Chapter 11

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 passed. 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 grass, 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 passenger 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 passed 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 tête-à-tête 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 assigned 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 nobody 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 brass 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 passed 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 passed him by.

Long he sat in silence, having a last visit with La Salle, her brass bands gleaming in the twilight. For years she had carried him safely through snow and sleet and rain, often from dawn till dusk, and sometimes from dusk till dawn again. She had been his life's companion while on the road, who now, "like some familiar face at parting, gained a graver grace."

Presently the lamp-lighters came and began lighting the oil lamps that stood in brackets along the wall; but before their gleam reached his face the old engineer slid down and hurried away home with never a backward glance.

* * * * *

That night when Mrs. Hautman had passed the popcorn and red apples, and they had all eaten and the men had lighted cigars, the engineer's wife brought a worn Bible out and drew a chair near the master-mechanic. The "old man," as he was called, looked at the book, then at the woman, who held it open on her lap.

"Do you believe this book?" she asked earnestly.

"Absolutely," he answered.

"All that is written here?"

"All," said the man.

Then she turned to the fly-leaf and read the record of Henry's birth,--the day, the month, and the year.

Henry came and looked at the book and the faded handwriting, trying to remember; but it was too far away.

The old Bible had been discovered that day deep down in a trunk of old trinkets that had been sent to Henry when his mother died, years ago.

The old engineer took the book and held it on his knees, turned its limp leaves, and dropped upon them the tribute of a strong man's tear.

The "old man" called for the letter he had written, erased the date, set it forward four years, and handed it back to Henry.

"Here, Hank," said he, "here's a Christmas gift for you."

So when the Wildwood Limited was limbered up that Christmas morning, Henry leaned from the window, leaned back, tugged at the throttle again, smiled over at the fireman, and said, "Now, Billy, watch her swallow that cold, stiff steel at about a mile a minute."

BOOKS BY CY WARMAN

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It is good for the soul that we should look into other worlds than our own, and Mr. Warman knows how to put us beside fireman and engineer and how to make us feel the poetry as well as the power of the tireless giants that fulfil for us moderns the ancient dream of the fire-breathing brazen bulls yoked for the service of man.

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Mr. Cy Warman, by long personal experience, acquired a close and exact knowledge of the life of railroad men. "The White Mail" brings out realistically the actual life of the engineer, the brakeman, and the freight handler.

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