Mark Enderby, engineer

Front matter

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The steady brain and eye and hand of Enderby played upon them as confidently as a trained hand plays upon a well -strung harp.

BY

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I A PEACEFUL DAY'S RUN 11

II AGAINST THE MOUNTAIN 20

Chapter I A Peaceful Day's Run

4 4 A LL, the world loves a lover," twittered a little woman / V who stood with her friends just below the cab window of Mark Enderby's engine.

She set her hat straighter upon her head, she believed, and patted her back hair until it suited her imagination, meanwhile smiling benignly after John Parry and his young wife whom she had never before seen and whom she probably never saw again. They, making their way self-consciously down the platform, were evidently embarking upon a life adventure by way of Mark Enderby's train. That he should one day bear a part in the weaving of darker woof upon this bright strand of warp in the railroad's giant loom was quite beyond his present seeing, for Enderby knew the glad young people not at all.

The little group beneath the cab window dissolved into the hurrying throngs in the big train-shed, and if the chance repetition of the old saw which, perhaps, holds more of jingle than of truth, made any impression upon Mark's faculties he gave no outward sign of it. True, a brighter gleam may have lighted his eyes for an instant as he continued to look back along the train, but, passing that, he took no more notice of the speaker or the young folks than of the hundreds of others who were parts of the animated scene.

Coming directly to the point, Enderby, in some respects, was disappointing as a locomotive engineer, but, in reality, there are many undiscovered Enderbys. That is to say, he was not down on the platform before a group of admiring passengers, doing unnecessary oiling ; or feeling of the driving axle centres with the back of his hand to learn if they had run hot, when he knew that the engine had been standing in the roundhouse for the last ten hours; nor was he loosening needle-feeds in the oil cups in order to look profoundly at them and tighten them up again, when they were all right in the beginning. In short, Mark never made a play to the grandstand and would not have known how to go about it. He made his important preparations at the roundhouse.

When he got the signal he was watching for, he withdrew his calm-eyed old visage into the cab and, with an after-dinner sigh, dropped his hand caressingly upon the brake-valve and released the brakes. He looked out again for the answering signal from the far end of the dusky train-shed. It came, and when he settled comfortably upon his cushion, his young fireman was fuming about a leaking flue and had just succeeded in kicking the fire-door shut in a way that did not at all comport with his good-natured face.

" Billy, did you hear what the little lady said of you ? " queried Enderby. " Think she ever heard of Nora, out on the mountain? "

" Not about me," said stalwart Billy Bane, with emphasis. " I can improve upon it, though : ' All the world kicks a kicker ' — or ought to. If that man at the roundhouse would quit kicking and calk flues, we could do better on this run, with less coal charged against us. This flat country is easy, but I 'd rather fight the mountain."

A PEACEFUL DAY'S RUN

" Don't kick, Billy," counselled Enderby, with much gravity. " We do pretty well sometimes. Promotion coming, then the mountain ! "

Billy grinned guiltily and climbed upon his seat-box to wait for the starting signal. When they got it, and the shrill treble of the little air-whistle in the cab died away, Enderby opened the throttle as gently as one might draw upon a softly opened door; and, as gently, the engine at first responded.

There is a moment that is dear to the heart of an engineer and yet it is one in which the engine, to the inexperienced onlooker, seems to fail of its promise of strength. It is that moment in which the eye of the man in the cab is fixed upon the floor, or the earth, at the side of the track, and the forward movement of the engine is so slight that only that view will reveal it to him. It is the actual beginning of the day's run.

They drew out through the wide-arching mouth of the train-shed, into the afternoon sun, and crossed, from lead to lead, down through the teeming city yard. Curving his able body above the clacking reverse lever Enderby drew its resisting length up for quicker speed and latched it safe and high in the quadrant. Joy and hope, despair and failure, young life and the quiet dead; a magistrate, late from his ermine, and a madman, bound; the wealth of a kingdom, in golden bars in the express car, only a car's length from the cluttered possessions of a party of bewildered immigrants,— all of these trailed in the lee of the big engine. All of them, to him, were the train. It was his to move them, swift and sure, to deliver them up where desired, or, at farthest, at the station one hundred and fifty miles across the prairie, that to him differed from all other stations, because it was home — though the mountains were calling, calling.

