Produced by David Edwards, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) STORIES OF THE RAILROAD JOHN A. HILL [Illustration: "_Quick as a flash the Kid had my arm._" (_page 73._)] STORIES _of the_ RAILROAD by John A. Hill [Illustration: Logo] New York Doubleday & McClure Co. 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1899, BY S. S. MCCLURE CO. COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY DOUBLEDAY & MCCLURE CO. Contents PAGE An Engineer's Christmas Story 7 The Clean Man and the Dirty Angels 27 Jim Wainwright's Kid 45 A Peg-legged Romance 75 My Lady of the Eyes 97 Some Freaks of Fate 151 Mormon Joe, the Robber 191 A Midsummer Night's Trip 227 The Polar Zone 253 List of Illustrations "Quick as a flash the Kid had my arm." _Frontispiece_ TO FACE "I noticed his long, slim hand on the top of the reverse-lever" 22 "It was a strange courting ... there on that engine" 70 "We carried him into the depot" 100 "'Mexican,' said I" 236 "What seemed to be a giant iceberg...." 282 "A white city ... was visible for an instant" 292 STORIES OF THE RAILROAD [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A COMPLETED ORDER AS ENTERED IN THE DESPATCHER'S ORDER-BOOK] AN ENGINEER'S CHRISTMAS STORY In the summer, fall, and early winter of 1863, I was tossing chips into an old Hinkley insider up in New England, for an engineer by the name of James Dillon. Dillon was considered as good a man as there was on the road: careful, yet fearless, kindhearted, yet impulsive, a man whose friends would fight for him and whose enemies hated him right royally. Dillon took a great notion to me, and I loved him as a father; the fact of the matter is, he was more of a father to me than I had at home, for my father refused to be comforted when I took to railroading, and I could not see him more than two or three times a year at the most--so when I wanted advice I went to Jim. I was a young fellow then, and being without a home at either end of the run, was likely to drop into pitfalls. Dillon saw this long before I did. Before I had been with him three months, he told me one day, coming in, that it was against his principles to teach locomotive-running to a young man who was likely to turn out a drunkard or gambler and disgrace the profession, and he added that I had better pack up my duds and come up to his house and let "mother" take care of me--and I went.