The Last Spike Part 19

Once in the South, the Lexington company became a part of the 184th Illinois Infantry, and almost immediately engaged in fighting. Jewett panted to be on the firing-line, but that was not to be. The regiment had just captured an important railway which had to be manned and operated at once. It was the only means of supplying a whole army corps with bacon and beans. The colonel of his company was casting about for railroaders, when he heard of Private Jewett. He was surprised to find, in "The Farmers," a man of such wide experience as a railway official, so well posted on the general situation, and so keenly alive to the importance of the railroad and the necessity of keeping it open. Within a week Jewett had made a reputation. If there had been time to name him, he would doubtless have been called superintendent of transportation; but there was no time to cla.s.sify those who were working on the road.

They called him Jewett. In some way the story of the one-time captain's experience at Bloomington came to the colonel's ears, and he sent for Jewett. As a result of the interview, the young private was taken from the ranks, made a captain, and "a.s.signed to special duty." His special duty was that of General Manager of the M. & L. Railroad, with headquarters in a car.

Jewett called upon the colonel again, uninvited this time, and protested. He wanted to get into the fighting. "Don't worry, my boy,"

said the good-natured colonel, "I'll take the fight out of you later on; for the present, Captain Jewett, you will continue to run this railroad."

The captain saluted and went about his business.

There had been some fierce fighting at the front, and the Yankees had gotten decidedly the worst of it. Several attempts had been made to rush re-enforcements forward by rail, but with poor success. The pilot engines had all been ditched. As a last desperate chance, Jewett determined to try a "black" train. Two engines were attached to a troop-train, and Jewett seated himself on the pilot of the forward locomotive. The lights were all put out. They were to have no pilot engine, but were to slip past the ambuscade, if possible, and take chances on lifted rails and absent bridges. It was near the end of a dark, rainy night. The train was rolling along at a good freight clip, the engines working as full as might be without throwing fire, when suddenly, from either side of the track, a yellow flame flared out, followed immediately by the awful roar of the muskets from whose black mouths the murderous fire had rushed. The bullets fairly rained on the jackets of the engines, and crashed through the cab windows. The engineer on the head engine was shot from his seat. Jewett, in a hail of lead, climbed over the running-board, pulled wide the throttle, and whistled "off brakes." The driver of the second engine, following his example, opened also, and the train was thus whirled out of range, but not until Jewett had been badly wounded. A second volley rained upon the rearmost cars, but did little damage. The enemy had been completely outwitted. They had mistaken the train for a pilot engine, which they had planned to let pa.s.s; after which they were to turn a switch, ditch, and capture the train.

There was great rejoicing in the hungry army at the front that dawn, when the long train laden with soldiers and sandwiches arrived. The colonel was complimented by the corps commander, but he was too big and brave to accept promotion for an achievement in which he had had no part or even faith. He told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and, when it was all over, there was no more "Captain" Jewett.

When he came out of the hospital he had the rank of a major, but was still "a.s.signed to special duty."

Major Jewett's work became more important as the great struggle went on.

Other lines of railway fell into the hands of the Yankees, and all of them in that division of the army came under his control. They were good for him, for they made him a very busy man and kept him from panting for the firing-line. In conjunction with General D., the famous army engineer, who has since become a noted railroad-builder, he rebuilt and re-equipped wrecked railways, bridged wide rivers, and kept a way open for men and supplies to get to the front.

When at last the little, ragged, but ever-heroic remnant of the Confederate army surrendered, and the worn and weary soldiers set their faces to the north again, Major Jewett's name was known throughout the country.

At the close of the war, in recognition of his ability and great service to the Union, Major Jewett was made a brevet colonel, by which t.i.tle he is known to almost every railway man in America.

Many opportunities came to Colonel Jewett to enter once more the field in which, since his school days, he had been employed. One by one these offers were put aside. They were too easy. He had been so long in the wreck of things that he felt out of place on a prosperous, well-regulated line. He knew of a little struggling road that ran east from Galena, Illinois. It was called the Galena and something, for Galena was at that time the most prosperous and promising town in the wide, wild West.

He sought and secured service on the Galena line and began anew. The road was one of the oldest and poorest in the state, and one of the very first chartered to build west from Chicago. It was sorely in need of a young, vigorous, and experienced man, and Colonel Jewett's ability was not long in finding recognition. Step by step he climbed the ladder until he reached the General Managership. Here his real work began. Here he had some say, and could talk directly to the President, who was one of the chief owners. He soon convinced the company that to succeed they must have more money, build more, and make business by encouraging settlers to go out and plough and plant and reap and ship. The United States government was aiding in the construction of a railway across the "desert," as the West beyond the Missouri River was then called. Jewett urged his company to push out to the Missouri River and connect with the line to the Pacific, and they pushed.