The city fell behind like a swiftly rolled canvas of neutral tints and they curved around the southern shore of Lake Michigan, where surf-caps rolled white upon the tawny beach and seemed to fall away brokenly among the sand pines. A touch of the hand upon the brake-valve, now and then, to steady the long line of coaches upon the curves ; the expiring sigh of release, upon the tangent; the momentary stammering of the exhaust while a yielding but sure grip reset the fighting reverse lever; the firm, almost imperceptible play of the hand upon the throttle ; the quickening speed ; again, the grinding restraint upon the smooth running wheels, until the signal-arms beckoned them onward. These were the animating forces that controlled the fate of the hurrying cavalcade of wheels with its motley burden of life, and the steady brain and eye and hand of Enderby played upon them as confidently as a trained hand plays upon a well-strung harp.

The run was on and he was composedly a part of it, as silent, serene, and alone as though in the heart of a forest. Ruled by the primal laws of compensation in nature, Enderby's mind was instinctively working its own economies. An otherwise unbearable physical hurt brings numbness that is near to physical comfort. A crushing mental shock often gives mental quiet like that of deep peace. An accustomed tumultuous world of sound eventually gives mental concentration that sharpens every faculty, gives alertness for the hearing and sight of the unusual, and leaves the mind free to deal chiefly with that.

Thus Enderby ran placidly on, reading signals, home and

A PEACEFUL DAY'S RUN

distant, distant and clear, and Billy worked methodically upon the deck, rejoicing in the decreasing leak and finding anew that trouble is sometimes worse in the offing than when it comes nearer, to be vanquished.

Towns and hamlets arose out of the beautiful flats of the prairie, took on a momentary importance, and slowly sunk into the low distance behind the flying train. The bell sang its musical crooning note and the whistle droned across the wide spaces, where no hill sent back its voice, and the smiling land received them with a wide-flung welcome, as in days gone, and with happy promise for the days to come.

Now and again, at the vanishing point of the tracks ahead, an atom of black indented the low and level sky-line. Slowly, for a time, it lifted its deceptive bulk more clearly into Enderby's field of sight. Then, swiftly, with breathless haste, it loomed a menacing, rushing hulk of power and fierce action, with wide-trailing plumes of white and black and swirling gray. It bore down upon him, and he upon it, with a resistless, final plunge and loud-voiced shouting. And, just when crashing impact and annihilation seemed most near and complete, the big engine of a plodding freight or speeding express shot safely past him in parallel and left with Enderby only a brief and vivid memory of the striking of a single clear note from an engine bell which seemed, instantly, to have struck and sunk to unfathomable depths in the ocean of sound that surged steadily in his keenly attuned ears.

Once, toward evening, a galloping horse attached to a wildly rocking buggy raced up a country lane between the green hedges, to contest with the engine for the moment of crossing. The space between them narrowed, narrowed, closer and closer, until a flying curtain waved like a victorious banner, from the rear of the outfit, after it had safely won the crossing by an instant's lead, the exultant occupant unaware that, but for Enderby's slight movement at the brake-valve, the little comedy would have been, instead, a thing for his friends to weep over.

When the train stopped at a village that boasted the name of " Victory " upon its small station board, a little company awaited the home-coming of the silent passenger in the baggage car. With bared heads they walked haltingly under the weight which the train gave up to them and, sliding it reverently into the waiting, mud-stained spring-wagon by the track, they placed a seat across it and thus rode away with the great city's contribution to the quiet village churchyard.

In silence, Enderby and Billy watched the speaking scene and, when they started on again, the hand upon the throttle drew it open with a kindly touch, the bell, under Billy's steady hand, seemed to sound a slower note, and the mournful chime of the whistle, across all of that broad country, to bear a deeper significance.

But the extra minutes used in the stop were to be regained, and Enderby went calmly about it, touching, adjusting, urging, restraining; until the long line of coaches again followed its flying leader in steady flight, and sailed around the wide curves with the grace of a hawk in air.

