The Last Spike Part 16

"Well, anybody could tell that. Where did you come from when you came here?"

"From E."

"Well, sir, can you finish this job and have steam up here on the first of January?"

The Englishman blushed, for he was embarra.s.sed, and glanced at the wood boss. Then, sweeping the almost empty shop with his eye, he said something about a foreman who was in charge of the work. "d.a.m.n the foreman," said the stranger; "I'm talking to you."

The young man blushed again, and said he could work twelve or fourteen hours a day for a time if it were necessary, but he didn't like to make any rash promises about the general result.

"Now look here," said the well-dressed man, "I want you to take charge of this job and finish it; employ as many men as you can handle, and blow a whistle here on New Year's morning--do you understand?"

The Englishman thought he did, but he could hardly believe it. He glanced at the wood boss, and the wood boss nodded his head.

"I shall do my best," said the Englishman, taking courage, "but I should like to know who gives these orders."

"I'm the General Manager," said the man; "now get a move on you," and he turned and walked out.

It is not to be supposed that the General Manager saw anything remarkable about the young man, save that he was six feet and had a good face. The fact is, the wood foreman had boomed the Englishman's stock before the Manager saw him.

The path of the Englishman was not strewn with flowers for the next few months. Any number of men who had been on the road when he was in the English navy-yards felt that they ought to have had this little promotion. The local foremen along the line saw in the young Englishman the future foreman of the new shops, and no man went out of his way to help the stranger. But in spite of all obstacles, the shop grew from day to day, from week to week; so that as the old year drew to a close the machinery was getting into place. The young foreman, while a hard worker, was always pleasant in his intercourse with the employees, and in a little while he had hosts of friends. There is always a lot of extra work at the end of a big job, and now when Christmas came there was still much to do. The men worked night and day. The boiler that was to come from Chicago had been expected for some time. Everything was in readiness, and it could be set up in a day; but it did not come.

Tracer-letters that had gone after it were followed by telegrams; finally it was located in a wreck out in a cornfield in Illinois on the last day of the year.

A great many of the officials were away, and the service was generally demoralized during the holidays, so that the appropriation for which the Englishman was working at M. had for the moment been forgotten; the shops were completed, the machinery was in, but there was no boiler to boil water to make steam.

That night, when the people of M. were watching the old year out and the new year in, the young Englishman with a force of men was wrecking the pump-house down by the station. The little upright boiler was torn out and placed in the machine shops, and with it a little engine was driven that turned the long line-shaft.

At dawn they ran a long pipe through the roof, screwed a locomotive whistle on the top of it, and at six o'clock on New Year's morning the new whistle on the new shops at M. in Iowa, blew in the new year.

Incidentally, it blew the town in for $47,000.

This would be a good place to end this story, but the temptation is great to tell the rest.

When the shops were opened, the young Englishman was foreman. This was only about twenty-five years ago. In a little while they promoted him.

In 1887 he went to the Wisconsin Central. In 1890 he was made Superintendent of machinery of the Santa Fe route,--one of the longest roads on earth. It begins at Chicago, strong like a man's wrist, with a finger each on Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, and El Paso, and a thumb touching the Gulf at Galveston.

The mileage of the system, at that time, was equal to one-half that of Great Britain; and upon the companies' payrolls were ten thousand more men than were then in the army of the United States. Fifteen hundred men and boys walk into the main shops at Topeka every morning. They work four hours, eat luncheon, listen to a lecture or short sermon in the meeting-place above the shops, work another four hours, and walk out three thousand dollars better off than they would have been if they had not worked.

These shops make a little city of themselves. There is a perfect water system, fire-brigade with fire stations where the firemen sleep, police, and a dog-catcher.

Here they build anything of wood, iron, bra.s.s, or steel that the company needs, from a ninety-ton locomotive to a single-barrelled mouse-trap, all under the eye of the Englishman who came to America with a good wife and three babies, a good head and two hands. This man's name is John Player. He is the inventor of the Player truck, the Player hand-car, the Player frog, and many other useful appliances.

This simple story of an unpretentious man came out in broken sections as the special sped along the smooth track, while the General Manager talked with the resident director and the General Superintendent talked with his a.s.sistant, who, not long ago, was the conductor of a work-train upon which the G.S. was employed as brakeman. I was two days stealing this story, between the blushes of the mechanical Superintendent.

