Public-domain ebook
by Robert Barr
Language: en524 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Novels
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #55328.
The opening · free to read
IT was a nasty night, with a drizzling rain nearly as thick as a fog--a rain which obscured the signals and left the rails so slippery that a quick stop was almost impossible--yet just the sort of night to make a quick stop imperative if disaster were to be averted.
Young John Steele, station-master, telegrapher, ticket-agent, and man-of-all-work in the lone shanty known on the railway map as Hitchen’s Siding, ignored by all other maps, stood beside the telegraph instrument wondering whether the rain had affected the efficiency of the wires, or whether the train despatcher had gone crazy. Here was Number Sixteen, the freight from the west, coming in, and there were no orders for her. Number Three, known to the outside world as the “Pacific Express,” the fastest train on the road, was already forty minutes overdue, tearing westward through the night somewhere, and John did not know where. All he knew was that she was trying to make up lost time as well as the greasy metals would allow, and here he stood without orders!
Once more he seized the key, and calling the despatched office in Warmington again demanded: “What orders for Sixteen?” Then he went outside, and on his own initiative kicked away the iron clutch that released the distant semaphore. The red star of danger glimmering through the drizzle to the east might hold the express if the driver saw it in time.
Number Sixteen had drawn up to the platform, and as her conductor came forward Steele ran to meet him, shouting: “Sidetrack your train, Flynn! Sidetrack her on the jump!”
“Where’s my orders?” asked the conductor.
“There’s no orders. I order you. Get her off the main line at once.”
“_Your_ orders! Well, for cold cheek----”
Steele lost none of the precious moments in argument, but, turning from the angry conductor, yelled to the engineer: “Whistle for the switch, and kick her back on to the siding. Number Three may be into you any moment.”
No youth in Steele’s position has the right to give a command to an engineer over the head of a conductor, neither should his orders to the conductor be oral--they must be documentary. Steele was shattering fixed rules of the road, and he knew it.
The conductor of a perishable goods train thinks himself nearly as important as if he ran an express, so Flynn was rightly indignant at this sudden assumption of unlawful authority by a no-account youth at a noaccount station. But a conductor is usually in a comparatively safe place, while the driver of an engine must bear the brunt of a head-on collision, so the grimy Morton at the throttle did not stand on etiquette, but blew the whistle for an open switch and backed his train into the siding. Steele watched the switch light turn to safety again, heaved a sigh of relief, then put his stalwart arms to the lever and slowly pulled off the danger signal to the east, and left the main line clear for the through express.
“What’s all this sweat about?” cried Flynn. “Where’s Number Three?”
“I don’t know,” replied John quietly.
“You don’t know? Well, I’m blessed! I’ll tell you one thing, my impetuous youngster. If Number Three has lost more time, and I’m ordered on to the next siding, you’ll lose your job.”
“I know it.”
John turned in from the platform to the telegraph-room, and Flynn followed him. As they advanced the instrument began a wild rataplan, and Steele paused, raising his hand for silence. Even Flynn, who did not understand its language, felt that the machine was making a frantic, agonised appeal.
“Listen to that!” cried Steele, a note of triumph in his voice.
“What’s it saying?” whispered the conductor, awed in spite of himself.
‘“Sidetrack Sixteen! Sidetrack Sixteen! In God’s name sidetrack Sixteen!’ There’s your orders at last, Flynn. It’s lucky you didn’t wait for them.”
The final words were obliterated by a roar as of a descending avalanche, and the express tore past, ripping the night and the silence; fifty miles an hour at the least; the long line of curtained windows in the sleeping-cars shimmering in the station lights like a wavering biograph picture--there and away while you drew your breath. In the stillness that followed, the brass instrument kept up its useless, idiotic chatter. A heavy step sounded on the platform, and the engineer appeared at the door, his face ghastly in its pallor, the smudges on it giving a heightening effect of contrast.
“God, Flynn,” he gasped, “that was a close call.”
The conductor nodded, and each man strode forward as if impelled by a single impulse to grasp hands with the youngster, who laughed nervously, saying:
“They’re pretty anxious in the city. I must answer.” Then he went to the instrument and sent the most undisciplined message that had ever gone over the wires from a subordinate to a superior.
IN the train despatcher’s office at Warmington, one hundred and twenty miles to the east of Hitchen’s Siding, the force was hard at work under the electric light. Philip Manson, division superintendent, strolled in, although it was long past his office hours, for he was one of those indefatigable railroad men loth to take his fingers off the pulse of the great organisation he controlled, and no employee of the road could be certain of any hour, night or day, when Manson might not be standing unexpectedly beside him. As this silent man surveyed the busy room, listening to the click of the telegraphic sounders, which spoke to him as plainly as if human lips were uttering the language of the land, he was startled by a cry from Hammond, the train despatcher. Hammond sprang like a madman to the sender, and the key, at lightning speed, rattled forth--“Sidetrack Sixteen. Sidetrack Sixteen.”