Duly, they delivered the pair of cooing doves who, apparently, were supposed to be living upon showers of rice, and in due time the judge strode away in majesty, up the shaded street of a suburban puddle in which he was, perhaps, the biggest toad. Turning at the curb, from daily habit, he waved a paternal farewell to Billy, much as one might say " Your greatest work is done, my son. Now run along to

A PEACEFUL DAY'S RUN

your supper." And Billy, strong in the habit grown of another viewpoint, waved a polite adieu and turned with merry eyes to meet Enderby's slow smile as he fixed for the far-reaching miles ahead.

Where the tracks spanned the deep and rocky bed of a clear babbling stream, and broad smooth-clipped lawns sloped up among tall firs to a secluded city of refuge upon a swelling knoll of the prairie, they came to a halt with no ring of bell or sound of whistle. There the madman, with hands encased, and unseeing eyes, stalked with his watchful retinue up the knoll singing, over and over again, a plaintive refrain. It struck a quavering chord with the low notes which Billy drew from the bell at starting, until it wavered away with the man's receding figure among the trees and was swallowed up in the thickening exhaust of the engine. The open book of the day's run lay again before Enderby, who was looking steadfastly ahead upon the track. And, far and wide upon the great steel web of track that has reclaimed the wilderness and made of it at once the noblest workshop and playground of the world, a host of other Enderbys were reading, understandingly, without qualm of fear or wide-eyed haste, other familiar pages of the daily story of the track ; the vivid, common story of a common day, although from pages which are ever changing with the moments, — reading, and casting surely the giant shuttles which, most of all, are weaving the mantle of destiny for the race of men.

The sleeping country roads were growing more marked in the slanting rays of the sun, and the engine crooned a deep, low monotone through the wooded places, as she fled across the long level. Through the busy, teeming hours she rocked, and steadied, and plunged ahead, climbing rises in loud-voiced triumph among rugged oaks and again, chanting a low requiem over the straight and silent places.

Where the prairie was dotted by widely grouped cottage.4, in the distance, the train again stopped. Some new-formed Arcadia welcomed the care-worn immigrants. They turned their tired faces, eager-eyed, into the reddening rays of the sinking sun, shouldering their crude luggage from the baggage car, with many lowly bows and hat-tippings, and trailing away into their new land of promise, to claim, late, a manhood they had never known.

The hands of the big illuminated clock in the station were drawing close to seven of the evening, and the piercing rays of the big torch, high upon the City Hall Tower, were flashing farewell signals after the departing sun, when the train came hurrying steadily out of the darkening maze of the afterglow, across the waving fields, and thrust itself into the narrow throat of the terminal yards. It glided into the lighted gloom of the big station exactly at seven, by the hands upon the glowing dial high upon the wall beyond the ends of the tracks. A final vibrant hiss from the brake-valve spoke sharply to the engine looming large toward the guardpost which stood directly in its path. Slower and slower, the menacing engine crept nearer the obstruction until, in the last forward turn of the wheels, Enderby set the brake-valve handle to full release, and the train was still and free, without a demurring lurch; free, as it had been through the living hours, in the freedom of a sure control.

All was quiet for a moment, except the regular pulsing of the air-pump. Then the station renewed its murmur of restrained life, so like the murmur of a shell from the sea. There came a group of men who took the golden treasure

A PEACEFUL DAY'S RUN

from its car and away. The hurrying throng flowed by, unnoting and unnoted. The day's run of the train was finished.

A little later, a placid-faced woman looked up in the failing light, from among the flowers in an old-fashioned door-yard, as the gate-latch clicked under Enderby's hand.

" You are sure as the sun, Mark," she said. " Was it a pleasant run to-day ? "

" Like canoeing on the river in June, mother," he answered. " Where is Ruth? "

" Placing supper upon the table. She was with me here until she saw her wonderful father coming."

Her cool, firm hand slipped into the strong and gentle clasp of Enderby as she smiled up contentedly into his eyes, and yet, a shade of longing sat deeply upon her face.

