Part 18 (1/2)

Slowly and sullenly the machines were backed again.

”She's doing the work, Georgie,” cried Sankey. ”For that kind of a cut she's as good as a rotary. Look everything over now while I go back and see how the boys are standing it. Then we'll give her one more, and give it the hardest kind.”

And they did give her one more--and another. Men at Santiago put up no stouter fight than they made that Sunday morning in the canon of the Blackwood. Once and twice more they went in. And the second time the b.u.mping drummed more deeply; the drivers held, pushed, panted, and gained against the white wall--heaved and stumbled ahead--and with a yell from Sinclair and Sankey and the fireman, the Double Header shot her nose into the clear over the Blackwood gorge. As engine after engine flew past the divided walls, each cab took up the cry--it was the wildest shout that ever crowned victory.

Through they went and half-way across the bridge before they could check their monster catapult. Then at a half-full they shot it back at the cut--it worked as well one way as the other.

”The thing is done,” declared Sankey. Then they got into position up the line for a final shoot to clean the eastern cut and to get the head for a dash across the bridge into the west end of the canon, where lay another mountain of snow to split.

”Look the machines over close, boys,” said Sankey to the engineers. ”If nothing's sprung we'll take a full head across the gorge--the bridge will carry anything--and buck the west cut. Then after we get No. 1 through this afternoon Neighbor can get his baby cabs in here and keep 'em chasing all night; but it's done snowing,” he added, looking into the leaden sky.

He had everything figured out for the master-mechanic--the shrewd, kindly old man. There's no man on earth like a good Indian; and for that matter none like a bad one. Sankey knew by a military instinct just what had to be done and how to do it. If he had lived he was to have been a.s.sistant superintendent. That was the word which leaked from headquarters after he got killed.

And with a volley of jokes between the cabs, and a laughing and a yelling between toots, down went Sankey's Double Header again into the Blackwood gorge.

At the same moment, by an awful misunderstanding of orders, down came the big rotary from the West End with a dozen cars of coal behind it.

Mile after mile it had wormed east towards Sankey's ram, burrowed through the western cut of the Blackwood, crashed through the drift Sankey was aiming for, and whirled then out into the open, dead against him, at forty miles an hour. Each train, in order to make the grade and the blockade, was straining the cylinders.

Through the swirling snow which half hid the bridge and swept between the rus.h.i.+ng ploughs Sinclair saw them coming--he yelled. Sankey saw them a fraction of a second later, and while Sinclair struggled with the throttle and the air, Sankey gave the alarm through the whistle to the poor fellows in the blind pockets behind. But the track was at the worst. Where there was no snow there were whiskers; oil itself couldn't have been worse to stop on. It was the old and deadly peril of fighting blockades from both ends on a single track.

The great rams of steel and fire had done their work, and with their common enemy overcome they dashed at each other frenzied across the Blackwood gorge.

The fireman at the first cry shot out the side. Sankey yelled at Sinclair to jump. But George shook his head: he never would jump.

Without hesitating an instant, Sankey caught him in his arms, tore him from the levers, planted a mighty foot, and hurled Sinclair like a block of coal through the gangway out into the gorge. The other cabs were already emptied; but the instant's delay in front cost Sankey's life.

Before he could turn the rotary crashed into the 566. They reared like mountain lions, and pitched headlong into the gorge; Sankey went under them.

He could have saved himself; he chose to save George. There wasn't time to do both; he had to choose and he chose instinctively. Did he, maybe, think in that flash of Neeta and of whom she needed most--of a young and a stalwart protector better than an old and a failing one? I do not know; I know only what he did.

Every one who jumped got clear. Sinclair lit in twenty feet of snow, and they pulled him out with a rope; he wasn't scratched; even the bridge was not badly strained. No. 1 pulled over it next day. Sankey was right: there was no more snow; not enough to hide the dead engines on the rocks: the line was open.

There never was a funeral in McCloud like Sankey's. George Sinclair and Neeta followed together; and of mourners there were as many as there were people. Every engine on the division carried black for thirty days.

His contrivance for fighting snow has never yet been beaten on the high line. It is perilous to go against a drift behind it--something has to give.

But it gets there--as Sankey got there--always; and in time of blockade and desperation on the West End they still send out Sankey's Double Header; though Sankey--so the conductors tell the children, travelling east or travelling west--Sankey isn't running any more.

Siclone Clark

”There goes a fellow that walks like Siclone Clark,” exclaimed Duck Middleton. Duck was sitting in the train-master's office with a group of engineers. He was one of the black-listed strikers, and runs an engine now down on the Santa Fe. But at long intervals Duck gets back to revisit the scenes of his early triumphs. The men who surrounded him were once at deadly odds with Duck and his chums, though now the ancient enmities seem forgotten, and Duck--the once ferocious Duck--sits occasionally among the new men and gossips about early days on the West End.

”Do you remember Siclone, Reed?” asked Duck, calling to me in the private office.

”Remember him?” I echoed. ”Did anybody who ever knew Siclone forget him?”

”I fired pa.s.senger for Siclone twenty years ago,” resumed Duck. ”He walked just like that fellow; only he was quicker. I reckon you fellows don't know what a snap you have here now,” he continued, addressing the men around him. ”Track fenced; ninety-pound rails; steel bridges; stone culverts; slag ballast; sky-sc.r.a.pers. No wonder you get chances to haul such n.o.bs as Lilioukalani and Schley and Dewey, and cut out ninety miles an hour on tangents.

”When I was firing for Siclone the road-bed was just off the sc.r.a.pers; the dumps were soft; pile bridges; paper culverts; fifty-six-pound rails; not a fence west of Buffalo gap, and the plains black with Texas steers. We never closed our cylinder c.o.c.ks; the hiss of the steam frightened the cattle worse than the whistle, and we never knew when we were going to find a bunch of critters on the track.