The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, October 25, 1903, Page 12

bjection on the score and to anticipate “The Dis- eet mpossible as ve from any be regarded efficacy of heads over ny sort 14 take would die in his orse in the e drifted into the Rockies, had seen, first and last, pret- . work i o men job to do with one-half the money they needed. The r figure, the cul- make, the blasting to to bor bridge to b And the; the be the could But T will be can- @id. If & section and elevation of Rosa- mond’s bower and a sectior and elevation of our Peace ) k were put up to engineers’ g0, a&nd ver track. There miles of it; but our men t against any eighty on earth grades, vil- oad tangle River worl elg would back tors always have promised to improve it; and they are promising yet. taught them, neu- the more pity “they eliminated the @read maid line curves that approach it, through & valley which I brief as a can- yon end the Mauvaises Terres rolied into one single p Yet we do lots of business along that stretch. Our engineers thread the cuts and ere glad to get safely through them. Our roadmasters keep up the elevations, the bl g right of per n. Our dis- g under shaded lamps, patchers thinl 1 their teeth clinched and hope there nev will be any trouble on that stretch ouble is our portion and trouble we T get: but not there. Let 1t come; b t come anywhere except the story opens; when eat in the night chair The days when the Old Guard were still there 4 before h, and fame, and cir- ance hs slen our first comman- ders and left only us little fellows, for- n by every better fate, to tell their ries ad the bridges then, and Wet- more locating, and Neighbor the oundhouses, and Bucks the superintend- and Callah 80 he ciaimed, the work, and Blackburn had the night trick. I When Blackburn came from the plains be brought = record clean as the book of life. Four years on a station key; then eight years at Omaha dispatching, with never & blunder or a break to the eight yeers. But it wae at Omaha that Black- burn lost the wife whose face he car- ried in watch. I never heard the story, only some rumor of how young she was apd how pretty and how he buried her and the wee baby together. ckburn brought to the West tains, his record and the little They said he had no earth, besides the wife back on the bluffs of the and 8o he came on the night End m face in the watch kith or kin he baby on trick to I was just & boy around the Wickiup then, b I remember the crowd; who could forget them? fellows They were jolly good sometimes there were very high Jinks. 1 don't mean anybody drunk or that sort, but good tobacco to smoke and good songs sing and good stories to tell—and Lord! how could they tell them. And when the pins slipped, as they would, end things went wrong, as they will, there were clear heads and pretty wits and stout hearts to put things right Blackburn, as much as I can remember, siways enjoyed it, but in a different way. He had such times a manner like nobody else's—a lent, beaming manner. When Bucks would roll a great white Panhan- ile yarn over his fresh linen shirt front d down his cool, clean, white arms one of them always bared to the elbow— sanding his points with the ash of a San Francisco cigar—and Neighbor would be- heave from the middle up llke & tamus, and Callahan would laugh kers full of dew, and Hailey would yell with delight, and the slaves in ext room would double upon the 1 at the story, Blackburn would sit , his laugh all in a sinile, but never sise or a word. He enjoyed it all; not doubt of that; only it was all tempered, reckon, by something that had gane be- At least that's the way it now 5 < me, and 1 watched thuse b'g fel- ws pretty close—the fellows who were , turn, while 1 was growing up among managers and presidents and ore them, into magnates; and some of them from every- day catch-as-catch-can men with the common alkali flecking thelr boots into rose dead men for whom marbie never white enough or high enough. Blackburn was four years at the Wicki- up on the night trick; it wouldn't have scemed natursl to see him there in day- light. It needed the yellow gloom of the oid kerosene lamp in the room; the specked, knotted, warped, smoky pine ceiling losing itself in biack and cob- webbed corners; the smoldering murk of the soft coal fire brooding in the shabby old salamander, and, outside in the dark- ness, the wind screw:ng down the gorge and rattling the shrunken casements, to raise Blackburn in the dispatcher’s ehair. Blackburn and the lamp and the stove and the ceiling and the gloom—in a word, Blackburn and the night trick—they went together, 7 Before the Short Line was opened the No. 1 and No. 5 trains caught practically all the coast passenger business. They were immensely heavy trains; month af- ter month we sent out two and three sec- tions of them each day and they always ran into our division on the night trick. Blackburn handled all that main line business with a mileage of 805, besides the mountain branches, say 400 more; and the passenger connections came Off them, mostly at night, for 1 and 5. Now three men wrestle with Blackburn's mileage; but that was befors they found out that dispatchers, although something tougher than steel, do Wwear out. More- over, we were then & good way from civ- fiization and extra men. If a dispatcher took sick there was no handy way of fill- ing in; it was just ‘double up and do the best you couid, One lad in the office those days every- body loved: Fred Norman. He was off the Burlington. A kid of a fellow who looked more like a chore boy than a train dispatcher. But he was all lightning—a laughing, restlesg, artless boy, open as a book and quick as a current. There was a better reason still, though, why they loved Fred; the boy had consumption; that's why he was out in the mountains, and his mother in Detroit used to write Buck asking about him, and she used to send us all things in Fred's box. His flesh was as white and as pink as moun- tain snow, and he had brown eyes; he was a good boy, and I called him handgpme. 