" Suppose we tie up those nasturtiums in the morning, mother," he laughingly suggested.

" I was thinking of that when you came," she said, " and, oh, father, I have been thinking of the mountains to-day, our Alta Vista, Villa Rica mountains ! Shall we ever go back to them? In another year, when Ruth's schooling is finished? Could we?"

" Why, mother, you have said the thing I wanted to say ! " he replied, as his arm passed gently about her. " We have been very happy here, but the mountains are always calling. Well, we shall see. Another year, maybe, and then we might be able to arrange it."

Thus, in a contentment that lacked but the nearness of the mountains for these mountain-bred folks, the seal was set upon a day's biography of a modest expert, and the forecast of others of his virile days was made.

Chapter II Against The Mountain

ALTA VISTA, far south and high in the Rockies, most of the time lies smiling guardedly in the tempered sunshine of New Mexico ; and for the rest of it, she has moods — which is one of the joys of Alta Vista.

While the June showers fall regularly of afternoons, she arouses sleepily as a peaceful babe ; blue-eyed of the sky, white-capped of the clouds, gurgling with the voice of many quick-born rills. And when the ready sunlight races down again from the mountains and across the wide vistas, the wayfarer is electrified into close kinship with the heart of things, with the heart of Alta Vista, and he thrills with a sense of fellowship in the power to create. But, when the equinox shatters the peaks with lightning and the valleys quake with thunder, or the snows come rippling across the divide, to battle with alkali dust whirled up from the desert and dashed into Big Pass, Alta Vista crouches expectantly at the base of the Rim Rock Cliff and waits. News will come of the men in the mountains, and there is gruff greeting for him who does not know the ways of the high country.

Five hundred feet more above the virile little town rises the Rim Rock Cliff, its solemn face to the east, worn smooth by the wash of tides of long ago, or glaciers' rasping touch, and its sparsely wooded top seamed with coal, a stranger to the miner's pick. Gnarled cedars cluster thickly along the crevices, and lower there is a fringe of cottonwoods that seems to overhang the town. Sloping sharply from this base, Alta Vista stretches sinuously down a thousand yards to the railroad tracks and beyond the tracks half as far to a deep arroyo which divides the Mexican quarter, the Old Tewn, from the new. Clinging to the nearer rim of this deep dry ditch are the shops and roundhouses of the first mountain division, and near by are the little red station and despatcher's office, where " He " and his aides hear the wires sing fair or sing foul, and direct the battle by minutes. Alta Vista is well pleased with its four thousand souls and grudgingly includes Mexicans and half-breeds, but laughingly denies that burros figure in the corner drug-store revision of the census which easily proves that Paradise's rival pretensions as a county seat are " sure foolish."

Far to the south stretch wave upon wave and foothill upon foothill of gray-brown earth, past Starvation Peak, past Villa Rica, and farther than the eye can reach into the clear heights of the Glorietas, whose brooding purple depths give no hint of the struggles of Mexican and Spaniard, red man and white, Federal and Confederate, whose blood has variously dyed the thirsty earth upon the line of the old trail. At the farther side of the broad valley, six miles northeast from the Rim Rock Cliff, rises Neilson's mesa, a bold rampart of earthen reds and greens fused into cliffs that zigzag away to right and left, a day's journey for a laden burro. And topping that, where the moon is born at evening behind the ragged profile of the Geyser Peak, the great levels stretch away into a little-known wilderness of dead gray.

But none of these things justify the pretensions of Alta Vista. Her windrows of skeletons lying nakedly on the earth beyond the stock pens, where the utterly starved, the hopelessly maimed, the exhausted and dead are sorted from the living skeletons that are shipped through from the deeper Southwest each spring by suffering thousands, show that she is near the cruel cattle country ; but she is not of it. Neither the cliff nor the skeleton-strewn valley, the mesa, nor the far reaches to the Glorietas, but the great pass in the Rim Rock Range made Alta Vista, and she is proud of her maker.