He related, also, that a man wearing high-cut trousers and milk on his boot had entered his office when he had got to his first position as master-mechanic and held out a hand, smiling, "Vell, you don't know me yet, ain't it? I'm Martin the fireman; I quit ranchin' already, an' I want a jobs."

Martin got a job at once. He got killed, also, in a little while; but that is part of the business on a new road.

Near the shops at Topeka stands the railroad Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation building. They were enlarging it when I was there. There are no "saloons" in Kansas, so Player and his company help the men to provide other amus.e.m.e.nts.

ON THE LIMITED

One Sabbath evening, not long ago, I went down to the depot in an Ontario town to take the International Limited for Montreal. She was on the blackboard five minutes in disgrace. "Huh!" grunted a commercial traveller. It was Sunday in the aforesaid Ontario town, and would be Sunday in Toronto, toward which he was travelling. Even if we were on time we should not arrive until 9.30--too late for church, too early to go to bed, and the saloons all closed and barred. And yet this restless traveller fretted and grieved because we promised to get into Toronto five minutes late. Alas for the calculation of the train despatchers, she was seven minutes overdue when she swept in and stood for us to mount. The get-away was good, but at the eastern yard limits we lost again. The people from the Pullmans piled into the cafe car and overflowed into the library and parlor cars. The restless traveller snapped his watch again, caught the sleeve of a pa.s.sing trainman, and asked "'S matter?" and the conductor answered, "Waiting for No. 5." Five minutes pa.s.sed and not a wheel turned; six, eight, ten minutes, and no sound of the coming west-bound express. Up ahead we could hear the flutter and flap of the blow-off; for the black flier was as restless as the fat drummer who was snapping his watch, grunting "Huh," and washing suppressed profanity down with _cafe noir_.

Eighteen minutes and No. 5 pa.s.sed. When the great black steed of steam got them swinging again we were twenty-five minutes to the bad. And how that driver did hit the curves! The impatient traveller snapped his watch again and said, refusing to be comforted, "She'll never make it."

Mayhap the fat and fretful drummer managed to communicate with the engine-driver, or maybe the latter was unhappily married or had an insurance policy; and it is also possible that he is just the devil to drive. Anyway, he whipped that fine train of Pullmans, cafe, and parlor cars through those peaceful, lamplighted, Sabbath-keeping Ontario towns as though the whole show had cost not more than seven dollars, and his own life less.

On a long lounge in the library car a well-nourished lawyer lay sleeping in a way that I had not dreamed a political lawyer could sleep. One gamey M.P.--double P, I was told--had been robbing this same lawyer of a good deal of rest recently, and he was trying at a mile a minute to catch up with his sleep. I could feel the sleeper slam her f.l.a.n.g.es against the ball of the rail as we rounded the perfectly pitched curves, and the little semi-quaver that tells the trained traveller that the man up ahead is moving the mile-posts, at least one every minute. At the first stop, twenty-five miles out, the fat drummer snapped his watch again, but he did not say, "Huh." We had made up five minutes.

A few pa.s.sengers swung down here, and a few others swung up; and off we dashed, drilling the darkness. I looked in on the lawyer again, for I would have speech with him; but he was still sleeping the sleep of the virtuous, with the electric light full on his upturned baby face, that reminds me constantly of the late Tom Reed.

A woman I know was putting one of her babies to bed in lower 2, when we wiggled through a reverse curve that was like shooting White Horse Rapids in a Peterboro. The child intended for lower 2 went over into 4.

"Never mind," said its mother, "we have enough to go around;" and so she left that one in 4 and put the next one in 2, and so on.

At the next stop where you "Y" and back into the town, the people, impatient, were lined up, ready to board the Limited. When we swung over the switches again, we were only ten minutes late.

As often as the daring driver eased off for a down grade I could hear the hiss of steam through the safety-valve above the back of the black flier, and I could feel the f.l.a.n.g.es against the ball of the rail, and the little tell-tale semi-quaver of the car.

By now the babies were all abed; and from bunk to bunk she tucked them in, kissed them good-night, and then cuddled down beside the last one, a fair-haired girl who seemed to have caught and kept, in her hair and in her eyes, the sunshine of the three short summers through which she had pa.s.sed.

Once more I went and stood by the lounge where the lawyer lay, but I had not the nerve to wake him.

