through the cab windows. The
+engineer on the head engine was shot from his seat. Jewett, in a hail of
+lead, climbed over the running-board, pulled wide the throttle, and
+whistled "off brakes." The driver of the second engine, following his
+example, opened also, and the train was thus whirled out of range, but
+not until Jewett had been badly wounded. A second volley rained upon the
+rearmost cars, but did little damage. The enemy had been completely
+outwitted. They had mistaken the train for a pilot engine, which they
+had planned to let pass; after which they were to turn a switch, ditch,
+and capture the train.
+
+There was great rejoicing in the hungry army at the front that dawn,
+when the long train laden with soldiers and sandwiches arrived. The
+colonel was complimented by the corps commander, but he was too big and
+brave to accept promotion for an achievement in which he had had no part
+or even faith. He told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
+truth; and, when it was all over, there was no more "Captain" Jewett.
+When he came out of the hospital he had the rank of a major, but was
+still "assigned to special duty."
+
+Major Jewett's work became more important as the great struggle went on.
+Other lines of railway fell into the hands of the Yankees, and all of
+them in that division of the army came under his control. They were good
+for him, for they made him a very busy man and kept him from panting for
+the firing-line. In conjunction with General D., the famous army
+engineer, who has since become a noted railroad-builder, he rebuilt and
+re-equipped wrecked railways, bridged wide rivers, and kept a way open
+for men and supplies to get to the front.
+
+When at last the little, ragged, but ever-heroic remnant of the
+Confederate army surrendered, and the worn and weary soldiers set their
+faces to the north again, Major Jewett's name was known throughout the
+country.
+
+At the close of the war, in recognition of his ability and great service
+to the Union, Major Jewett was made a brevet colonel, by which title he
+is known to almost every railway man in America.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many opportunities came to Colonel Jewett to enter once more the field
+in which, since his school days, he had been employed. One by one these
+offers were put aside. They were too easy. He had been so long in the
+wreck of things that he felt out of place on a prosperous,
+well-regulated line. He knew of a little struggling road that ran east
+from Galena, Illinois. It was called the Galena and something, for
+Galena was at that time the most prosperous and promising town in the
+wide, wild West.
+
+He sought and secured service on the Galena line and began anew. The
+road was one of the oldest and poorest in the state, and one of the very
+first chartered to build west from Chicago. It was sorely in need of a
+young, vigorous, and experienced man, and Colonel Jewett's ability was
+not long in finding recognition. Step by step he climbed the ladder
+until he reached the General Managership. Here his real work began. Here
+he had some say, and could talk directly to the President, who was one
+of the chief owners. He soon convinced the company that to succeed they
+must have more money, build more, and make business by encouraging
+settlers to go out and plough and plant and reap and ship. The United
+States government was aiding in the construction of a railway across the
+"desert," as the West beyond the Missouri River was then called. Jewett
+urged his company to push out to the Missouri River and connect with the
+line to the Pacific, and they pushed.
+
+Ten years from the close of the war Colonel Jewett was at the head of
+one of the most promising railroads in the country. Prosperity followed
+peace, the West began to build up, the Pacific Railroad was completed,
+and the little Galena line, with a new charter and a new name, had
+become an important link connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific.
+
+For nearly half a century Jewett has been at the front, and has never
+been defeated. The discredited captain of that promising company of
+car-boys has become one of our great "captains of industry." He is
+to-day President of one of the most important railroads in the world,
+whose black fliers race out nightly over twin paths of steel, threading
+their way in and out of not less than nine states, with nearly nine
+thousand miles of main line. He has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams;
+and his success is due largely to the fact that when, in his youth, he
+mounted to ride to fame and fortune, he did not allow the first jolt to
+jar him from the saddle. He is made of the stuff that stands.
+
+
+
+
+THE MILWAUKEE RUN
+
+
+Henry Hautman was born old. He had the face and figure of a voter at
+fifteen. His skin did not fit his face,--it wrinkled and resembled a
+piece of rawhide that had been left out in the rain and sun.
