[Ill.u.s.tration: "HE KNEW THAT A SECOND EXPLOSION MIGHT COME AT ANY MOMENT."]

There was no other man but Plumstead who _did_ wait that day; there was none but he whose waiting could avail anything. _He_ had to fight it out alone with that ton of nitroglycerin, or run and let an explosion come far worse than the other. He fought it out; he waited, and he won.

Gradually the thermometer dropped to eighty-five, to eighty, and the danger was pa.s.sed.

But--well, even the superintendent admitted that Joshua did a rather fine thing here, while the workmen themselves and the people of Kenvil shake their heads solemnly and vow that he saved the works.

THE LOCOMOTIVE ENGINEER

I

HOW IT FEELS TO RIDE AT NIGHT ON A LOCOMOTIVE GOING NINETY MILES AN HOUR

IT is 8.30 P.M., any night you please, and for miles through the yards of East Chicago lights are swinging, semaph.o.r.e arms are moving, men in clicking signal-towers are juggling with electric b.u.t.tons and pneumatic levers, target lights on a hundred switches are changing from red to green, from green to red; everything is clear, everything is all right, the Lake Sh.o.r.e Mail is coming, with eighty tons of letters and papers in its pouches. Relays of engines and engineers have brought these messages, this news of the world, thus far on their journey. Up the Hudson they have come, and across the Empire State and along the sh.o.r.es of Lake Michigan, nearly a thousand miles in twenty-four hours, which is not so bad, although the hottest, maddest rush is yet to come.

It is a fine thing to know the men who drive the engines on these trains; just to see them is something, and to make them talk (if you can do it) is better business than interviewing most celebrities you have heard about.

To this end I set out, one evening early in January, for the great round-house of the Northwestern road, that lies on the outskirts of Chicago. A strange place, surely, is this to one who approaches it unprepared--a place where yellow eyes glare out of deep shadows, where fire-dragons rush at you with crunchings and snortings, where the air hisses and roars. It might be some demon menagerie, there in the darkness.

To this place of fears and pitfalls I came an hour or so before starting-time, and here I found Dan White, one of the Northwestern crack-a-jacks, giving the last careful touches to locomotive 908 before the night's hard run. In almost our first words my heart was won by something White said. I had mentioned Frank Bullard of the Burlington road, a rival by all rights, and immediately this bluff, broad-shouldered man exclaimed: "Ah, he's a fine fellow, Bullard is, and he knows how to run an engine." White would fight Bullard at the throttle to any finish, but would speak only good words of him.

"Tell me," said I, "about the great run you made the other night." From a dozen lips I had heard of White's tremendous dash from Chicago to Clinton, Iowa.

"Oh, it wasn't much; we had to make the time up, and we did it. Didn't we, Fred?"

This to the fireman, who nodded in a.s.sent, but said nothing.

"You made a record, didn't you?"

"Well, we went one hundred and thirty-eight miles in one hundred and forty-three minutes; that included three stops and two slow-downs. I don't know as anybody has beat that--much."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PLACE WHERE YELLOW EYES GLARE OUT OF DEEP SHADOWS.]

By dint of questioning, I drew from this modest man some details of his achievement. The curve-bent stretch of seventeen miles between Franklin Grove and Nelson they did in fourteen minutes, and a part of this, beyond Nachusa, they took at an eighty-mile pace. They covered five miles between Clarence and Stanwood in three minutes and a half, and they made two miles beyond Dennison at over a hundred miles an hour. As the mail rushed west, word was flashed ahead, and crowds gathered at the stations to cheer and marvel.

"There must have been five hundred people on the platform at Dixon,"

said White, telling the story, "and they looked to me like a swarm of ants, just a black, wriggling ma.s.s, and then they were gone. We came on to a bridge there after a big reverse curve with a down grade, and I guess no one will ever know how fast we were going, as we slammed her around one way and then slammed her around the other way. It was every bit of ninety miles an hour. You got all you wanted, didn't you, Fred?"

The fireman looked up, torch in hand, and remarked, in a dry monotone: "Goin' through Dixon I said my prayers and hung on, stretched out flat.

That's what I done."

"Fred and I," continued White, "both got letters about the run from the superintendent. Here's mine, if you'd like to read it."

The pleasure of these two blackened men over this graciousness of the superintendent was a thing to see. For such a bit of paper, crumpled and smeared with oil, I believe they would have taken the Mississippi at a jump, engine, train, and all. Superintendent's orders, superintendent's praise--there is the beginning and end of all things for them.