Instinctively the division superintendent knew what had happened. To the most accurate of men, faithful and exact through years of service, may come an unaccountable momentary lapse of vigilance. The train despatcher had forgotten Number Sixteen! Instantly the road spread itself out before the mind’s eye of the superintendent. He knew every inch of it. The situation revealed itself to his mathematical brain as a well-known arrangement of men and pawns would display to an expert what could or could not be done on the chess-board. He knew where Number Three would lose further time on the up-grades, but now, alas! it was speeding along a flat country, where every minute meant a mile. Nevertheless, there was one chance in a thousand that the express had not yet reached Hitchen’s, and his quick mind indicated the right thing to be done.
“Tell him to stop Number Three,” he snapped forth.
The despatcher obeyed. Where disaster was a matter of moments, there was little use in awaiting the slow movements of a heavy freight-train when the express, a demon of destruction, was swooping down on the scene. There came no answer to the frenzied appeal. Every man in the room was on his feet, and each held his breath as if the crash and the shrieks could leap across one hundred and twenty miles and penetrate into that appalled office. Then the sounder began, leisurely and insolent:
“_I sidetracked Sixteen on my own, and set the signal against Three until Sixteen was in. Are you people crazy, or merely plain drunk?_”
The tension snapped like an overstrained wire. One man went into shriek after shriek of laughter; another laid his head on his desk and sobbed. Hammond staggered into a chair, and an assistant held a glass of water to his ashen lips. The division superintendent stood like a statue, a deep frown marking his displeasure at the flippant message that had come in upon such a tragic crisis. But the assurance that the express was safe cleared his brow.
“The man at the siding is named John Steele, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Send down a substitute to-morrow, and tell Steele to report to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
And this is how our young man came to be Philip Man-son’s right-hand helper in the division superintendent’s office of the Grand Union Station at Warmington City.
The Grand Union Station is a noble pile of red brick, rough and cut stone and terra-cotta, adorned by a massive corner tower holding aloft a great clock that gives the city standard time. The tower is the pride of Warmington--a pillar of red cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, with the hours distinct a mile away. The tower may be taken as a monument to the power and wealth of the Rockervelts, although in larger cities they possessed still more imposing architecture to uphold their fame.
The Manateau Midland, which made this immense structure its eastern terminus, was merely a link in the Rockervelt chain of admirably equipped railways; but, as the title, Union, implied, other roads, mostly bankrupt lines or branches of the Midland, enjoyed running rights into the Grand Union Station.
The transferring of a country youth at an enhanced salary, from a lone pine shanty on the prairie to this palatial edifice in the city seemed to John like being translated bodily to heaven. Now he had his chance, and that was all he asked of fate. He delighted in railway work. The strident screech of the whistles, the harsh clanking of cars coming together, all the discordant sounds of the station-yard, were as orchestral music to him, and he never tired of the symphony. He speedily became the most useful man about the place, and was from the first the most popular. He had a habit of dashing here and there bare-headed, and to heat or cold was equally indifferent. There was not a trace of malice in the lad, and he was ever ready with a cheery word or a helping hand. He seemed able to do anything, from running an engine to tapping a wire, and was willing in an emergency to work night and day, without a grumble, till he dropped from fatigue. Silent Philip Man-son watched Steele’s progress with unspoken approval, and loved him not the less that for all the lad’s witty exuberance not a word had ever passed his lips about that sinister blunder at Hitchen’s Siding. Those things are not to be spoken of, and even the general manager knew nothing of the crisis. The train despatcher had retired, nerve-broken, and the newspapers never guessed why.
But there was one man who did not like John, and that was no less important a personage than the general manager himself. His huge room in the lower part of the tower was as sumptuously furnished as an eastern palace. T. Acton Blair, general manager of the Manateau Midland, was supposed to be related to the Rockervelt family, but this was perhaps a fallacy put forth to account for the placing of such a palpably incompetent man in so responsible a position. He was a bald-headed, corpulent personage, pompous and ponderous, slow moving and slow speaking, saying perfectly obvious things in a deep, impressive voice, as if he were uttering the wisdom of ages. His subordinate, Philip Manson, as everybody knew, was responsible for the efficiency of the road; and when he wanted a project carried out, he always pretended it was Blair’s original idea, so the general manager got the credit if it was a success, and Manson shouldered the blame if it was not.
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