In a wide sweep to the north of the Geyser Peak the Rim Rock Range rises forbiddingly. Seven miles of winding through the pass, rising a thousand feet and curving like a maimed serpent, is crowned by a tunnel of half a mile cut through the crest into Colorado. Sixteen miles of writhing and turning in half -circles and steep-pitched elliptics, down sixteen hundred feet to the wide gate of the canyon, shows Sentinel straddling the noisy little Geyser Water and waiting, with coal, water, sand and human grit, for trouble ; conquering it at catch-holds when it comes. There, Rankin's Rest calmly backs the town with five hundred feet of dull yellow cliff, and on its top Pioneer Rankin and his mate sleep grandly beneath a lonely finger of stone. Across the little creek, Vulcan Peak frowns down from its great height and faces away toward the Snowy Range and the Spanish Peaks, far to the right of which lies Crystal, eighty-five miles from Sentinel and two thousand feet lower, on the Arkansas. All of these point to the pass, and the pass made Alta Vista, quietly proud ordinarily, fiercely so sometimes, and yet smiling the dominant smile of the frontier headquarters of the mountain division; the steely smile of men who can go long hours on little food at times, with faces stiff from want of sleep, and laugh derisively, or curse and fight the mountains until they let freight into Alta Vista and pass it on to Villa Rica, to the Glorietas, to Balceta, the Tehachapies, and the western sea.

The call of the mountains had prevailed and the Enderbys, as well as Billy Bane, had returned to Alta Vista to fight the mountain in its savage moods and to bask and rejoice with body and soul in its more frequent sunny uplift.

In Crystal, on a November morning that promised fair, Billy, wearing the proud title of engineer, and fireman Jim Plinney blinked sleepily at the call-boy's lantern and looked approvingly through the open door at a red-hot stove in the boarding-house hall, as they sat up in bed to sign the callbook.

"What do we get, Zeke?" said Bane to the caller.

" First Fifty-one, at four-thirty this morning."

"Made up?"

" Making up ; thirty loads, all refrigerators, track fourteen."

" What engine ? " said Plinney.

" Big consolidation ; the 700. She 's on the ashpit now with her flues a-leakinV

" H-e-e-11," Plinney drawled in disgust, and lolled back with his face to the wall.

" How late was Fifty-one getting in? " yawned Bane.

" On time."

" What time is it now, Zekey? "

" Three-forty-five. Git a move on you. I can't stay here all night with you fellers."

" Snow? " drawled Bane.

" Nope ; fair. Moon gone down ; dark now. Hold on there, don't you fellers go to sleep on me again. Come on now ! The Old Man like to skinned me last time you was here, 'cause I did n't git the figgers to cinch you on when you held Second Fifty-one ten minutes. Put 'er in there now, will you ? "

Bane signed for both, and growled, " We were out twenty hours on the trip before we overslept. There you are, sonny, now vamose. This is no bird cage."

" Well I only want wat 's — "

" Vamose, hotabre" repeated Plinney, and swung a threatening shoe as the door banged shut and Zekey went pattering and whistling down the stairs in search of other victims for the early morning. Then they laughed a tolerant laugh, as men do after they have learned to bear all things ; yawned and were wide awake.

By 4:10 a. m. they had breakfasted, stumbled through the dark yards to the roundhouse, gone outside to the engine, and were uniformed in their comfortable faded blue overalls. Plinney had examined the leaking flues for prospects of a hard trip, doctored his fire, filled the signal-lamps, trimmed and lighted the headlight, fed water to the boiler, shut off the purring injector, and stood silently in the ruddy gloom of the engine cab with his back to the warmth of the boiler-head; while Bane, now boldly outlined in the flare of his torch, and now melting into the shadowy background, like the strong figure of an old Rembrandt, looking keenly here and there below, oiling, tightening, loosening, defaming in a subdued and satisfied way the pooled engine and all who believe in pooling, made ready for the start.

As he climbed into the gangway and blew out the flame of his torch a brakeman swung up after him with a crisp call of "Ready?" For answer, Bane nodded, shoved the cylindercock lever to open position with his foot, tried the air on the driver-brakes, and opened the throttle cautiously. The engine coughed up a ragged spurt of sooty water from the stack, hissed spitefully at the dark coal chutes in the shadows, close at hand, slipped viciously with an echoing roar, steadied down and moved off slowly toward the yards.

