"Me?" answered the old man, evasively, "I've got a boy back East; getting to be a big one, too. He's in school. When are you going to give us a pa.s.senger run with the Sky-Sc.r.a.per, Neighbor?" asked Hamilton, turning to the master-mechanic.

"Soon as we get this wheat, up on the high line, out of the way,"

replied Neighbor. "We haven't half engines enough to move it, and I get a wire about every six hours to move it faster. Every siding's blocked, clear to Belgrade. How many of those sixty-thousand-pound cars can you take over Beverly Hill with your Sky-Sc.r.a.per?"

He was asking both men. The engineer looked at his chum.

"I reckon maybe thirty-five or forty," said McNeal. "Eh, Dad?"

"Maybe, son," growled Hamilton; "and break my back doing it?"

"I gave you a helper once and you kicked him off the tender," retorted Neighbor.

"Don't want anybody raking ashes for me--not while I'm drawing full time," Dad frowned.

But the upshot of it was that we put the Sky-Sc.r.a.per at hauling wheat, and within a week she was doing the work of a double-header.

It was May, and a thousand miles east of us, in Chicago, there was trouble in the wheat-pit on the Board of Trade. You would hardly suspect what queer things that wheat scramble gave rise to, affecting Georgie McNeal and old man Hamilton and a lot of other fellows away out on a railroad division on the Western plains; but this was the way of it:

A man sitting in a little office on La Salle Street wrote a few words on a very ordinary-looking sheet of paper, and touched a b.u.t.ton. That brought a colored boy, and he took the paper out to a young man who sat at the eastern end of a private wire.

The next thing we knew, orders began to come in hot from the president's office--the president of the road, if you please--to get that wheat on the high line into Chicago, and to get it there quickly.

Trainmen, elevator-men, superintendents of motive power, were spurred with special orders and special bulletins. Farmers, startled by the great prices offering, hauled night and day. Every old tub we had in the shops and on the sc.r.a.p was overhauled and hustled into the service. The division danced with excitement. Every bushel of wheat on it must be in Chicago by the morning of May 31st.

For two weeks we worked everything to the limit; the Sky-Sc.r.a.per led any two engines on the line. Even Dad Hamilton was glad to cry enough, and take a helper. We doubled them every day, and the way the wheat flew over the line towards the lower end of Lake Michigan was appalling to speculators. It was a battle between two commercial giants--and a battle to the death. It shook not alone the country, it shook the world; but that was nothing to us; our orders were simply to move the wheat. And the wheat moved.

The last week found us pretty well cleaned up; but the high price brought grain out of cellars and wells, the buyers said--at least, it brought all the h.o.a.rded wheat, and much of the seed wheat, and the 28th day of the month found fifty cars of wheat still in the Zanesville yards. I was at Harvard working on a time-card when the word came, and behind it a special from the general manager, stating there was a thousand dollars premium in it for the company, besides tariff, if we got that wheat into Chicago by Sat.u.r.day morning.

The train end of it didn't bother me any; it was the motive power that kept us studying. However, we figured that by running McNeal with the Sky-Sc.r.a.per back wild we could put all the wheat behind her in one train. As it happened, Neighbor was at Harvard, too.

"Can they ever get over Beverly with fifty, Neighbor?" I asked, doubtfully.

"We'll never know till they try it," growled Neighbor. "There's a thousand for the company if they do, that's all. How'll you run them?

Give them plenty of sea-room; they'll have to gallop to make it."

Cool and reckless planning, taking the daring chances, straining the flesh and blood, driving the steel loaded to the snapping-point; that was what it meant. But the company wanted results; wanted the prestige, and the premium, too. To gain them we were expected to stretch our little resources to the uttermost.

I studied a minute, then turned to the dispatcher.

"Tell Norman to send them out as second 4; that gives the right of way over every wheel against them. If they can't make it on that kind of schedule, it isn't in the track."

It was extraordinary business, rather, sending a train of wheat through on a pa.s.senger schedule, practically, as the second section of our east-bound flyer; but we took hair-lifting chances on the plains.

It was noon when the orders were flashed. At three o'clock No. 4 was due to leave Zanesville. For three hours I kept the wires busy warning all operators and trainmen, even switch-engines and yard-masters, of the wheat special--second 4.

The Flyer, the first section and regular pa.s.senger-train, was checked out of Zanesville on time. Second 4, which meant Georgie McNeal, Dad, the Sky-Sc.r.a.per, and fifty loads of wheat, reported out at 3.10. While we worked on our time-card, Neighbor, in the dispatcher's office across the hall, figured out that the wheat-train would enrich the company just eleven thousand dollars, tolls and premium. "If it doesn't break in two on Beverly Hill," growled Neighbor, with a qualm.

