The Night OperatorPackard, Frank L. (Frank Lucius)
General
The Night Operator
Packard, Frank L. (Frank Lucius)
Fiction; Railroad stories; Short stories
There wasn't anything the matter with the electrotypes, either--nature
backed up those "ads" to the last detail, and threw in a whole lot more
for good measure--even a pessimist didn't hold a good enough hand to
call the raise and had to drop out. Pugsley, the advertising man, was
an awful liar, and what he said may not be strictly true, but he
claimed the road paid their dividends for one quarter through the sale
to a junk and paper-dealer of the letters they got from delighted
tourists telling how far short anything he could say came to being up
to the reality. Anyway, Pugsley and the passenger-agent's department
were the only ones who weren't enthusiastic about the double-loop
tunnel--it spoiled the scenic effect.
This is Beezer's story. Beezer has "rights" through to the terminal,
and pictures of scenery however interesting, and a description of how
Harvey bored his holes into the mountain sides however instructive,
should naturally be relegated to the sidings; but there's just a word
or two necessary before Beezer pulls out into the clear.
One thing the electrotypes didn't show was the approach to the Devil's
Slide. It came along the bottoms fairly straight and level, the track
did, for some five miles from the Bend, until about a mile from the
summit where it hit a long, stiff, heavy climb, that took the breath
out of the best-type engine that Regan, representing the motive-power
department, had to offer. And here, the last few hundred yards were
taken with long-interval, snorting roars from the exhaust, that echoed
up and down the valley, and back and forward from the hills like a
thousand thunders, or the play of a park of artillery, and the pace was
a crawl--you could get out and walk if you wanted to. That was the
approach of the Devil's Slide--on a westbound run, you understand?
Then, once over the summit, the Devil's Slide stretched out ahead, and
in its two reeling, drunken, zigzag miles dropped from where it made
you dizzy to lean out of the cab window and see the Glacier River
swirling below, to where the right of way in a friendly, intimate
fashion hugged the Glacier again at its own bed level. How much of a
drop in that two miles? Grade percentages and dry figures don't mean
very much, do they? Take it another way. It dropped so hard and fast
that that's what the directors were spending three million dollars
for--to divide that drop by two! It just _dropped_--not an incline,
not by any means--just a drop. However----
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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