" Sassy this morning," said the brakeman.

" Yes, but it 's a bluff," said Plinney. " Look at her leak."

From the narrow throat at the end of the big yards, she reversed and crept backward down the ladder track indicated by a long diagonal line of bright green lights, shimmering close to the ground at intervals where the several tracks were intersected. Here and there, an imperative target of red showed the bullseye of a switch set to lead her onto Number Fourteen track, where a cluster of white lights shifted and twinkled at the head of the sullen-looking line of refrigerators. At 4:15, she settled back upon the head end of the thirty loads, with a subdued crash of the couplings that rippled away in decreasing rumblings toward the distant caboose. It was the wordless signal for one of the routine scenes of activity that leap from seeming unpreparedness in a railroad yard, and subside into the apparently vacant darkness, as a rocket leaps from its dull casing, sweeps through its fiery arc, subsides, and is gone. It is done, complete, dismiss it. What does the future hold?

Something more than the casting off of a ship's lines from the wharf, something less than the solemnity of the passing of a soul from earth, is in these early morning scenes in a railroad yard of a single-track line through the mountains of the high country. It puts the yearning, far-away look in the eyes of men who converse in monosyllables while they think of many secrets of the hill country; who laugh jerkily — if they laugh — as though the mystery of the mountains might sweep down and exact tribute of life for the infraction of the great rule of silence. The mystery that is written in the faces even of the wild things that live in the Land of Altitude, closes quickly all breaches of the silence that holds the barrens.

So, deft activity held sway for a time. Before the echoes had run out of the frozen yards, the air-hose had been snapped together, the air cut in, and the air-pump chugged hurriedly to replace what had been suddenly drawn from its store. A torch rose, wavered, and fell near the engine, and a resonant voice from the darkness said, " Set 'em." Bane, leaning from the window and looking toward the train, reached into the cab without turning, and the brakes set for test in response to the rasping discharge of the brake-valve.

On each side of the train a torch flared its way, searching slowly to the rear, and the inspectors signalled for release. Bane's hand moved silently a few inches in the dark cab. Each triple valve along the train whistled its keen expiring sigh and the iron shoes released their grip of the wheels. The air-pump chuckled wildly again into the night, a torch far to the rear flared a peremptory " All right," and vanished. Bane drew in his head to respond to conductor Waverly's greeting as he climbed up from the other side with orders.

"Hello, Bill!"

" Hello, Wavy ! What you got ? "

" Rights to Sentinel against first and second Fifty-two and Number Two will wait at Sinker's until 5 :55 a. m. and at Badger until 6:15 a. m. Meet Extra 905 at the Dry Hole. Sign and let's go. Make Sinker's, can't you? We don't want to stay at Badger till 6:15."

" Try it ; but it 's close time and she 's leaking," said Bane, and signed, with Plinney reading over his shoulder the details of the order which had been read in full by Bane while Waverly skilfully voiced the points that governed for the next few hours' work. Waverly dropped from the gangway remarking as a polite afterthought, " How are you, Jim? " and Plinney replied, " How are you, Wave ? " as he shot a shovelful of coal into the fire-box and landed it with precision upon a gray spot in the fire.

The time for talk was past. There came two short low blasts from the whistle and a quick swing of a clean white light from the caboose. The engine was settling heavily to her work and they were off for the pass of the Rim Rock and for home in Alta Vista. At regular intervals, as they slowly climbed the first wave of the foothills, a pulsing shaft of ruddy light shot backward and up into the rolling trail of vapor and smoke, until it faded and was swallowed up in the distance with the sound of the laboring engine. The darkness closed in behind the triangle of red tail lights as they slowly sank below the conquered rise, and silence fell upon the motionless yards. They were gone, said the train-sheet ; and the wires repeated, variously, " Gone." A distinct individuality, First Fifty-one, gone into the arid waste, with the finality of death, yet throbbing with hope and the hazard of life.