1 reckon they all did. Fred brought out a tennis set with him, the first we ever saw in Medicine Bend, and before he had been playing an hour he had Neighbor, big as a grizzly, and Callahan, with a pipe in one hand and & tennis guide in the other, chasing all over the yard after balls; and Halley trying to figure forty love, while Fred taught Bucks the Law- ford drive. I don't say what he was to me; only that he taught me all I ever knew or ever will know about handling trains; and, though I was carrying mes. sages then, and he was signing orders, we were really like kids together. Fred for a long time had the early trick. He came on at four in the morning and caught most of the through freights that got away from the river behind the pas- senger trains, There was no use trying to move them in the night trick. Between the stock trains eastbound and the both- way passenger trains, if a westbound freight got caught In the mountains at night the engine might as well be stand- ing in the house saving fuel—there wasn't time to get from one siding to another. 8o Fred Norman took the freights as they came and he handled them like a ring- master. When Fred's whip cracked, by Joe! & traln had to dance right along, grade or no grade. Fred gave them the rights and they had the rest to do—or business to do with the lup;flnlendenl or with Doubleday, Neighbor's assistant in the motive nower. There was only one tendency In Fred Norman’'s dispatching that anybody could criticise: he never seemed, after handling trains on the plains, to appre- clate what our mountain grades really meant, gnd when they pushed him he sent his trains out pretty close together. It never bothered h to handle a heavy trafic; he would get the business through the mountatns just as fast as they could put it at the division; but occasionaliy there were some hair-curling experiences among the freights on Norman's trick trying to keep off each other's coat tails. One night in July there was a great press moving elght or nine trains of Montana grassers over the main line on some kind of a time contract—we were giving stock- men the earth then. Everybody was prod- ding the mountain division, and part of the stuff came in late on Blackburn and part of it early on Fred, who was almoat coughing his head off about that time, getting up at 3:30 every morning. Fred, at 4 o'clock, took the steers and sent them, train after train, through the Rat River country like bullets out of a Mex- tm gun. It was hot work, and before he had sat in an hour there was a stumble. The engineer of a big ten-wheeler pulling twenty-five cars of steers had been push- ing hard and, at the entrance of the canyon, set his air so quick he sprung one of the drive shoes and the main rod hit {t. The great steel bar doubled up like a man with a cramp. It was showing daylight; they made a stop and, quick as men could do it, flagged both ways. But the last section was crowding into the canyon right behind; they were too close together, that was all there was to it. The hind section split into the stand- ing train like a butcher knife into a sandwich. It made a mean wreck—and, worse, it made a lot of hard feeling at the Wickiup. Whgn the Investigation came it was pretty near up to Fred Norman right from the start, and he knew it. But Blackburn, who shielded him when he could, just as all the dispatchers did, be- cause he was a boy—and a sick one among men—tried to take part of the blame himself. He could afford it, Black- burn; his shoulders were broad and he hadn’t so much as a fly speck on his book. Bucks looked pretty grave when the evi- dence was all In, and around the second floor they guessed that meant something for Norman. Fred himself couldn’'t sieep over it, and to complicate things the en- gineer of the stalled train, who hated Doubleday, hinted quietly that the trouble came in the first place from Doubleday's new-fangled idea of putting the driver shoes behind instead of in front of the wheels. Then the fat was in the fire. Fred got hold of it and, boy-like— sore over his own share In the trouble and exasperated by something Doubleday was reported to have sald about him over at they house—lighted into Doubleday about the engine failure. Doubleday was right in his device, as time has proved; but it was unheard of then, and moreover the assistant master mechanic, sensitive to criticism at any time, was a fearful man to run against, Bunday morning he and Norman met in the trainmaster's office. They went at each other like sparks, and when Double- day, who had a hard mouth, began curs- ing Fred, the poor little dispatcher, rank- ling with the trouble, anyway half sick, went all to pleces and flew at the big fellow like a sparrow hawk. He threw a wicked left into the master mechanic be- fore Doubleday could lift a guard. But Walter Doubleday, angry as he was, couldn’t strike Fred. He caught up both the boy’s hands and pushed him, strug- gling madly, back against the wall to lap his face, when a froth of blood stained Fred's lips and he fell fainting; just at that minute Blackburn stepped into the room. It wasn't the kind of a time—they weren't the kind of men—to ask or volun- teer explanations. Blackburn was on Doubleday in a wink, and before Walter could right himself the night dispatcher had thrown him headlong across the room. As the operators rushed in Black- THE SUNDAY CALL. R