+
+Henry's father was a freighter on the Santa Fe trail when Independence
+was the back door of civilization, opening on a wilderness. Little Henry
+used to ride on the high seat with his father, close up to the tail of a
+Missouri mule, the seventh of a series of eight, including the trailer
+which his father drove in front of the big wagon. It was the wind of the
+west that tanned the hide on Henry's face and made him look old before
+his time.
+
+At night they used to arrange the wagons in a ring, in which the
+freighters slept.
+
+One night Henry was wakened by the yells of Indians, and saw men
+fighting. Presently he was swung to the back of a cayuse behind a
+painted warrior, and as they rode away the boy, looking back, saw the
+wagons burning and guessed the rest.
+
+Later the lad escaped and made his way to Chicago, where he began his
+career on the rail, and where this story really begins.
+
+It was extremely difficult, in the early days, to find sober, reliable
+young men to man the few locomotives in America and run the trains. A
+large part of the population seemed to be floating, drifting west, west,
+always west. So when this stout-shouldered, strong-faced youth asked for
+work, the round-house foreman took him on gladly. Henry's boyhood had
+been so full of peril that he was absolutely indifferent to danger and a
+stranger to fear. He was not even afraid of work, and at the end of
+eighteen months he was marked up for a run. He had passed from the
+wiping gang to the deck of a passenger engine, and was now ready for the
+road.
+
+Henry was proud of his rapid promotion, especially this last lift, that
+would enable him to race in the moonlight along the steel trail, though
+he recalled that it had cost him his first little white lie.
+
+One of the rules of the road said a man must be twenty-one years old
+before he could handle a locomotive. Henry knew his book well, but he
+knew also that the railroad needed his service and that he needed the
+job; so when the clerk had taken his "Personal Record,"--which was only
+a mild way of asking where he would have his body sent in case he met
+the fate so common at that time on a new line in a new country,--he gave
+his age as twenty, hoping the master-mechanic would allow him a year for
+good behavior.
+
+Years passed. So did the Indian and the buffalo. The railway reached out
+across the Great American Desert. The border became blurred and was
+rubbed out. The desert was dotted with homes. Towns began to grow up
+about the water-tanks and to bud and blow on the treeless plain.
+
+Henry Hautman became known as the coolest and most daring driver on the
+road. He was a good engineer and a good citizen. He owned his home; and
+while his pay was not what an engineer draws to-day for the same run
+made in half the time, it was sufficient unto the day, his requirements,
+and his wife's taste.
+
+Only one thing troubled him. He had bought a big farm not far from
+Chicago, for which he was paying out of his savings. If he kept well, as
+he had done all his life, three years more on the Limited would let him
+out. Then he could retire a year ahead of time, and settle down in
+comfort on the farm and watch the trains go by.
+
+It would be his salvation, this farm by the roadside; for the very
+thought of surrendering the "La Salle" to another was wormwood and gall
+to Henry. It never occurred to him to quit and go over to the N.W. or
+the P.D. & Q., where they had no age limit for engineers. No man ever
+thought of leaving the service of the Chicago, Milwaukee & Wildwood. The
+road was one of the finest, and as for the run,--well, they used to say,
+"Drive the Wildwood Limited and die." Henry had driven it for a decade
+and had not died. When he looked himself over he declared he was the
+best man, physically, on the line. But there was the law in the Book of
+Rules,--the Bible of the C.M. & W.,--and no man might go beyond the
+limit set for the retirement of engine-drivers; and Henry Hautman, the
+favorite of the "old man," would take his medicine. They were a loyal
+lot on the Milwaukee in those days. Superintendent Van Law declared them
+clannish. "Kick a man," said he, "in St. Paul, and his friends will feel
+the shock in the lower Mississippi."
