Snow on the headlight : $b a story of the great Burlington strikeWarman, Cy
General
Snow on the headlight : $b a story of the great Burlington strike
Warman, Cy
Burlington Strike, 1888 -- Fiction; Strikes and lockouts -- Fiction
While Dan Moran was being examined in Judge Meyer's ill-smelling court
in Chicago a coroner's jury was sitting on the body of the dead engineer
at Galesburg. Hundreds of people had been at the station and witnessed
the arrival of the express train that came in with a dead engine, with
snow on her headlight, and a dead engineer hanging out of the window.
Hundreds of people could testify that this had happened, but none of
them knew what had caused the death of the engine-driver. Medical
experts who were called in to view the body could find no marks of
violence upon it and, in order to get out of a close place without
embarrassment, agreed that the engineer had died of heart failure. This
information, having been absorbed by the jury, they gave in a verdict to
that effect. If the doctors had said, "He died for want of breath," the
verdict would no doubt have agreed perfectly with what the doctors
said.
After the train had arrived and the coroner was called and had taken the
dead man from the engine, Barney Guerin had wandered into a small hotel
near the station and engaged a room for the night. Being the only person
on the engine at the time of the engineer's death, Guerin was very
naturally attracting the attention of the railway officials, and calling
about him, unconsciously, all the amateur detectives and newspaper
reporters in the place. Fortunately for him, he was arrested, upon a
warrant sworn out by the station agent, and lodged in jail before the
reporters got at him. Here he was visited by a local lawyer, for the
company, and instructed to say nothing whatever about the death of
Cowels.
Upon the announcement of the verdict of the coroner's jury the prisoner
was released, and returned to Chicago by the same train that bore the
remains of the dead engineer.
Guerin, whose heart was as big as his body and as tender as a woman's,
hastened to the home of his late companion and begged the grief-sick
widow to allow him to be of some service to her. His appearance (she had
known him by sight) excited her greatly for she knew he had been
arrested as the murderer of her husband.
The news he brought of the verdict of the coroner's jury, which his very
presence corroborated, quieted her and she began to ask how it had all
happened.
Guerin began cautiously to explain how the engineer had died, still
remembering the lawyer's advice, but before he had gone a dozen words
the poor woman wept so bitterly that he was obliged to discontinue the
sad story.
Then came the corpse, borne by a few faithful friends--some of the
Brotherhood and some of the railway company--who met thus on neutral
ground and in the awful presence of death forgot their feud. Not an eye
was dry while the little company stood about as the mother and boy bent
over the coffin and poured out their grief, and the little girl, not old
enough to understand, but old enough to weep, clung and sobbed at her
mother's side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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