Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
Now, deep down in his fire-box, ・007 had cherished a hope that as soon
as his trial was done, he would be led forth with songs and shoutings,
and attached to a green-and-chocolate vestibuled flyer, under charge of
a bold and noble engineer, who would pat him on his back, and weep over
him, and call him his Arab steed. (The boys in the shops where he was
built used to read wonderful stories of railroad life, and ・007
expected things to happen as he had heard.) But there did not seem to
be many vestibuled fliers in the roaring, rumbling, electric-lighted
yards, and his engineer only said:
“Now, what sort of a fool-sort of an injector has Eustis loaded on to
this rig this time?” And he put the lever over with an angry snap,
crying: “Am I supposed to switch with this thing, hey?”
The collarless man mopped his head, and replied that, in the present
state of the yard and freight and a few other things, the engineer
would switch and keep on switching till the cows came home. ・007 pushed
out gingerly, his heart in his headlight, so nervous that the clang of
his own bell almost made him jump the track. Lanterns waved, or danced
up and down, before and behind him; and on every side, six tracks deep,
sliding backward and forward, with clashings of couplers and squeals of
hand-brakes, were cars—more cars than ・007 had dreamed of. There were
oil-cars, and hay-cars, and stock-cars full of lowing beasts, and
ore-cars, and potato-cars with stovepipe-ends sticking out in the
middle; cold-storage and refrigerator cars dripping ice water on the
tracks; ventilated fruit—and milk-cars; flatcars with truck-wagons full
of market-stuff; flat-cars loaded with reapers and binders, all red and
green and gilt under the sizzling electric lights; flat-cars piled high
with strong-scented hides, pleasant hemlock-plank, or bundles of
shingles; flat-cars creaking to the weight of thirty-ton castings,
angle-irons, and rivet-boxes for some new bridge; and hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of box-cars loaded, locked, and chalked. Men—hot
and angry—crawled among and between and under the thousand wheels; men
took flying jumps through his cab, when he halted for a moment; men sat
on his pilot as he went forward, and on his tender as he returned; and
regiments of men ran along the tops of the box-cars beside him,
screwing down brakes, waving their arms, and crying curious things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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