+
+Time winged on, and as often as Christmas came it reminded the old
+engineer that he was one year nearer his last trip; for his mother, now
+sleeping in the far West, had taught him to believe that he had come to
+her on Christmas Eve.
+
+How the world had aged in threescore years! Sometimes at night he had
+wild dreams of his last day on the freight wagon, of the endless reaches
+of waving wild grass, of bands of buffalo racing away toward the setting
+sun, a wild deer drinking at a running stream, and one lone Indian on
+the crest of a distant dune, dark, ominous, awful. Sometimes, from his
+high seat at the front of the Limited, he caught the flash of a field
+fire and remembered the burning wagons in the wilderness.
+
+But the wilderness was no more, and Henry knew that the world's greatest
+civilizer, the locomotive, had been the pioneer in all this great work
+of peopling the plains. The pathfinders, the real heroes of the
+Anglo-Saxon race, had fought their way from the Missouri River to the
+sundown sea. He recalled how they used to watch for the one opposing
+passenger train. Now they flashed by his window as the mile-posts
+flashed in the early days, for the line had been double-tracked so that
+the electric-lighted hotels on wheels passed up and down regardless of
+opposing trains. All these changes had been wrought in a single
+generation; and Henry felt that he had contributed, according to his
+light, to the great work.
+
+But the more he pondered the perfection of the service, the comfort of
+travel, the magnificence of the Wildwood Limited, the more he dreaded
+the day when he must take his little personal effects from the cab of
+the La Salle and say good-bye to her, to the road, and hardest of all,
+to the "old man," as they called the master-mechanic.
+
+One day when Henry was registering in the round-house, he saw a letter
+in the rack for him, and carried it home to read after supper.
+
+When he read it, he jumped out of his chair. "Why, Henry!" said his
+wife, putting down her knitting, "what ever's the matter,--open switch
+or red light?"
+
+"Worse, Mary; it's the end of the track."
+
+The old engineer tossed the letter over to his wife, sat down, stretched
+his legs out, locked his fingers, and began rolling his thumbs one over
+the other, staring at the stove.
+
+When Mrs. Hautman had finished the letter she stamped her foot and
+declared it an outrage. She suggested that somebody wanted the La Salle.
+"Well," she said, resigning herself to her fate, "I bet I have that
+coach-seat out of the cab,--it'll make a nice tete-a-tete for the front
+room. Superannuated!" she went on with growing disgust. "I bet you can
+put any man on the first division down three times in five."
+
+"It's me that's down, Mary,--down and out."
+
+"Henry Hautman, I'm ashamed of you! you know you've got four years come
+Christmas--why don't you fight? Where's your Brotherhood you've been
+paying money to for twenty years? I bet a 'Q' striker comes and takes
+your engine."
+
+"No, Mary, we're beaten. I see how it all happened now. You see I began
+at twenty when I was really but sixteen; that's where I lose. I lied to
+the 'old man' when we were both boys; now that lie comes back to me, as
+a chicken comes home to roost."
+
+"But can't you explain that now?"
+
+"Well, not easy. It's down in the records--it's Scripture now, as the
+'old man' would say. No, the best I can do is to take my medicine like a
+man; I've got a month yet to think it over."
+
+After that they sat in silence, this childless couple, trying to fashion
+to themselves how it would seem to be superannuated.
+
+The short December days were all too short for Henry. He counted the
+hours, marked the movements of the minute-hand on the face of his cab
+clock, and measured the miles he would have, not to "do" but to enjoy,
+before Christmas. As the weeks went by the old engineer became a changed
+man. He had always been cheerful, happy, and good-natured. Now he
+became thoughtful, silent, melancholy. There was not a man on the first
+division but grieved because he was going, but no man would dare say so
+to Henry. Sympathy is about the hardest thing a stout heart ever has to
+endure.
+
+While Henry was out on his last trip his wife waited upon the
+master-mechanic and asked him to bring his wife over and spend Christmas
+Eve with Henry and help her to cheer him up; and the "old man" promised
+to call that evening.
