Half way between Kewanee and Galva a white light came suddenly into view far ahead. I knew it for the headlight of a locomotive coming toward us on the parallel track. Already we had met two or three trains, and swept past them with a smashing of sound and air. But this headlight seemed different from the others, paler in its l.u.s.ter, not so steady in its glare. The ordinary locomotive comes at you with a calm, staring yellow eye that grows until it gets to be a huge full moon. But it comes gradually, without much jumping or wavering. This light danced and flashed like a great white diamond. I watched it with a certain fascination, and as it came nearer and nearer, realized that here was a train of different kind from the others, coming down on us at terrific speed. And Bullard shouted: "Number--8--with--the--mail." Then added, as the train pa.s.sed like the gleam of a knife: "She's--going--too."

II

WE PICK UP SOME ENGINE LORE AND HEAR ABOUT THE DEATH OF GIDDINGS

THE next day, with comfortable rocking-chairs to sit in and a row of hotel windows before us, Bullard and I found time for engine chat, and I was well content. First I asked him about putting his head out of the cab window there at Greggs Hill and elsewhere. "Was it to see better?"

said I.

"No," said Bullard; "it was to hear better and to smell better."

"Hear what? Smell what?"

"Hear the noises of the engine. If any little thing was working wrong, I'd hear it. If there was any wear on the bearings, I'd hear it. Why, if a mouse squeaked somewhere inside of 590, I guess I'd hear it."

Then he went on to explain that the ordinary roar of the engine, which drowned everything for me, was to him an unimportant background of sound that made little impression, and left his ears free for other sounds.

"I get so accustomed to listening to an engine," he added, "that often up home, talking with my wife and child, I find myself trying to hear sounds from the round-house. And, after a run, I talk to people as if they were deaf."

"You spoke about smelling better."

"That's right. I can smell a hot box in a minute, or oil burning. All engineers can. Why, there was--"

This led to the story of poor Giddings, killed on 590 three years before through this very necessity of putting his head out of the cab window.

Giddings had Bullard's place, and was one of the most trusted men in the Burlington employ.

"You saw last night," said Bullard, "how the boiler in 590 shuts off the engineer from the fireman. And prob'ly you noticed those posts along the road that hold the tell-tale strings. They're to warn crews on freight-car tops when it is time to duck for bridges. Well, Giddings was coming along one night between Biggsville and Gladstone--that's about ten miles before you get to the Mississippi. He was driving her fast to make up time, sixty miles an hour easy, and he put his head out to hear and to smell, the way I've explained it.

"There must have been a post set too near the track, and anyway 590's cab is extra wide, so the first thing he knew--and he didn't know that--his head was knocked clean off, or as good as that, and there was 590, her throttle wide open, tearing along, with a fireman stoking for all he was worth and a dead engineer hanging out the window.

"So they ran for eight miles, and Billy Maine--he was firing--never suspected anything wrong--for of course he couldn't see--until they struck the Mississippi bridge at full speed. You remember crossing the bridge just before we pulled in here. It's twenty-two hundred feet long, and we always give a long whistle before we get to it, and then slow down. That's the law," he added, smiling, "and, besides, there's a draw to look out for. When he heard no whistle this time, Billy Maine jumped around quick to where Giddings was, and then he saw he had a corpse for a partner."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THEY STRUCK THE MISSISSIPPI BRIDGE AT FULL SPEED."]

Another question I asked was about stopping a train at great speed for an emergency--how quickly could they do it? "I've stopped," said Bullard, "in nine hundred and fifty feet, pulling five cars that were making about sixty-two miles an hour. I don't know what I could do with this new train, only three cars, and going eighty or ninety miles an hour. That's a hard proposition."

"Would you reverse her?"

"No, sir. All engineers who know their business will agree on that. I'd shut the throttle off, and put the brakes on full. But I wouldn't reverse her. If I did, the wheels would lock in a second, and the whole business would skate ahead as if you'd put her on ice."

Then we talked about the nerve it takes to run an engine, and how a man can lose his nerve. It's like a lion-tamer who wakes up some morning and finds that he's afraid. Then his time has come to quit taming lions, for the beasts will know it if he doesn't, and kill him. There are men who can stand these high-speed runs for ten years, but few go beyond that term, or past the forty-five-year point. Slow-going pa.s.senger trains will do for them after that. Others break down after five years. Many engineers--skilled men, too--would rather throw up their jobs than take the run Bullard makes. Not that they feel the danger to be so much greater in pushing the speed up to seventy, eighty, or ninety miles an hour, but they simply _cannot_ stand the strain of doing the thing.

"This doubling up is what breaks my heart," said Bullard. "Since they've put on their new schedule I have to divide 590 with another fellow. John Kelly takes her on the fast run East while I wait here and rest. And so I've lost my sweetheart, and I don't feel near as much interest in her as I did. You see, she ain't mine any more. And, between you and me,"

he added, confidentially, "I don't think 590 likes it much herself; you see, engines are a good deal like girls, after all."

