The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, June 12, 1904, Page 7

he train ser- y I worked for the to say how s was a very old n Sankey was a was brak- ¥ nger train we nning—and was . ion about , swarthy lood of a Sio s. It was in th s excitement, when k by the gold fever, we , even at ~ s g across the a rk's ng. Men to run t 1 to get, and Tom ¥ was putting in every man he could pick up, without reference to age or color. Porter—he died at Julesburg after- ward—was & great jollier, and he of anybo earth a wan g of Sioux clat- o town. They tore around like d threatened to scalp every- 2 to local tickets. The head braves dashed In on Tom Porter, sit- interested t pariey, w the whole hiring and t freight tra 0Old man Sankey is sald to have been one of th riginal war party. Now this erely a caboose story— told on wi nights when trainmen w drifting down country. But what get stalled from the Bi follows is better attested. start with, had a peculiar unceable, unspella- name. I never It was as nkey. turne: always second tr they some- r him after years—and it this that hurts—these very same children, grown ever so much bigger, and riding again n California or Japan or Aus- ask when they reach the about the Indian conductor. conductors who now run land trains pause at the ques- ecking over the date limits on of the coupon tickets, and If vou have ever gone over our line to the mountains or to the coast you may remember at McCloud, where they change engines and set the diner in or out, the pretty little green park to the east of the depot with a row of catalpa trees slong the platform line. It looks like & glass of spring water. If it happened to be Sankey’s run R r West End day, sunny ful, you would be sure to nding under the catalpas a shy, ned girl of fourteen or fifteen ently watching the prepara- the departure of the Over- and see £t er the new engine had been ng down, and harnessed g string of vestibuied sleep- r hose had been con- the air valves examined; ngineer had swung out of filled his cups and swung in rar the fireman and his help- T 1 of their slicebar and the tender a final . ¥ the conductor had h ely forward, compared tim e engineer, and cried, “All en, as your coach moved slowly o you might r under the re- « t t girl waving ndkerchief, at the t t Conductor she his daughter, Her 1 r was Span- when Neeta was a wee d the Limited were San- € nclair began pulling b unning west site i uck up a gre Sar y day the 1k; perhaps s pulling Sankey's e extraordinary efforts to —time was a hobby with Foley sald he was so care- that when he was off s watch stop just to save Sankey nd the loved to breast the winds fioods and the snows, and if get home pretty near on with everybody else late, he nappy: and In respect of that, as used to say, Georgle Sinclair me nearer gratifying Sankey's than any runner we had. firemen used to observe " young engineer, always neat, lookec neater the days that he took Sankey’'s train. By and by there &n introduction under the catal- after that it was noticed that Georgie began wearing gloves on the engine—not kid gloves, but yellow dog- skin—and black silk shirts; he bought them in Denver. Then—an odd way engineers have of paying compliments—when pulled into town on Sankey’s train, the would give a short, most peculiar not past Sankey’s ho the brow of the hill west of the ya Then Neeta would that N and her father and, naturally, Mr clair were in again and all was safe and sound. When the railway trainmen their division fair at McCloud there wae a lantern to be voted to the most popular conductor—a gold-plated lan- tern with a green curtain in the globe. Cal Stewart and Ben Doton, who were very swell conductors, and great rivais, were the favorites and had the town divided over their chances for winning it. ' But during the last moments Georgie Sinclair stepped up to the booth and cast a storm of votes for old man San- key. Doton’s friends and Stewart’s votes kept pouring in amazingly. The favorites grew frightened; they pooled their issues by throwing Stewart's vote to Doton; but it wouldn't do. Georgie Sinclair, with a crowd of engineers— Cameron, Moore, Foley, Bat Mullen and Burns—came back at them with such a swing that in the final round up they fairly swamped Doton. San- key took the lantern by a thousand votes, but I understood it cost Georgie and his friends a pot of money. Bankey said all the time he didn’t want the lantern, but, just the same, he always carried that particular lan- tern, with his full name,’\ Sylvester Sankey, ground into the glass just be- low the green mantle. Pretty soon, Neeta being 18, it was rumored that Sinclair was engaged to Miss Sankey— was going to