"Where are your section men?" asked Bucks.

"In bed at the section house."

"Who's with you?"

"Night agent. Sheriff with two cowboy prisoners waiting to take 59."

Before the last word came, Bucks was back at him:

_To Opr._:

Ask Sheriff release his prisoners to save pa.s.senger-train. Go together to west switch house-track, open, and set it. Smash in section tool-house, get tools. Go to point of house-track curve, cut the rails, and point them to send runaway train from Ogalalla over the bluff into the river.

BUCKS.

The words flew off his fingers like sparks, and another message crowded the wire behind it:

_To Agt._:

Go to east switch, open, and set for pa.s.sing-track. Flag 59, and run her on siding. If can't get 59 into the clear, ditch the runaways.

BUCKS.

They look old now. The ink is faded, and the paper is smoked with the fire of fifteen winters and bleached with the sun of fifteen summers.

But to this day they hang there in their walnut frames, the original orders, just as Bucks scratched them off. They hang there in the dispatchers' offices in the new depot. But in their present swell surroundings Bucks wouldn't know them. It was Harvey Reynolds who took them off the other end of the wire--a boy in a thousand for that night and that minute. The instant the words flashed into the room he instructed the agent, grabbed an axe, and dashed out into the waiting-room, where the sheriff, Ed Banks, sat with his prisoners, the cowboys.

"Ed," cried Harvey, "there's a runaway train from Ogalalla coming down the line in the wind. If we can't trap it here, it'll knock 59 into kindling-wood. Turn the boys loose, Ed, and save the pa.s.senger-train.

Boys, show the man and square yourselves right now. I don't know what you're here for; but I believe it's to save 59. Will you help?"

The three men sprang to their feet; Ed

Banks slipped the handcuffs off in a trice. "Never mind the rest of it.

Save the pa.s.senger-train first," he roared. Everybody from Ogalalla to Omaha knew Ed Banks.

"Which way? How?" cried the cowboys, in a lather of excitement.

Harvey Reynolds, beckoning as he ran, rushed out the door and up the track, his posse at his heels, stumbling into the gale like lunatics.

"Smash in the tool-house door," panted Harvey as they neared it.

Ed Banks seized the axe from his hands and took command as naturally as Dewey.

"Pick up that tie and ram her," he cried, pointing to the door. "All together--now."

Harvey and the cowboys splintered the panel in a twinkling, and Banks, with a few clean strokes, cut an opening. The cowboys, jumping together, ran in and began fishing for tools in the dark. One got hold of a wrench; the other, a pick. Harvey caught up a clawbar, and Banks grabbed a spike-maul. In a bunch they ran for the point of the curve on the house-track. It lies there close to the verge of a limestone bluff that looms up fifty feet above the river.

But it is one thing to order a contact opened, and another and very different thing to open it, at two in the morning on December twenty-fifth, by men who know no more about track-cutting than about logarithms. Side by side and shoulder to shoulder the man of the law and the men out of the law, the rough-riders and the railroad boy, pried and wrenched and clawed and struggled with the steel. While Harvey and Banks clawed at the spikes the cowboys wrestled with the nuts on the bolts of the fish-plates. It was a baffle. The nuts wouldn't twist, the spikes stuck like piles, sweat covered the a.s.sailants, Harvey went into a frenzy. "Boys, we must work faster," he cried, tugging at the frosty spikes; but flesh and blood could do no more.

"There they come--there's the runaway train--do you hear it? I'm going to open the switch, anyhow," Harvey shouted, starting up the track.

"Save yourselves."

Heedless of the warning, Banks struggled with the plate-bolts in a silent fury. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. "Give me the maul!" he cried.

Raising the heavy tool like a tack-hammer he landed heavily on the bolt nuts; once, and again; and they flew in a stream like bullets over the bluff. The taller cowboy, bending close on his knees, raised a yell. The plates had given. Springing to the other rail, Banks stripped the bolts even after the mad train had shot into the gorge above them. They drove the pick under the loosened steel, and with a pry that bent the clawbar and a yell that reached Harvey, trembling at the switch, they tore away the stubborn contact, and pointed the rails over the precipice.

The shriek of a locomotive whistle cut the wind. Looking east, Harvey had been watching 59's headlight. She was pulling in on the siding. He still held the switch open to send the runaways into the trap Bucks had set, if the pa.s.senger-train failed to get into the clear; but there was a minute yet--a bare sixty seconds--and Harvey had no idea of dumping ten thousand dollars' worth of equipment into the river unless he had to.

