The Nerve of Foley Part 8

Neighbor answered him never a word; he only put his hand on Dad's shoulder.

"Find him first! Find him!" he repeated, with a strain in his voice I never heard till then; and the two giants hurried away together. When I reached the Sky-Sc.r.a.per, buried in the thick of the smash, roaring like a volcano, the pair were already into the jam like a brace of ferrets, hunting for the engine crews. It seemed an hour, though it was much less, before they found any one; then they brought out 55's fireman.

Neighbor found him. But his back was broken. Back again they wormed through twisted trucks, under splintered beams--in and around and over--choked with heat, blinded by steam, shouting as they groped, listening for word or cry or gasp.

Soon we heard Dad's voice in a different cry--one that meant everything; and the wreckers, turning like beavers through a dozen blind trails, gathered all close to the big fireman. He was under a great piece of the cab where none could follow, and he was crying for a bar. They pa.s.sed him a bar; other men, careless of life and limb, tried to crawl under and in to him, but he warned them back. Who but a man baked twenty years in an engine cab could stand the steam that poured on him where he lay?

Neighbor, just outside, flashing a light, heard the labored strain of his breathing, saw him getting half up, bend to the bar, and saw the iron give like lead in his hands as he pried mightily.

Neighbor heard, and told me long afterwards, how the old man flung the bar away with an imprecation, and cried for one to help him; for a minute meant a life now--the boy lying pinned under the shattered cab was roasting in a jet of live steam. The master-mechanic crept in.

By signs Dad told him what to do, and then, getting on his knees, crawled straight into the dash of the white jet--crawled into it, and got the cab on his shoulders.

Crouching an instant, the giant muscles of his back set in a tremendous effort. The wreckage snapped and groaned, the knotted legs slowly and painfully straightened, the cab for a pa.s.sing instant rose in the air, and in that instant Neighbor dragged Georgie McNeal from out the vise of death, and pa.s.sed him, like a pinch-bar, to the men waiting next behind.

Then Neighbor pulled Dad back, blind now and senseless. When they got the old fireman out he made a pitiful struggle to pull himself together.

He tried to stand up, but the sweat broke over him and he sank in a heap at Neighbor's feet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE CAB FOR A Pa.s.sING INSTANT ROSE IN THE AIR"]

That was the saving of Georgie McNeal, and out there they will still tell you about that lift of Dad Hamilton's.

We put him on the cot at the hospital next to his engineer. Georgie, dreadfully bruised and scalded, came on fast in spite of his hurts. But the doctor said Dad had wrenched a tendon in that frightful effort, and he lay there a very sick and very old man long after the young engineer was up and around telling of his experience.

"When we cleared the chutes I saw white signals, I thought," he said to me at Dad's bedside. "I knew we had the right of way over everything. It was a hustle, anyway, on that schedule, Mr. Reed; you know that; an awful hustle, with our load. I never choked her a notch to run the yards; didn't mean to do it with the Junction grade to climb just ahead of us. But I looked out again, and, by hokey! I thought I'd gone crazy, got color-blind--red signals! Of course I thought I must have been wrong the first time I looked. I choked her, I threw the air, I dumped the gravel. Heavens! she never felt it! I couldn't figure how we were wrong, but there was the red light. I yelled, 'Jump, Dad!' and he yelled, 'Jump, son!' Didn't you, Dad?

"He jumped; but I wasn't ever going to jump and my engine going full against a red lamp. Not much.

"I kind of dodged down behind the head; when she struck it was biff, and she jumped about twenty feet up straight. She didn't? Well, it seemed like it. Then it was biff, biff, biff, one after another. With that train behind her she'd have gone through Beverly Hill. Did you ever buck snow with a rotary, Mr. Reed? Well, that was about it, even to the rolling and heaving. Dad, want to lie down? Le' me get another pillow behind you. Isn't that better? Poor Musgrave!" he added, speaking of the engineer of 55, who was instantly killed. "He and the fireman both. Hard lines; but I'd rather have it that way, I guess, if I was wrong. Eh, Dad?"

Even after Georgie went to work, Dad lay in the hospital. We knew he would never shovel coal again. It cost him his good back to lift Georgie loose, so the surgeon told us; and I could believe it, for when they got the jacks under the cab next morning, and Neighbor told the wrecking-gang that Hamilton alone had lifted it six inches the night before, on his back, the wrecking-boss fairly snorted at the statement; but Hamilton did, just the same.

"Son," muttered Dad, one night to Georgie, sitting with him, "I want you to write a letter for me."

"Sure."

"I've been sending money to my boy back East," explained Dad, feebly. "I told you he's in school."

"I know, Dad."