marry her. And marry her he did, though that was not until after the wreck in the Blackwood gorge, the time of the big snow. It goes yet by just that name on the West End, for never was such a win- ter and such a snow known on the plains and in the mountains. One train on the northern division was stalled six weeks that winter and one whole coach was chopped up for kind- ling wood. But the great and desperate effort of the company was to hold open the main line, the artery which connected the two coasts. It was a hard winter on trainmen. Week after week the big Sin- held THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL nd blowing. The * the line, it was ry day we sent we should not 1t we didn’t pretend to move; nger busin had to be Coal, to keep our engines supplied, we were and after that alil nd the muscle and the mo- were centered on keeping our through passenger trains, trainmen worked like Ameri- were no cowards on our after too long a strain become exhausted, benumbed, indifferent, reckless even. The nerves give out and will power seems to halt on indecision, but decision is the life of the fast train. None of our conductors stood the hopeless fight like Sankey. Sankey was patient, taciturn, untiring and, in a conflict with the elements, ferocious. All the fighting blood of his ancestors seemed to course again in thesstruggle with the winter king.” I can see him yvet, on bitter days, standing along- side the track, in a heavy peajacket and Napoleon boots, a sealskin cap drawn snugly over his stralght, black hair, watching, ordering, signaling, while No. 1, with its frost bitten sleep- ers behind a rotary, struggled to buck through the ten and twenty foot cuts, which lay bankful of snow west of McCloud. Not until April did it begin té look as if we should win out. A dozen times the line was all but choked on us. And then, when snow plows were disabled and train crews desperate, there came a storm that discounted the worst bliz- zard of the winter. As the reports rolled in on the morning of the Bth, growing worse as they grew thicker, Neighbor, dragged out, played out men- tally and physically, threw up his hands. The 6th It snowed all day, and on Saturday morning the section men reported thirty feet in the Blackwood Canyon. y It was 6 o'clock when we got the word, and daylight before we got the rotary against it. They bucked away till noon with discouraging results, and came in with their gear smashed and a driving rod fractured. It looked as if ‘we were beaten. No. 1 got into McCloud eighteen hours late; it was Sankey's and Sinclair's run west. There was a long council in the roundhouse. The rotary was knocked out; coal was runnipgg low in the chutes. If the line wasn't kept open for the coal from the mountains it was plain we should be tied until we could ship it from lowa or Mi West ot Medicine Pole there w rotary working eas behind her, but sh fast in the Cheve Foley made suggestions, lair made suggestions had a suggestion left. T and Ev » trouble Si T didn’t cighbor said, they amount to rthing or were impossibl It's a dead block, boys,” announced Neighbor i towing again!” dark * air was in a minute with g clonds. M turned to the windows and quit talking; every fellow felt the same- but one. San- k of ing tracings on his overalls with a piece of chalk. “You might as well unload your pas- sitting the stove, was said ‘em Sankey," never get Nelghbor. sengers, % through this Vou'll winter.” And it was then that Sankey pro- posed his double-header. He devised a snowplow that combined in one monster ram about all the good material we had left, and submitted the scheme to Neighbor. Neighbor-studied it and hacked at it all he could, and brought it over to the office. It was like staking everything on the last cast of the dice, but we were in the state of mind which precedes a desperate venture. It was talked over for an hour, and orders were finally given by the superintendent to rig up the double- heager and get against the snow as quick as it could be made ready. All that day and most of the night Neighbor worked twenty men on San- key's device. By Sunday morning it was in such shape that we began to take heart. “It she don’'t get through she’ll get back again, and that's what most of ‘em don't do,” growled Neighbor, as he and Sankey showed the new ram to the engineers. < They had taken the 566, Georgie Sin- clair’s engine, for one head and Burns' 497 for the other. Behind these were Kennedy with the 314 and Cameron with the 296. The engines were set In pairs, headed each way, and buckled up lke packmules. Over the piiots and stacks of the head engines rose the tremendous plows, which were to tackle the