Walker of the Secret ServicePost, Melville Davisson
General
Walker of the Secret Service
Post, Melville Davisson
Secret service -- Fiction
It seemed a long time as we sat there in the darkness waiting for
the train; but it was perhaps, in fact, less than half an hour.
Directly we heard the whistle in the distance and we went down to
the track; White had got a piece of fence wire and he now climbed
the pole and tied the red semaphore arm down over the green and
white lights. Mooney went about fifty yards along the track in the
direction from which the train was coming, and waited at the place
where he thought the engine would stop. White and I hid ourselves
where he thought the baggage and express cars would stop.
But our calculations were not accurate.
Instead of the engine stopping where we thought it would, it ran on
for at least a hundred yards past the red light. There was a fog,
and the engineer did not see the red signal soon enough. The train
roared past us. We knew the engineer had thrown on the emergency,
“goosed the air” as White called it. The fire from the brake shoes
grinding on the wheels showed up red along the whole train. The
engineer reversed and brought back his engine to the point where
Mooney was hidden behind a tree on the right of way. The engineer
was following a rule of the road that one must not under any
circumstances run past a red light.
We jumped at once.
Mooney climbed into the engine and took charge of the fireman and
engineer. They made no resistance to the masked man with a weapon in
his hand. White rushed in and uncoupled the mail and express cars
from the rest of the train.
Now, on these through first-class passenger trains, a power
velocipede, or what is known in the dialect of the road as a
“gasoline speeder,” is always carried in the baggage car. It is an
emergency vehicle in order to enable one of the crew to get to a
telegraph station in case of a wreck or any accident. When the
engine stopped under this unexpected red light of the semaphore a
negro porter, seeing two masked men, ran to the baggage car and got
the vehicle out on the ground. He was lifting it on his shoulder.
I did not understand what the thing meant at the time, but I called
to White and he came out from behind the two cars.
The porter found himself before the round end of an automatic.
“Put that thing back,” said White, “or I’ll blow your head off.”
The man turned with the vehicle in his hands, thrust it back into
the baggage car and dropped where he stood, his face down, by the
side of the track.
By this time the passengers began to come off to see what had
happened to the train.
I don’t know precisely what I did, but to White there was no
confusion. He ordered every one back into the train and began to
fire along the sides to hurry them into the covering of the cars. In
the meantime, Mooney had brought the engineer and fireman back to
the mail car and had taken the mail clerks out of the car.
There had been no resistance to this man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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