"I haven't been able to send any since I've been by, but I'm going to send some when I get my relief. Not so much as I used to send. I want you to kind of explain why."

"What's his first name, Dad, and where does he live?"

"It's a lawyer that looks after him--a man that 'tends to my business back there."

"Well, what's his name?"

"Scaylor--Ephraim Scaylor."

"Scaylor?" echoed Georgie, in amazement.

"Yes. Why, do you know him?"

"Why, that's the man mother and I had so much trouble with. I wouldn't write to that man. He's a rascal, Dad."

"What did he ever do to you and your mother?"

"I'll tell you, Dad; though it's a matter I don't talk about much. My father had trouble back there fifteen or sixteen years ago. He was running an engine, and had a wreck; there were some pa.s.sengers killed.

The dispatcher managed to throw the blame on father, and they indicted him for man-slaughter. He pretty near went crazy, and all of a sudden he disappeared, and we never heard of him from that day to this. But this man Scaylor, mother stuck to it, knew something about where father was; only he always denied it."

Trembling like a leaf, Dad raised up on his elbow. "What's your mother's name, son? What's your name?"

Georgie looked confused. "I'll tell you, Dad; there's nothing to be ashamed of. I was foolish enough, I told you once, to go out on a strike with the engineers down there. I was only a kid, and we were all black-listed. So I used my middle name, McNeal; my full name is George McNeal Sinclair."

The old fireman made a painful effort to sit up, to speak, but he choked. His face contracted, and Georgie rose frightened. With a herculean effort the old man raised himself up and grasped Georgie's hands.

"Son," he gasped to the astonished boy, "don't you know me?"

"Of course I know you, Dad. What's the matter with you? Lie down."

"Boy, I'm your own father. My name is David Hamilton Sinclair. I had the trouble--Georgie." He choked up like a child, and Georgie McNeal went white and scared; then he grasped the gray-haired man in his arms.

When I dropped in an hour later they were talking hysterically. Dad was explaining how he had been sending money to Scaylor every month, and Georgie was contending that neither he nor his mother had ever seen a cent of it. But one great fact overshadowed all the villany that night: father and son were united and happy, and a message had already gone back to the old home from Georgie to his mother, telling her the good news.

"And that indictment was wiped out long ago against father," said Georgie to me; "but that rascal Scaylor kept writing him for money to fight it with and to pay for my schooling--and this was the kind of schooling I was getting all the time. Wouldn't that kill you?"

I couldn't sleep till I had hunted up Neighbor and told him about it; and next morning we wired transportation back for Mrs. Sinclair to come out on.

Less than a week afterwards a gentle little old woman stepped off the Flyer at Zanesville, and into the arms of Georgie Sinclair. A smart rig was in waiting, to which her son hurried her, and they were driven rapidly to the hospital. When they entered the old fireman's room together the nurse softly closed the door behind them.

But when they sent for Neighbor and me, I suppose we were the two biggest fools in the hospital, trying to look unconscious of all we saw in the faces of the group at Dad's bed.

He never got his old strength back, yet Neighbor fixed him out, for all that. The Sky-Sc.r.a.per, once our pride, was so badly stove that we gave up hope of restoring her for a pa.s.senger run. So Neighbor built her over into a sort of a dub engine for short runs, stubs, and so on; and though Dad had vowed long ago, when unjustly condemned, that he would never more touch a throttle, we got him to take the Sky-Sc.r.a.per and the Acton run.

And when Georgie, who takes the Flyer every other day, is off duty, he climbs into Dad's cab, shoves the old gentleman aside, and shoots around the yard in the rejuvenated Sky-Sc.r.a.per at a hair-raising rate of speed.

After a while the old engine got so full of alkali that Georgie gave her a new name--Soda-Water Sal--and it hangs to her yet. We thought the best of her had gone in the Harvard wreck; but there came a time when Dad and Soda-Water Sal showed us we were very much mistaken.

Soda-Water Sal

When the great engine which we called the Sky-Sc.r.a.per came out of the Zanesville shops, she was rebuilt from pilot to tender.

Our master-mechanic, Neighbor, had an idea, after her terrific collision, that she could not stand heavy main-line pa.s.senger runs, so he put her on the Acton cut-off. It was what railroad men call a jerk-water run, whatever that may be; a little jaunt of ten miles across the divide connecting the northern division with the Denver stem. It was just about like running a trolley, and the run was given to Dad Sinclair, for after that lift at Oxford his back was never strong enough to shovel coal, and he had to take an engine or quit railroading.

Thus it happened that after many years he took the throttle once more and ran over, twice a day, as he does yet, from Acton to Willow Creek.