The silver moon rose and lit the ripples on the lake that lay below my window as the last of the diners came from the cafe car. Along the sh.o.r.e of the sleeping lake our engine swept like a great, black, wingless bird of night. Presently I felt the frogs of South Parkdale; and when, from her hot throat she called "Toronto," the fat and fretful traveller opened his great gold watch. He did not snap it now, but looked into its open face and almost smiled; for we were touching Toronto on the tick of time.

I stepped from the car, for I was interested in the fat drummer. I wanted to see him meet her, and hold her hand, and tell her what a really, truly, good husband he had been, and how he had hurried home. As he came down the short stair a friend faced him and said "Good-night,"

where we say "Good-evening." "h.e.l.lo, Bill," said the fat drummer. They shook hands languidly. The fat man yawned and asked, "Anything doing?"

"Not the littlest," said Bill. "Then," said Jim (the fat man), "let us go up to the King Edward, sit down, and have a good, quiet smoke."

THE CONQUEST OF ALASKA

Immediately under the man with the money, who lived in London, there was the President in Chicago; then came the chief engineer in Seattle, the locating engineer in Skagway, the contractor in the grading camp, and Hugh Foy, the "boss" of the builders. Yet in spite of all this overhanging stratification, Foy was a big man. To be sure, none of these men had happened to get their positions by mere chance. They were men of character and fort.i.tude, capable of great sacrifice.

Mr. Close, in London, knew that his partner, Mr. Graves, in Chicago, would be a good man at the head of so cold and hopeless an enterprise as a Klondike Railway; and Mr. Graves knew that Erastus Corning Hawkins, who had put through some of the biggest engineering schemes in the West, was the man to build the road. The latter selected, as locating engineer, John Hislop, the hero, one of the few survivors of that wild and daring expedition that undertook, some twenty years ago, to survey a route for a railroad whose trains were to traverse the Grand Canon of Colorado, where, save for the song of the cataract, there is only shade and silence and perpetual starlight. Heney, a wiry, compact, plucky Canadian contractor, made oral agreement with the chief engineer and, with Hugh Foy as his superintendent of construction, began to grade what they called the White Pa.s.s and Yukon Railway. Beginning where the bone-washing Skagway tells her troubles to the tide-waters at the elbow of that beautiful arm of the Pacific Ocean called Lynn Ca.n.a.l, they graded out through the scattered settlement where a city stands to-day, cut through a dense forest of spruce, and began to climb the hill.

When the news of ground-breaking had gone out to Seattle and Chicago, and thence to London, conservative capitalists, who had suspected Close Brothers and Company and all their a.s.sociates in this wild scheme of temporary insanity, concluded that the sore affliction had come to stay.

But the dauntless builders on the busy field where the grading camp was in action kept grubbing and grading, climbing and staking, blasting and building, undiscouraged and undismayed. Under the eaves of a dripping glacier, Hawkins, Hislop, and Heney crept; and, as they measured off the miles and fixed the grade by blue chalk-marks where stakes could not be driven, Foy followed with his army of blasters and builders. When the pathfinders came to a deep side canon, they tumbled down, clambered up on the opposite side, found their bearings, and began again. At one place the main wall was so steep that the engineer was compelled to climb to the top, let a man down by a rope, so that he could mark the face of the cliff for the blasters, and then haul him up again.

It was springtime when they began, and through the long days of that short summer the engineers explored and mapped and located; and ever, close behind them, they could hear the steady roar of Foy's fireworks as the skilled blasters burst big boulders or shattered the shoulders of great crags that blocked the trail of the iron horse. Ever and anon, when the climbers and builders peered down into the ragged canon, they saw a long line of pack-animals, bipeds and quadrupeds,--some hoofed and some horned, some bleeding, some blind,--stumbling and staggering, fainting and falling, the fittest fighting for the trail and gaining the summit, whence the clear, green waters of the mighty Yukon would carry them down to Dawson,--the Mecca of all these gold-mad men. As often as the road-makers glanced at the pack-trains, they saw hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of traffic going past or waiting transportation at Skagway, and each strained every nerve to complete the work while the sun shone.

By midsummer they began to appreciate the fact that this was to be a hard job. When the flowers faded on the southern slopes, they were not more than half-way up the hill. Each day the sun swung lower across the ca.n.a.ls, all the to-morrows were shorter than the yesterdays, and there was not a man among them with a shade of sentiment, or a sense of the beautiful, but sighed when the flowers died. Yes, they had learned to love this maiden, Summer, that had tripped up from the south, smiled on them, sung for a season, sighed, smiled once more, and then danced down the Lynn again.