The next night, in workman's garb again, I made my way to a gloomy round-house, ready for the run to Omaha. I was to ride the second relay, as far as Creston, on locomotive 1201, with Jake Myers in the cab, so I had been informed. Being hours ahead of time, I saw something of round-house life.

First, I followed a gaunt, black-faced Swede, with stubby beard, through his duties as locomotive hostler; saw him take the tired engines in hand, as they came in one after another from hard runs, and care for them as stable hostlers care for horses. There were fires to be dropped in the clinker-pit, coal and wood to be loaded in from the chutes, water-tanks to be filled, sand-boxes looked after, and, finally, there was the hitching fast of the weary monsters in empty stalls, whither they were led from the lumbering turn-table with the last head of steam left over dead fire-boxes. And now spoke the Swede:

"Dem big pa.s.senger-engines can werry easy climb over dem blocks and go through the brick wall," and he pointed to a great semicircle of cold engine-noses, ranged along not two feet from the round-house wall.

Later on, in the dimly lighted locker-room, I listened to round-house men swapping yarns about accidents, and to threats of a fireman touching a certain yardmaster set apart by general consent for a licking.

Finally an Irishman came in, James Byron, and for all his good-natured face he seemed in ill humor. It turned out that he had just received a hurry order to take 1201 out in Myers's place.

"Jake is sick," he said, "and they've sent for me. But I'm sick, too.

Was in bed with the grip. Just took ten grains of quinine. Say, I ain't any more fit to run an engine than I am to run a Sunday-school."

Then he began pulling on his overalls, while the others laughed at him, told him he was "scared" of the fast run, and said good-by with mock seriousness.

But Byron showed himself a good soldier, and soon was working over 1201 with a will, inspecting every inch of her, torch in hand, and he a.s.sured me he would take her through all right, grip or no grip.

And take her through he did. At 1.16 A.M. my old friend, locomotive 590, brought the flier up from Chicago, six minutes ahead of the schedule.

Kelly had done himself proud this time. And six minutes later, on time to the minute, we drew out behind 1201, with Byron handling her and seventy tons of mail following after.

Our fireman was named Bellamy. He wore isingla.s.s goggles against the heat, and, in his way, he was a humorist, as I discovered presently, when he came close to me (we were running at a sixty-mile gait), and, grinning like a Dante demon, remarked slowly: "Say--if--we--go--in--the--ditch--will--you--come--along?"

The first feature of this run was some trouble with a feed-pipe from the tank, which brought us to a sudden standstill in the open night with a great hissing of steam.

"What is it?" I asked of Bellamy, while Byron, grumbling maledictions, hammered under the truck.

"Check-valve stuck; water can't get into the boiler."

"How did he know it?"

"Water-gage."

"What if he hadn't noticed it?"

Bellamy smiled in half contempt. "Say, if he hadn't noticed it for fifteen minutes, we'd have been sailing over them trees about this time--in pieces. She'd have bust her boiler."

Five minutes lost here, and we were off again, running presently into a thick fog, then into rain, and, finally, into a snow-storm. Never shall I forget the illusion, due to our great speed, that the flakes were rushing at us horizontally, shooting upward in sharp curves over the engine's headlight. And, as we swept on, the shadow of 1201 advanced beside us on the stretch of white snow as smoothly and silently as the tail of an eclipse. The engine itself was a noisy, hurrying affair, but the engine's shadow was as calm and quiet as a cloud. And I recall that the swiftness of our rush this night caused in me neither fear nor any particular emotion, although this was practically the same experience that had stirred me so the night before on 590. And I realized that riding on a swift locomotive may become a matter of course like other strange things.

III

SOME MEMORIES OF THE GREAT RECORD-BREAKING RUN FROM CHICAGO TO BUFFALO

THERE is a place in New York--the very last place one would think of--where stories without end may be heard about locomotives and the men who drive them; it is not a place of grime and steam, but a quiet and luxurious club spreading over the top floor of a very tall building on Forty-second Street, and here every day at luncheon-time railroad officials gather: superintendents, managers, and various heads of departments, men who may have grown prosperous and portly, but are always proud to talk about the boys at the throttle, and recall experiences of their own in certain exciting runs.

In the wide hall near the entrance of this Transportation Club is a driving-wheel, green painted, from the De Witt Clinton, the first locomotive that drew a pa.s.senger train in the State of New York. It is scarcely larger than a wagon-wheel, though made of iron, and an inscription sets forth how it made the historic run from Albany to Schenectady on August 9, 1831. The walls show many pictures, famous locomotives, scenes of accidents, and there are thrilling memories here in abundance if one have with him some veteran of the road to recall them.