My first long ride on one of these splendid locomotives was with the Burlington night mail (no pa.s.sengers), 590 pulling her and Frank Bullard at the throttle. It is said that the Baldwin Locomotive Works never turned out a faster engine than this 590. The man must be a giant whose head will top her drivers, and, for all her seventy tons, there is speed in every line of her. She is a young engine, too--only four years old--and Bullard swears he will back her in the matter of getting over rails to do anything that steel and steam can do. "She's willing and gentle, sir, and easy running. You'll see in a minute."

These words from Bullard, first-cla.s.s engine-driver of the C. B. & Q., a long, loosely jointed man, with the eye and build of a scout. As he spoke they were coupling us to the mail-cars, in preparation for the start. In overalls and sweater I had come, with type-written authority to make the run that night. This was in the first week in January, the second time Bullard had drawn the throttle for Burlington on the new fast schedule. Burlington lay off there in Iowa, on the Mississippi, with all the night and all the State of Illinois between us.

Now the train stands ready--three mail-cars and the engine, not a stick besides. No Pullman comforts here, no bunks for sleeping, no man aboard who has the right to sleep. Everything is hustle and business. Already the mail clerks are swarming at the pouches, like printers on a rush edition. See those last bags swung in through the panel doors! Not even the president of the road may ride here without a permit from the government.

Bullard takes up a red, smoking torch and looks 590 over. He fills her cups, and prods a two-foot oiler into her rods and bearings. Dan Cleary, the fireman, looks out of his window on the left and chews complacently.

Down the track beside him locomotive 1309 backs up, a first-cla.s.s engine she, but 590 bulks over her as the king of a herd might over some good, ordinary working elephant. As she stands here now, purring through her black iron throat, 590 measures sixteen feet three inches from rails to stack-top. Both engines blow out steam, that rolls up in silver clouds to the electric lights.

Bullard climbs to his place at the right, and a hiss of air tells that he is testing the brakes. Under each car sixteen iron shoes close against sixteen wheels, and stay there. Down the length of the train goes the repair man with his kit, and makes sure that every contact is right, then pulls a rope four times at the rear, whereupon four hissing signals answer in the cab. Bullard shuts off the air.

"It's all there is to stop her with," says he, "so we take no chances with it. She's got high-speed brakes on her, 590 has--one hundred and ten pounds to the inch. Twenty-four, Dan," he adds, and snaps his watch.

"We start at thirty."

Dan chews on. "Bad wind to-night," he says; "reg'lar gale."

Bullard nods. "I know it; we're fifteen minutes late, too."

"Make Burlington on time?"

"Got to: you hit it up, and I'll skin her. Twenty-six, Dan."

Four minutes to wait. Two station officials come up with polite inquiries. The thermometer is falling, they say, and we shall have it bitter cold over the plains. They reach up with cordial hand-shakes. I pull my cap down, and take my stand behind Bullard. Our side of the cab is quite cut off from the fireman's side by a swelling girth of boiler, which leaves an alleyway at right and left wide enough for a man's body and no wider. Bullard and I are in the right-hand alleyway, Bullard's back and black cap just before me. Dan, with his shovel, is out on a shaky steel shelf behind, that bridges the s.p.a.ce between engine and tender. That is where he works, poor lad! We are breathing coal-dust and torch-smoke and warm oil.

"F-s-s-s-s-s!" comes the signal, and instantly we are moving. Lights flash about us everywhere--green lights, white lights, red lights, a phantasmagoria of drug-store bottles. The tracks shine yellow far ahead.

A steady pounding and jarring begins, and grows like the roar of battle.

Our cab heaves with the tugging of a captive balloon. Our speed increases amazingly. We seem constantly on the point of running straight through blocks of houses, and escape only by sudden and disconcerting swayings around curves that all lead, one will vow, straight into black chasms under the dazzle. Whoever rides here for the first time feels that he is ticketed for sure destruction, understands that this plunging engine _must_ necessarily go off the rails in two or three minutes, say five at the latest; for what guidance, he reasons, can any man get from a million crazy lights, and who that is human can avoid a snarl in such a tangle of b.u.mping switches? I am free to confess, for my own part, that I found the first half hour of my ride on 590 absolutely terrifying.