toughest drifts ever recorded, before or since, on the West End. The ram ‘was designed to work both ways. Un- der the coal each tender was loaded The beleaguered passengers en No. 1, sidetracked in the yards, watched the preparations Sankey was making to clear the line. Every amateur on the train had his camera snapping at the ram. The town, gathered in @ single gréat mob, looked silently on, and lis- tened to the {rosty notes of the sky- scrapers as they went through their climinary manecuvers. Just as the al word was given by Sankey, in charge, the sun burst through the fleccy clouds and a wild cheer followed the ram out of the western yard—it was good luck to see the sun again. ittie Neeta, up on the hill, must have seen them as they pufled out; rely she heard the choppy, icebitten ch of the 566; that ivas never for- whether the service was spe- ten, of the ram carried this time not only rgie Sinclair, but her father as well. key could handle a slicebar as well punch, and rode on the head en- ne, where, if anything, the big chances hovered. 'What he was not capable of in the train service we never knew, because he was stronger than any emergency that ever confronted him. Bucking snow is principally brute force; there is little coaxing. Just west of the bluffs, like code sighals between a fleet of cruisers, there was a volley of sharp tooting, and in a minute the four ponderous engines, two of them in the. back motion, fires white and throats bursting, steamed wildly into the canyon. Six hundred feet from the first cut Sincalir's whistle signaled in, Burns and Cameron and Kennedy an- swered and then, literally turning the monster ram loose against the dazzling mountain, the crews settled thémselves for a shock. At such a moment there is nothing to be done, If anything goes wrong eternity is too close to consider. There comes a muffled drumming om the steam chest—a stagger and a terrific impact—and then the recoil like the stroke of a triphammer. The snow shoots into ‘the air fifty feet, and the wind carries a cloud of fleecy confu- sion over the d out of the eut. The cabs were buried in white and the great steel frames of the engines sprung like knitting needles under the frightful blow. Pausing for hardly a breath the sig- naling again began. Then the backing, up and up and up the line, and the massive machin were hurled screaming into the cut. “You're getting there, Georgle,” ex- claimed Sankey when the rolling and lurching had stopped. No one else could tell a thing about it, for it was snow and snow and snow, above and behind, and ahead and beneath. Sin- clair coughed the flakes out of his eyes and nose and mouth like a baffled collle. He locked doubtful of the claim until the mist had blown clear and the quivering monsters were again recalled for a dash. Then it was plain that Sankey’s instinct was right; they were gaining. Again they went in, lifting a very avalanche over the stacks, packing the ) SORLE D S CLAIR LIRE A Bzoc'/; OF cial or regular. Besides, the head caby banks of the cut with walls hard as ics. Again as the drivers stuck they raced in a frenzy, and into the shriek of the wind went the unearthly scrape of the overloaded safeties. Slowly and sullenly the machines ‘were backed again. “She’s doing the work, Georgie,” eried Sankey. “For that kind of a cut she’s as good as a rotary. Look every- thing over now while I go back and see how the boys are standing It Then we'll give her one more, and give it the hardest kind.” And they did give her one more— and another. Men at Santlago put up outer fight than they that made Sunday morning in the canyon of the Blackwood. Once and twice more they went in. And the second time the bumping drummed more, deeply; the drivers held, pushed, panted and gained against the white wall—heaved and stumbled ahead—and with a yell from Sinclair and Sankey and the fire- man, the double-header shot her nose into the clear over the Blackwood gorge. As engine after engine flew past the divided walls each cab took up the cry—it was the wildest shout that ever erowned victory. Through they went and half-way écross the bridge before they could check their monster catapult. Then at a half-full they shot it back at the cut—it worked as well one way as the other. “The thing is done,” declared San- key. Then they got into position in the line for a final shoot to-wlose the eastern cut and get head for @ dash across the bridge into the west end of the canyon, where lay another mountain of snew to split. “Look the machines over close, —_— QU OARL = i Shro TwE GORGE bhoys,” sald Sankey to the engineer. “If nothin's sprung we head across the gorge will carry nothing—and west cut. Then after