burn and the tall master mechanic sprang at each other in a silent fury. No man dare say where it might have ended had not Fred Norman staggered between them with his hands up—but the blood was gushing from his mouth, It was pretty serious business. They caught him as he fell and the boy lay on Blackburn's arm limp as a dead wire; no- body thought after they saw that hemor- rhgge that he would ever live to have an- other. I was scared sick, and I never saw a man so cut up as Doubleday. Biack- burn was cool in a second, for he saw quicker than others and he knew there was danger of the little dlsPatcher's dy- ing right there in his tracks. Blackburn stood over him, as much at home facing death he was in a fight or In a dis- patcher's chair., He appeared to know just how to handle the boy to check the gush, and to know just where the salt waa and how to feed it, and he had Doubleday telephoning for Dr, Carhart and me run- ning to a saloon after chopped ice in a Jiffy. When anybody was knocked out, Blackburn was as regular as ever you saw; even switchmen, when they -got pinched, kind of looked to Blackburn. That day the minute he got Fred into Carhart's hands there was Fred's trick to take care of, and nobody, of course, but Blackburn to do 1t. He sat in and picked up the threads and held them tiil noon; then Maxwell relieyed him. Dou- bleday was walting outside when Black- burn left the chair. I saw him put out his hand to the night dispatcher. They spoke a minute, and went out and up Third street toward Fred Norman's room. It was a gloomy day around the depot. Everybody was talking about the trouble and the way it had begun and the way it had ended. They talked in undertones, little groups in corners and in rooms with the doors-shut. There wasn’t much of that in our day there, and it was depress- ing. I went home early to bed, for I was on nights. But the wind sung so, even in the afternoon, that I couldn't quiet down to sleep. Ir ‘We were handling trains then on the old gingle-order system. I mention this be- cause in no other way could this particu- lar thing have happened; but there’'s no especial point In that, since other particu- lar things do happen all the time, single order, double order or no ordér system, The wind had dropped and there wsa Just a drizzle of rain falling through the mountains when 1 got down to the depot at seven o'clock that Sunday evening. I don't know how much sleep Blackburn had had during the day, but he had been at Fred Norman’s bed most of the after- noon with Doubleday and Carhart, so he couldn’t have had much. About hall-past seven Maxwell sent me over there with a note and his storm coat for him, and the turee men were in the room then. Boy- like, T hung around until it was time for Blackburn to take Mis trick, and then he and Doubleday and I walked over to the Wickiup together. At sundown everything was shipshape. There hadn’t been an engine fallure in the district for twenty-four hours and every handcar was running smoothly. More- over, there were no extra sections marked up and only one special on the division card—a theatrical train eastbound with Henry Irving and company from 'Frisco t6 Chicago. The Irving special was heavy, as it always is; that night there were five e PO 178/ DARE SRY WHERE (7 /7/GHT - baggage cars, a cosch and two sleepers. I am particular to lay all this out just as the night opened when Blackbura took his train sheet, because someétimes these things happen under extraordinary pres- sure on the line and sometimes they don’t; sometimes they happen under pres- sure on the dispatcher himself. It was all fixed, too, for Blackburn to handle not only his own trick but the first two hours of Fred's trick, which would carry him till six o'clock in/ the morning. At six Maxwell was to double into a four-hour dogwatch and Callaghan was to sit In till noon. There was nothing to hold the big fel- lows around the depot that night, and they began straggling home through the rain about nine o'clock. Before ten, Bucks and Callahan had left the office; from gone by eleven Neighbor had got away the roundhou: Doubleday had back to sit with Fred Norman. The -lights in the yard were low and the drizzle had eased into a mist; it was a nasty night, and yet one never promised better for quiet. Before midnight the switchmen were snug in the yard shan- ties; in the Wickiup there was the night ticket agent and the night baggageman downstairs. Upstairs every door W locked and every room was dark, except the dispatcher’s office. In thgg Blackburn sat at his key; near by, but closer to the stove, sat the night caller for the train crews, trying to starch his hair with a 10- cent novel. The west-bound Overland passenger No. 1 was due to leave Ames at 12:40 a. m., and ordinarily would have met a spec 1al like the Irving at Rosebud, which is a good bit west of the river. No. I's engine had been steaming badly 1 the way from MeCloud, and on her schedule, which wag crazy fast all night, she did WVE ESMOED,” not make Ames il some fifty minutes late. While there were no special orders, it was understood we were to help the Irving train as much as possible, anyway Bucks had made the acquaintance of the great man and his fellows on the west- bound run, and as they had pald us the particular compliment of a return trip we were minded to give them the best {t—even against Ne. 1, which was always rather sacred on the sheet. This, I was pretty generally understood; when it was all over there was cism whatever on Blackburn’s intention of making a meeting point for the two trains, as they then stood, at O'Fallon's siding. Between Ames and Rosebud, twenty miles apart, there are two sidings— O'Fallon’s, west of the river, and Salt