Ten years from the close of the war Colonel Jewett was at the head of one of the most promising railroads in the country. Prosperity followed peace, the West began to build up, the Pacific Railroad was completed, and the little Galena line, with a new charter and a new name, had become an important link connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific.

For nearly half a century Jewett has been at the front, and has never been defeated. The discredited captain of that promising company of car-boys has become one of our great "captains of industry." He is to-day President of one of the most important railroads in the world, whose black fliers race out nightly over twin paths of steel, threading their way in and out of not less than nine states, with nearly nine thousand miles of main line. He has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams; and his success is due largely to the fact that when, in his youth, he mounted to ride to fame and fortune, he did not allow the first jolt to jar him from the saddle. He is made of the stuff that stands.

THE MILWAUKEE RUN

Henry Hautman was born old. He had the face and figure of a voter at fifteen. His skin did not fit his face,--it wrinkled and resembled a piece of rawhide that had been left out in the rain and sun.

Henry's father was a freighter on the Santa Fe trail when Independence was the back door of civilization, opening on a wilderness. Little Henry used to ride on the high seat with his father, close up to the tail of a Missouri mule, the seventh of a series of eight, including the trailer which his father drove in front of the big wagon. It was the wind of the west that tanned the hide on Henry's face and made him look old before his time.

At night they used to arrange the wagons in a ring, in which the freighters slept.

One night Henry was wakened by the yells of Indians, and saw men fighting. Presently he was swung to the back of a cayuse behind a painted warrior, and as they rode away the boy, looking back, saw the wagons burning and guessed the rest.

Later the lad escaped and made his way to Chicago, where he began his career on the rail, and where this story really begins.

It was extremely difficult, in the early days, to find sober, reliable young men to man the few locomotives in America and run the trains. A large part of the population seemed to be floating, drifting west, west, always west. So when this stout-shouldered, strong-faced youth asked for work, the round-house foreman took him on gladly. Henry's boyhood had been so full of peril that he was absolutely indifferent to danger and a stranger to fear. He was not even afraid of work, and at the end of eighteen months he was marked up for a run. He had pa.s.sed from the wiping gang to the deck of a pa.s.senger engine, and was now ready for the road.

Henry was proud of his rapid promotion, especially this last lift, that would enable him to race in the moonlight along the steel trail, though he recalled that it had cost him his first little white lie.

One of the rules of the road said a man must be twenty-one years old before he could handle a locomotive. Henry knew his book well, but he knew also that the railroad needed his service and that he needed the job; so when the clerk had taken his "Personal Record,"--which was only a mild way of asking where he would have his body sent in case he met the fate so common at that time on a new line in a new country,--he gave his age as twenty, hoping the master-mechanic would allow him a year for good behavior.

Years pa.s.sed. So did the Indian and the buffalo. The railway reached out across the Great American Desert. The border became blurred and was rubbed out. The desert was dotted with homes. Towns began to grow up about the water-tanks and to bud and blow on the treeless plain.

Henry Hautman became known as the coolest and most daring driver on the road. He was a good engineer and a good citizen. He owned his home; and while his pay was not what an engineer draws to-day for the same run made in half the time, it was sufficient unto the day, his requirements, and his wife's taste.

Only one thing troubled him. He had bought a big farm not far from Chicago, for which he was paying out of his savings. If he kept well, as he had done all his life, three years more on the Limited would let him out. Then he could retire a year ahead of time, and settle down in comfort on the farm and watch the trains go by.

It would be his salvation, this farm by the roadside; for the very thought of surrendering the "La Salle" to another was wormwood and gall to Henry. It never occurred to him to quit and go over to the N.W. or the P.D. & Q., where they had no age limit for engineers. No man ever thought of leaving the service of the Chicago, Milwaukee & Wildwood. The road was one of the finest, and as for the run,--well, they used to say, "Drive the Wildwood Limited and die." Henry had driven it for a decade and had not died. When he looked himself over he declared he was the best man, physically, on the line. But there was the law in the Book of Rules,--the Bible of the C.M. & W.,--and no man might go beyond the limit set for the retirement of engine-drivers; and Henry Hautman, the favorite of the "old man," would take his medicine. They were a loyal lot on the Milwaukee in those days. Superintendent Van Law declared them clannish. "Kick a man," said he, "in St. Paul, and his friends will feel the shock in the lower Mississippi."

Time winged on, and as often as Christmas came it reminded the old engineer that he was one year nearer his last trip; for his mother, now sleeping in the far West, had taught him to believe that he had come to her on Christmas Eve.