we through this afternoon X get ghbor can 7 get his baby cubs In here and keep ‘em. chasing all night; but it's done snowin,” he added, looking into-the leaden sky. He had everything figured out for the . master mechanic—the shrewd, kindly old man. There's no man on earth like a good India and for that matter none like a bad one, San- key knew by a military instinct just what had to be done and how to do It If he had lived he was to have been assistant superintendent; that was the word that leaked from headquar- ters after he got kiljed. And with a velley of jokes between the cabs and a laughing and & yell- ing between toots down went Sankey’'s double-header again into the Black- wood gorge. At the same moment, by an awful misunderstanding of orders, down came the big rotary from the West End with a dozen cars of coal behind Mfle after mile it had wormed 's ram, burrowed of the Black- s drift San- r hirled then out Into th ad ggainst him, at forty miles Each train, in order to make the grade and the blpckade, was straining the ¢ ders. Through the swirling snow which half hid the b d swept be- tween the rushir while Sincla throttle and the s alarm rough the fellows in the blind But the track was at t worst. Wh there was no snow e were whis- kers; oil itself couldn't have been worse to stop on. It was the old and deadly peril of fighting blockades both ends on a single track. The great rar and Aee had done their w nd with their common enemy Overcom dash- ed at each other frenzied across the Blackwood gorge. The fireman at the f the side. Sankey ye jump. But Geer he never w urn yithou esi- tating an i X v in his arms, tore ers, planted a might: Sinclair like a block coal the gangway out into the go: were al E crashed into ountain lions & nto the gorge; Sankey w he There wasn't time to do both; he had to choose and he chose instinctively. Did he, maybe, He could have saved himself; chose to save George. think in that flash of Neeta and of whom she needed most—of a young and stalwart protector better than an old and a failing one? I do mot kmow. I only know what he did. Every one who jumped got clear. Sinclair 1it in twenty feet-of snow, and they pulled him out with a rope. He wasn't even scratched. Even the bridge was not badly strained. No. 1 pulled over it next day. Sankey was right: there was no m ow; not enough to hide the dead engines on the rocks; ths line was open. There never was a funeral in Mo~ Cloud llke Sankey’'s. George Sinclair and Neeta followed together; and of mourners there were as many as there were people. Every engine on the di- vision carried black for thirty days. His contrivance for fighting snow has never yet been beaten on the high line. It is perilous to go agaiust a drift behind it—something has to give. But it gets Sankey got time of block- there—as ' LIFE IN CHILE O vegetate in a delightful eli- mate, whose hottest sunbeams are cooled by breezes blown from Andean snow fields, ex- empt from all excitements ex- cept, perhaps, those that spring from natural causes, such as love—that is the delight of life in Chile. To prom- enade In the cool of ‘the evening in the “Garden of Delight,” the public garden of the populace, and still later to at- tend the opera, or tertulla, the so- cial gatherings in the private houses are called, is almost the scle diversion of the Chilean. The fair Chilean rises late, in des- habille she dawdles about, amusing herself with fancy work or nething at all until sheer ennul drives her forth to seek relaxation in shopping or mak- ing calls. Then the giossy hair mounts high on the head in a heap marvelous to behold. She dons of French boots with heels so high one wonders they do not cripple the foolish wearer after the day's comfort In slipshod slippers. She sallies forth with stately tread (“‘Solomon In all his glory was never so gorgeously arrayed”), ever clogely attended by a servant, who is expected to attend to her most trivial n eeds, such as carrying her purse, handkerchief, or any trifle she may urchase. P In the early evening she repairs to the promenade to enjoy a little music or a mild flirtation, the latter being confined discreetly to sighs, eyes and possibly following footsteps. So pass the days In this land of indolence for the women—days go by in monotonous round, year in and year out. As for the men, they omit the mass, which the women always attend, their deshabille covered by the long black mantua—covering, indeed, many omis- sions as regards neatness of tollet. They attend "a little” to any business they may have during the middle of the day, but most diligently to the opera, the promenade and the gaming table for the night. Gambling is a natlonal habit. In