Thus, at break-neck speed, we come out of Chicago, all slow-going city ordinances to the contrary notwithstanding. We are chasing a transcontinental record schedule, and have fifteen minutes to make up. I breathe more freely as we get into open country. We are going like the wind, but the track is straighter, and the darkness comfortable. I begin to notice things with better understanding. As the lurches come, I brace myself against the boiler side without fear of burning; that is something learned. I find out later that I owe this protection to a two-inch layer of asbestos. I catch a faint sound of the engine bell, and discover, to my surprise, that it has been ringing from the start--indeed, it rings, without ceasing, all the way to Burlington, the rope pulled by a steam jerking contrivance, but the roar of the engine drowns it.

Deep shadows inwrap the cab, all the deeper for the glare that flashes through them every minute or two as Dan, back there on his iron shelf, stokes coal in at the red-hot door. Two faint lights burn for the gages--a jumping water column in front, a pair of wavering needles on the boiler. These Bullard watches coolly, and from time to time reaches back past me to turn the injector-c.o.c.k, whereupon steam hisses by my head. For the most part he is quite still, like an Indian pilot, head forward at the lookout window, right hand down by the air-brake valve, left hand across the throttle lever, with only a second's jump to the reversing lever that rises up from the floor straight before him. As we race into towns and roar through them, he sounds the chime whistle, making its deep voice challenge the darkness. At curves he eases her with the brakes. And for grades and level stretches and bridges he notches the throttle up or down as the need is. Watch his big, strong grip on the polished handles! Think of the hours he spends here all alone, this man who holds life and death in his quick, sure judgment!

Now he catches the window-frame and slides it open. A blast sweeps in like an arctic hurricane. Bullard leans out into the night and seems to listen. "Try it," he cries, but his voice is faint. I put my head out, and come into a rush of air billows that strangle like breakers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AT THE THROTTLE.]

"Greggs--Hill--three--miles--long. Let--her--go--soon." He closes the window. And now, as we clear the grade, begins a burst of speed that makes the rest of small account. Faster and faster we go, until the very iron seems alive and straining underneath us. I am tossed about in hard pitches. The glow of the furnace lights up continuously. There is no sense of fear any longer. It is too splendid, what we are doing. Of course it means instant death if anything breaks. Let the ma.s.sive side rod that holds the two drivers snap, and a half--ton knife sweeping seventy miles an hour will slice off our cab and us with it like a cut of cheese. Did not an engineer go to his death that way only last week on the Union Pacific run? After all, why not this death as well as any other? Have we not valves and tubes in our bodies that may snap at any moment!

"How--fast?" I call out.

"Eighty--miles--an--hour," says Bullard, close to my ear, and a moment later pulls the rope for a grade crossing. "Ooooo--ooooo--oo--oo,"

answers the deep iron voice, two long and two short calls, as the code requires. "Year--ago--killed--two--men--here," he shouts as we whiz over the road. "Struck--buggy--threw--men--sixty--feet." I wonder how far we would throw them now.

In the two hundred and six miles' run to the Mississippi we stop only twice--for water, at Mendota and at Galesburg--nine minutes wasted for the two, and the gale blowing harder. Our schedule makes allowance for no stops; every moment from our actual going is so much "dead time" that must be fought for, second by second, and made up. Drive her as he will, with all the cunning of his hand, Bullard can score but small gains against the wind. And some of these he loses. At Mendota we have made up seven minutes, but we pull out thirteen minutes late. At Princeton we are fifteen minutes late, at Galva fourteen minutes, at Galesburg eight minutes, but we pull out twelve minutes late. Then we make the last forty-three miles, including bridges, towns, grades, and curves, in forty-four minutes, and draw into Burlington at 1.22 A.M.--on time to the dot. This because Bullard had sworn to do it; also because the road beyond Galesburg runs west instead of southwest, and it is easier for a train to bore straight through a gale, head on, than to take it from the quarter.

We took the big, steady curve at Princeton, a down-grade helping us, at a hundred miles an hour--so Bullard declares and what he says about engine-driving I believe. Indeed, these great bursts can be measured only by the subtle senses of an expert, since no registering instrument has been devised to make reliable record. Across the twin high bridges that span the Bureau creeks we shot with a rush that left the reverberations far back in the night like two short barks. And just as we rounded a curve before these bridges I saw a black face peering down from the boiler-top, while a voice called out: "Wahr--wahr--wahr--wahr!"

To which startling apparition Bullard, undisturbed, replied: "Wahr--wahr--wahr--wahr!" Then the head disappeared. Dan, from his side, was telling Bullard that he had seen the safety-light for the bridges, and Bullard was answering something about hitting it up harder. How these men understand each other in such tumult is a mystery to one with ordinary hearing, but somehow they manage it.