Suddenly, up went the safety signals from the east end. The 101 was coughing noisily up the pa.s.sing-track--the line was clear. Banks and the cowboys, waiting breathless, saw Harvey with a determined lurch close the main-line contact.

In the next breath the coalers, with the sweep of the gale in their frightful velocity, smashed over the switch and on. A rattling whirl of ballast and a dizzy clatter of noise, and before the frightened crew of 59 could see what was against them, the runaway train was pa.s.sed--gone!

"I wasn't going to stop here to-night," muttered the engineer, as he stood with the conductor over Harvey's shoulder at the operator's desk a minute later and wiped the chill from his forehead with a piece of waste. "We'd have met them in the canon."

Harvey was reporting to Bucks. Callahan heard it coming: "Rails cut, but 59 safe. Runaways went by here fully seventy miles an hour."

It was easy after that. Griffin is the foot of the grade; from there on, the runaway train had a hill to climb. Bucks had held 250, the local pa.s.senger, side-tracked at Davis, thirty miles farther east. Sped by the wind, the runaways pa.s.sed Davis, though not at half their highest speed.

An instant later, 250's engine was cut loose, and started after them like a scared collie. Three miles east of Davis they were overhauled by the light engine. The fireman, Donahue, crawled out of the cab window, along the foot-rail, and down on the pilot, caught the ladder of the first car, and, running up, crept along to the leader and began setting brakes. Ten minutes later they were brought back in triumph to Davis.

When the mult.i.tude of orders was out of the way, Bucks wired Ed Banks to bring his cowboys down to McCloud on 60. 60 was the east-bound pa.s.senger due at McCloud at 5.30 A.M. It turned out that the cowboys had been arrested for la.s.soing a Norwegian homesteader who had cut their wire. It was not a heinous offence, and after it was straightened out by the intervention of Bucks--who was the whole thing then--they were given jobs la.s.soing sugar barrels in the train service. One of them, the tall fellow, is a pa.s.senger conductor on the high line yet.

It was three o'clock that morning--the twenty-fifth of December in small letters, on the West End--before they got things decently straightened out: there was so much to do--orders to make and reports to take. Bucks, still on the key in his flowing robes and tumbling hair, sent and took them all. Then he turned the seat over to Callahan, and getting up for the first time in two hours, dropped into another chair.

The very first thing Callahan received was a personal from Pat Francis, at Ogalalla, conductor of 59. It was for Bucks:

Your mother is aboard 59. She was carried by McCloud in the Denver sleeper. Sending her back to you on 60. Merry Christmas.

It came off the wire fast. Callahan, taking it, didn't think Bucks heard; though it's probable he did hear. Anyway, Callahan threw the clip over towards him with a laugh.

"Look there, old man. There's your mother coming, after all your kicking--carried by on 59."

As the boy turned he saw the big dispatcher's head sink between his arms on the table. Callahan sprang to his side; but Bucks had fainted.

Sankey's Double Header

The oldest man in the train service didn't pretend to say how long Sankey had worked for the company.

Pat Francis was a very old conductor; but old man Sankey was a veteran when Pat Francis began braking. Sankey ran a pa.s.senger-train when Jimmie Brady was running--and Jimmie afterwards enlisted and was killed in the Custer fight.

There was an odd tradition about Sankey's name. He was a tall, swarthy fellow, and carried the blood of a Sioux chief in his veins. It was in the time of the Black Hills excitement, when railroad men struck by the gold fever were abandoning their trains, even at way-stations, and striking across the divide for Clark's crossing. Men to run the trains were hard to get, and Tom Porter, train-master, was putting in every man he could pick up, without reference to age or color.

Porter--he died at Julesburg afterwards--was a great jollier, and he wasn't afraid of anybody on earth.

One day a war-party of Sioux clattered into town. They tore around like a storm, and threatened to scalp everything, even to the local tickets.

The head braves dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the dispatcher's office up-stairs. The dispatcher was hiding under a loose plank in the baggage-room floor; Tom, being bald as a sand-hill, considered himself exempt from scalping-parties. He was working a game of solitaire when they bore down on him, and interested them at once. That led to a parley, which ended in Porter's hiring the whole band to brake on freight-trains. Old man Sankey is said to have been one of that original war-party.