The last spike, and other railroad storiesWarman, Cy
General
The last spike, and other railroad stories
Warman, Cy
American fiction -- 20th century; Railroad stories
The night man slipped out in the dawn and called the day man who was the
station master, explaining that the old man was at the station and
evidently unhappy.
The agent came on unusually early and endeavored to arrange for a light
engine to carry the superintendent back to the Junction.
At the end of three hours they had a freight engine that had left its
train on a siding thirty miles away and rolled up to rescue the stranded
superintendent.
Now, every railway man knows that when one thing goes wrong on a
railroad, two more mishaps are sure to follow; so, when the rescuing
crew heard over the wire that the train they had left on a siding,
having been butted by another train heading in, had started back down
grade, spilled over at the lower switch, and blocked the main line, they
began to expect something to happen at home.
However, the driver had to go when the old man was in the cab and the
G.M. with a whole army of engineers and workmen waiting for him at
Pee-Wee; so he rattled over the switches and swung out on the main line
like a man who was not afraid.
Two miles up the road the light engine, screaming through a cut,
encountered a flock of sheep, wallowed through them, left the track, and
slammed the four men on board up against the side of the cut.
Not a bone was broken, though all of them were sore shaken, the engineer
being unconscious when picked up.
"Go back and report," said the old man to the conductor. "You look after
the engineer," to the fireman.
"Will you flag west, sir?" asked the conductor.
"Yes,--I'll flag into Pee-Wee," said the old man, limping down the line.
To be sure, the superintendent was an intelligent man and not the least
bit superstitious; but he couldn't help, as he limped along, connecting
these disasters, remotely at least, with general order No. 13.
In time the "unseen signal" came to be talked of by the officials as
well as by train and enginemen. It came up finally at the annual
convention of General Passenger Agents at Chicago and was discussed by
the engineers at Atlanta, but was always ridiculed by the eastern
element.
"I helped build the U.P.," said a Buffalo man, "and I want to tell you
high-liners you can't drink squirrel-whiskey at timber-line without
seein' things nights."
That ended the discussion.
Probably no road in the country suffered from the evil effects of the
mysterious signal as did the Inter-Mountain Air Line.
The regular spotters failed to find out, and the management sent to
Chicago for a real live detective who would not be predisposed to accept
the "mystery" as such, but would do his utmost to find the cause of a
phenomenon that was not only interrupting traffic but demoralizing the
whole service.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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