most of the swellest classes of Valparaiso and Santiago the gaming table is regularly set out and forms the most important feature of private en- tertainments, ,like the baccarat of Great Britain, which some time ago plunged his now Royal Highness of England into such torrid water. Even the peons and raggedest gam- ins may be seen a 11 hours betting nuclios and centavos (the pennies and nickels of this country) with as much eagerness as the wealthy mine owner stakes his golden ounces. The tallest gambling that ever came under writer’s observation took place on a steamer plying between Copeapo and Talcahuano, when a man who had re- cently struck it rich in the Atacama mines lost $90,000 in a single night, There is a law agalnst gambling, but— well! In regard to an American wrestling with the mysteries of Chilean house- keeping, I can give you a slight in- sight into my own. We engaged a cook, who promised faithfully to come on a certain morning, retaining our predecessor’s man servant—neither of whom spoke a word of English, while we, unfortunately, were equally ignor- ant of Spanish. We took posgession on the day appointed, but, “a Ja Frisco,” no cook appeared. There was nothing in the house but groceries and bread, as at the moment we were unable to buy anything, being unable to speak the language of traffic, consequently the gentlemen returned to the hotel, while we ladies were compelled to content ourselves with bread and butter and, I fear, a few regrets audibly expressed. friend calling during the evening suggested that we have our meals brought from the cafe—a commeon cus- tom Rhere—pending the arrival of our cook. Ome has & set of tins made, fit- ting one into the other, a wire passing through rings at the sides. The bot- tom tin contains coals, and the meats, vegetables, etc., are placed above one another In the successive tins. The strings of tins vary in length according to the magnitude of ome’s purchase. It was most amusing to me to see men hurrying in every direc- tion with these tins at the din- ner hours. We managed to live, or rather exist, in this way for a week; all the food half cold and I always had a horrible suspicion that the tins were never more than half washed, and really all the food most unmistakably did taste “tinny,” but if people will vis- it a foreign country wthout knowing the language they must take the conse- quences. After a week of this sort of ltving, we obtaned & cook. I smile now when I think of how I was obliged to approach her each morning with a dictionary in ene hand, money in the other, giving the necessary orders for the day. It was not diffioult te catch the Spanish pronunciation and the follow- ing dlalogues usually occurred: “Yu- sero pcr papas, huevos, Deefsteak,” (I want potatoes, eggs and beefsteak), to which the servant replied, “Si, sen- orfta, muy bueno” (Very well, Miss). Our man servant—we are obliged to magnificently style him “majordomo™ —takes charge of the dining-room, walts at table and acts as chamber- maid. It is a singular fact that the chamber-“maids™ of Chile are almost invariably of the sterer sex. Up the ohe staircase everything must come. The first thing I hear uncom- fortably early each morning is the step of the water carrier, who, with unnecessary clatter, brings us two kegs of water, dally, for which he is paid $2 per month. Then comes our bread- man, to whom we pay 30 cents per day for what our family of five ars supposed to consume; then the milk- man, charging-six cents for half a pint, and, lastly, but surely not the least of neces: vils, the ocook, bringing the day’s supply of market- ing and fuel. I never got over the sensation that in this hand-to-mouth way of liv- ing we should be some day left des- titute. But as every one else lives ~in- the same way and no other way seems possible here, ene consoles one’s self by thinking that at least, in case of the deluge, there will be company. Sunday is the day for complimentary visiting in Chile and in case you have & letter of introduction to Senor So- and-So, and have been recognized byre- ceipt of & card saying he will “cele- brate greatly acquaintance with you,” and “that his house and all it contains is at your service”—(a meaningless phrase, by the way)—you may call and be received cordially by his wife, who will serve you with tea and entertain you to the best of her abil- jty until midnight, regardless of the host’s absence, for he is rarely at home after sunset. Ladles are seldom attended home by anybody but a servant, no matter what the hour, as in Chile it would be con- gidered very bad form for the man of the house or a man friend to perform this, with us, ofttimes pleasant :\.xt%