+
+Although there were half-a-dozen palms itching for the throttle of the
+La Salle, no man had yet been assigned to the run. And the same kindly
+feeling of sympathy that prompted this delay prevented the aspirants
+from pressing their claims. Once, in the lodge room, a young member
+eager for a regular run opened the question, but saw his mistake when
+the older members began to hiss like geese, while the Worthy Master
+smote the table with his maul. Henry saw the La Salle cross the
+turn-table and back into the round-house, and while he "looked her
+over," examining every link and pin, each lever and link-lifter, the
+others hurried away; for it was Christmas Eve, and nobody cared to say
+good-bye to the old engineer.
+
+When he had walked around her half-a-dozen times, touching her burnished
+mainpins with the back of his hand, he climbed into the cab and began to
+gather up his trinkets, his comb and tooth-brush, a small steel
+monkey-wrench, and a slender brass torch that had been given to him by a
+friend. Then he sat upon the soft cushioned coach-seat that his wife had
+coveted, and looked along the hand-railing. He leaned from the cab
+window and glanced along the twin stubs of steel that passed through the
+open door and stopped short at the pit, symbolizing the end of his run
+on the rail. The old boss wiper came with his crew to clean the La
+Salle, but when he saw the driver there in the cab he passed him by.
+
+Long he sat in silence, having a last visit with La Salle, her brass
+bands gleaming in the twilight. For years she had carried him safely
+through snow and sleet and rain, often from dawn till dusk, and
+sometimes from dusk till dawn again. She had been his life's companion
+while on the road, who now, "like some familiar face at parting, gained
+a graver grace."
+
+Presently the lamp-lighters came and began lighting the oil lamps that
+stood in brackets along the wall; but before their gleam reached his
+face the old engineer slid down and hurried away home with never a
+backward glance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night when Mrs. Hautman had passed the popcorn and red apples, and
+they had all eaten and the men had lighted cigars, the engineer's wife
+brought a worn Bible out and drew a chair near the master-mechanic. The
+"old man," as he was called, looked at the book, then at the woman, who
+held it open on her lap.
+
+"Do you believe this book?" she asked earnestly.
+
+"Absolutely," he answered.
+
+"All that is written here?"
+
+"All," said the man.
+
+Then she turned to the fly-leaf and read the record of Henry's
+birth,--the day, the month, and the year.
+
+Henry came and looked at the book and the faded handwriting, trying to
+remember; but it was too far away.
+
+The old Bible had been discovered that day deep down in a trunk of old
+trinkets that had been sent to Henry when his mother died, years ago.
+
+The old engineer took the book and held it on his knees, turned its limp
+leaves, and dropped upon them the tribute of a strong man's tear.
+
+The "old man" called for the letter he had written, erased the date, set
+it forward four years, and handed it back to Henry.
+
+"Here, Hank," said he, "here's a Christmas gift for you."
+
+So when the Wildwood Limited was limbered up that Christmas morning,
+Henry leaned from the window, leaned back, tugged at the throttle again,
+smiled over at the fireman, and said, "Now, Billy, watch her swallow
+that cold, stiff steel at about a mile a minute."
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY CY WARMAN
+
+
+SHORT RAILS
+
+12mo. $1.25
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
+
+N.Y. TIMES REVIEW.
+
+It is good for the soul that we should look into other worlds than our
+own, and Mr. Warman knows how to put us beside fireman and engineer and
+how to make us feel the poetry as well as the power of the tireless
+giants that fulfil for us moderns the ancient dream of the
+fire-breathing brazen bulls yoked for the service of man.
+
+THE OUTLOOK.
+
+A dozen or more spirited tales, tersely told, and with that surety of
+touch which comes only from intimate knowledge.... The romance, danger,
+bravery, plottings, and nobility of action incident to life on the rail
+are all realistically depicted, and the reader feels the charm which
+attaches to the new or strange.
+
+BOSTON ADVERTISER.