On the dispatcher's sheet, which is a sort of panorama, I watched the big train whirl past station after station, drawing steadily nearer to us, and doing it, the marvel, on full pa.s.senger time. It was a great feat, and Georgie McNeal, whose nerve and brain were guiding the tremendous load, was breaking records with every mile-stone.

They were due in Harvard at nine o'clock. The first 4, our Flyer, pulled in and out on time, meeting 55, the west-bound overland freight, at the second station east of Harvard--Redbud.

Neighbor and I sat with the dispatchers, up in their office, smoking.

The wheat-train was now due from the west, and, looking at my watch, I stepped to the western window. Almost immediately I heard the long peculiarly hollow blast of the Sky-Sc.r.a.per whistling for the upper yard.

"She's coming," I exclaimed.

The boys crowded to the window; but Neighbor happened to glance to the east.

"What's that coming in from the junction, Bailey?" he exclaimed, turning to the local dispatcher. We looked and saw a headlight in the east.

"That's 55."

"Where do they meet?"

"55 takes the long siding in from the junction"--which was two miles east--"and she ought to be on it right now," added the dispatcher, anxiously, looking over the master-mechanic's shoulder.

Neighbor jumped as if a bullet had struck him. "She'll never take a siding to-night. She's coming down the main track. What's her orders?"

he demanded, furiously.

"Meeting orders for first 4 at Redbud, second 4 here, 78 at Glencoe.

Great Jupiter!" cried the dispatcher, and his face went sick and scared, "they've forgotten second 4."

"They'll think of her a long time dead," roared the master-mechanic, savagely, jumping to the west window. "Throw your red lights! There's the Sky-Sc.r.a.per now!"

Her head shot that instant around the coal chutes, less than a mile away, and 55 going dead against her. I stood like one palsied, my eyes glued on the burning eye of the big engine. As she whipped past a street arc-light I caught a glimpse of Georgie McNeal's head out of the cab window. He always rode bare-headed if the night was warm, and I knew it was he; but suddenly, like a flash, his head went in. I knew why as well as if my eyes were his eyes and my thoughts his thoughts. He had seen red signals where he had every right to look for white.

But red signals now--to stop _her_--to pull her flat on her haunches like a bronco? Shake a weather flag at a cyclone!

I saw the fire stream from her drivers; I knew they were churning in the sand; I knew he had twenty air cars behind him sliding. What of it?

Two thousand tons were sweeping forward like an avalanche. What did brains or pluck count for now with 55 dancing along like a school-girl right into the teeth of it?

I don't know how the other men felt. As for me, my breath choked in my throat, my knees shook, and a deadly nausea seized me. Unable to avert the horrible blunder, I saw its hideous results.

Darkness hid the worst of the sight; it was the sound that appalled.

Children asleep in sod shanties miles from where the two engines reared in awful shock jumped in their cribs at that crash. 55's little engine barely checked the Sky-Sc.r.a.per. She split it like a banana. She bucked like a frantic horse, and leaped fearfully ahead. There was a blinding explosion, a sudden awful burst of steam; the windows crashed about our ears, and we were dashed to the wall and floor like lead-pencils. A baggage-truck, whipped up from the platform below, came through the heavy sash and down on the dispatcher's table like a brickbat, and as we scrambled to our feet a shower of wheat suffocated us. The floor heaved; freight-cars slid into the depot like battering-rams. In the height of the confusion an oil-tank in the yard took fire and threw a yellow glare on the ghastly scene.

I saw men get up and fall again to their knees; I was shivering, and wet with sweat. The stairway was crushed into kindling-wood. I climbed out a back window, down on the roof of the freight platform, and so to the ground. There was a running to and fro, useless and aimless; men were beside themselves. They plunged through wheat up to their knees at every step. All at once, above the frantic hissing of the buried Sky-Sc.r.a.per and the wild calling of the car tinks, I heard the stentorian tones of Neighbor, mounted on a twisted truck, organizing the men at hand into a wrecking-gang. Soon people began running up the yard to where the Sky-Sc.r.a.per lay, like another Samson, prostrate in the midst of the destruction it had wrought. Foremost among the excited men, covered with dirt and blood, staggered Dad Hamilton.

"Where's McNeal?" cried Neighbor.

Hamilton pointed to the wreck.

"Why didn't he jump?" yelled Neighbor.

Hamilton pointed at the twisted signal-tower; the red light still burned in it.

"You changed the signals on him," he cried, savagely. "What does it mean? We had rights against everything. What does it mean?" he raved, in a frenzy.