How the world had aged in threescore years! Sometimes at night he had wild dreams of his last day on the freight wagon, of the endless reaches of waving wild gra.s.s, of bands of buffalo racing away toward the setting sun, a wild deer drinking at a running stream, and one lone Indian on the crest of a distant dune, dark, ominous, awful. Sometimes, from his high seat at the front of the Limited, he caught the flash of a field fire and remembered the burning wagons in the wilderness.

But the wilderness was no more, and Henry knew that the world's greatest civilizer, the locomotive, had been the pioneer in all this great work of peopling the plains. The pathfinders, the real heroes of the Anglo-Saxon race, had fought their way from the Missouri River to the sundown sea. He recalled how they used to watch for the one opposing pa.s.senger train. Now they flashed by his window as the mile-posts flashed in the early days, for the line had been double-tracked so that the electric-lighted hotels on wheels pa.s.sed up and down regardless of opposing trains. All these changes had been wrought in a single generation; and Henry felt that he had contributed, according to his light, to the great work.

But the more he pondered the perfection of the service, the comfort of travel, the magnificence of the Wildwood Limited, the more he dreaded the day when he must take his little personal effects from the cab of the La Salle and say good-bye to her, to the road, and hardest of all, to the "old man," as they called the master-mechanic.

One day when Henry was registering in the round-house, he saw a letter in the rack for him, and carried it home to read after supper.

When he read it, he jumped out of his chair. "Why, Henry!" said his wife, putting down her knitting, "what ever's the matter,--open switch or red light?"

"Worse, Mary; it's the end of the track."

The old engineer tossed the letter over to his wife, sat down, stretched his legs out, locked his fingers, and began rolling his thumbs one over the other, staring at the stove.

When Mrs. Hautman had finished the letter she stamped her foot and declared it an outrage. She suggested that somebody wanted the La Salle.

"Well," she said, resigning herself to her fate, "I bet I have that coach-seat out of the cab,--it'll make a nice tete-a-tete for the front room. Superannuated!" she went on with growing disgust. "I bet you can put any man on the first division down three times in five."

"It's me that's down, Mary,--down and out."

"Henry Hautman, I'm ashamed of you! you know you've got four years come Christmas--why don't you fight? Where's your Brotherhood you've been paying money to for twenty years? I bet a 'Q' striker comes and takes your engine."

"No, Mary, we're beaten. I see how it all happened now. You see I began at twenty when I was really but sixteen; that's where I lose. I lied to the 'old man' when we were both boys; now that lie comes back to me, as a chicken comes home to roost."

"But can't you explain that now?"

"Well, not easy. It's down in the records--it's Scripture now, as the 'old man' would say. No, the best I can do is to take my medicine like a man; I've got a month yet to think it over."

After that they sat in silence, this childless couple, trying to fashion to themselves how it would seem to be superannuated.

The short December days were all too short for Henry. He counted the hours, marked the movements of the minute-hand on the face of his cab clock, and measured the miles he would have, not to "do" but to enjoy, before Christmas. As the weeks went by the old engineer became a changed man. He had always been cheerful, happy, and good-natured. Now he became thoughtful, silent, melancholy. There was not a man on the first division but grieved because he was going, but no man would dare say so to Henry. Sympathy is about the hardest thing a stout heart ever has to endure.

While Henry was out on his last trip his wife waited upon the master-mechanic and asked him to bring his wife over and spend Christmas Eve with Henry and help her to cheer him up; and the "old man" promised to call that evening.

Although there were half-a-dozen palms itching for the throttle of the La Salle, no man had yet been a.s.signed to the run. And the same kindly feeling of sympathy that prompted this delay prevented the aspirants from pressing their claims. Once, in the lodge room, a young member eager for a regular run opened the question, but saw his mistake when the older members began to hiss like geese, while the Worthy Master smote the table with his maul. Henry saw the La Salle cross the turn-table and back into the round-house, and while he "looked her over," examining every link and pin, each lever and link-lifter, the others hurried away; for it was Christmas Eve, and n.o.body cared to say good-bye to the old engineer.

When he had walked around her half-a-dozen times, touching her burnished mainpins with the back of his hand, he climbed into the cab and began to gather up his trinkets, his comb and tooth-brush, a small steel monkey-wrench, and a slender bra.s.s torch that had been given to him by a friend. Then he sat upon the soft cushioned coach-seat that his wife had coveted, and looked along the hand-railing. He leaned from the cab window and glanced along the twin stubs of steel that pa.s.sed through the open door and stopped short at the pit, symbolizing the end of his run on the rail. The old boss wiper came with his crew to clean the La Salle, but when he saw the driver there in the cab he pa.s.sed him by.