+
+The reader will find much pleasure, and no disappointment, in reading
+these pages.
+
+
+THE WHITE MAIL
+
+12mo. $1.25
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
+
+THE NATION.
+
+Cy Warman can always impart a living interest to a story through his
+close intimacy with locomotives, yard-masters, signals, switches, with
+all that pertains to railroading, in a word--from a managers' meeting to
+a frog. The tender enthusiasm he feels for the denizens of his iron
+jungle is contagious.
+
+THE OUTLOOK
+
+Mr. Cy Warman, by long personal experience, acquired a close and exact
+knowledge of the life of railroad men. "The White Mail" brings out
+realistically the actual life of the engineer, the brakeman, and the
+freight handler.
+
+THE CONGREGATIONALIST
+
+Cy Warman writes excellent railroad stories, of course, and his new one,
+"The White Mail," is short, lively, and eminently readable.
+
+ST. LOUIS GLOBE-DEMOCRAT
+
+In "The White Mail," Cy Warman, in the pleasant, witty style for which
+this poet of the Rockies has become noted, has presented a tender,
+touching picture.
+
+
+TALES OF AN ENGINEER
+
+_With Rhymes of the Rail_
+
+12mo. $1.25
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
+
+THE CONGREGATIONALIST
+
+There is true power in Cy Warman's "Tales of an Engineer," and the
+reader yields willingly to the attraction of its blended novelty,
+spirit, and occasional pathos. It does not lack humor, and every page is
+worth reading.
+
+THE CHURCHMAN
+
+A new departure in literature should be interesting even if lacking in
+the brilliant off-hand sketchiness of these pages. One steps into a new
+life. There is not a dull page in this book, and much of it is of more
+than ordinary interest.
+
+NEW YORK COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER
+
+There is a rugged directness about the description of rushing runs on
+the rail, through which one can hear the thump-thump of the machinery as
+the engine dashes over the rails, and which seems to be illumined by the
+glow of the headlights and the colored signals.
+
+
+THE EXPRESS MESSENGER
+
+_And Other Tales of the Rail_
+
+12mo. $1.25
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
+
+BOSTON TRANSCRIPT
+
+The author's work is familiarly and pleasantly known to magazine readers
+for the realistic details of Western railroad life, which give them a
+dashing, vital movement, though they are often highly romantic. The
+romantic in them, however, seems very human--indeed, there is a ring of
+true feeling in these little tales.
+
+BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE
+
+Mr. Warman's work has about it the merit of a genuine realism, and it is
+as full of romance and adventure as the most exacting reader could
+desire. It is a volume of sketches that is well worth reading, not only
+because they are well written and full of action, but for the pictures
+they give of a life that the world really knows very little about.
+
+PHILADELPHIA PRESS
+
+The poet appears in the descriptive passages, and there is a melodious
+rhythm to his prose style that is pleasurable in a high degree. Mr.
+Warman has a field of his own, and he is master of it.
+
+
+FRONTIER STORIES
+
+12mo. $1.25
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+OPINIONS OF THE PRESS
+
+REVIEW OF REVIEWS
+
+Nobody knows his frontier life better than Mr. Warman, and his yarns of
+Indians, striking miners, cowboys, half-breeds, and railroad men, are
+full of vivid reality. There is plenty of romance and excitement in this
+score of stories.
+
+THE CHURCHMAN
+
+Eighteen tales which certainly are excellent in their kind, quick,
+breezy, full of the local color, yet with delightful touches of
+universal humanity.
+
+CINCINNATI COMMERCIAL TRIBUNE
+
+They are honest little chapters of life simply written, an effective
+word of slang stuck in here and there where it does not seem at all out
+of place; honest, open-hearted, steady-eyed narratives all, with the
+breeze of the Western prairies in every line, as well as the brotherhood
+of man, and his triumphs and his failures impressing themselves upon you
+at every turn.
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+153-157 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Last Spike, by Cy Warman
+
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