CHAPTER XXV.

THE WRECKING TRAIN.

In the morning, as I have watched the conductors, engineers, and trainmen trooping down to the Union station, and marked one of them, a fine, hearty, lusty, fellow, I have wondered if he would ever come back. A collision, a pitch-in, a broken rail, or a low bridge are possibilities always before them. I was in the Union station one afternoon when a wrecking train came in from the east, bringing the crew and portable parts of a train which had been wrecked by a pitch-in away down the line. Four of the train-hands, including the engineer, had been hurt, some of them seriously, and to see the fine young fellows, all broken and hurt, lifted out of the car to be sent to the hospital, was most sad. On the platform stood an old woman, who, on seeing her boy borne out, broke into bitter weeping.

“Oh, Johnny, Johnny, my boy, my boy! Didn’t I always want you to keep away from them awful trains? Don’t take my Johnny to the hospital. I’ll nurse him—indeed, indeed, good gentlemen, I can nurse my Johnny better than anyone.” Then the subtle woman rose up in her. “Is his face hurted? Will he be disfigured? No, thank God! Oh, but he was a pretty boy.”

“How did it happen?” I enquired.

“Freight train ahead of us lost her grip on a grade. The brakes wouldn’t hold and she broke away and run back and we pitched into her.”

“I suppose your engineer stuck to his place?”

The train hand smiled a superior smile.

“You bet he did; catch Bill leaving his post while there is any show to do anything.”

One man had his leg broken, another had his breast crushed, the engineer had sustained fatal internal injuries, and Johnny had his shoulder crushed. These things don’t bother railway men much. In a few months after all hands, with the exception of the engineer, were back at their work again as devoid of fear and careless of consequences as ever.

CONDUCTORS’ EXPERIENCES.

“There is a sameness about our lives which makes it monotonous,” said Conductor B—as he lit a cigar and reflectively tossed the match into the gutter.

“Yes, but you have a variety, surely.”

“Yes, but this variety becomes the regular thing, and I tell you it gets monotonous; still what we see may perhaps be worth reproducing in print. The latest thing that I remember as peculiar is this: I noticed a well-dressed, middle-aged lady on the train every day going to Toronto and coming back. She was as regular as clockwork, always wore the same highly respectable clothes, never had any baggage, always sat alone and never spoke to me. She made the trip with us every day for two weeks steady and I began to get interested in her. Just when I was getting thoroughly puzzled as to who she could possibly be, she disappeared.”

“Well.”

“Well, she was a mad woman, that’s all. As crazy as a bedbug and this railroading was a mad fancy. She broke out bad at last and they had to put her in the asylum. It makes me cold to think of what she might have done had she broke out in the car.”

“Have you thrown off any tramps?”

“Oh, that’s an old story and we get used to it by degrees. I remember one thoroughbred, however, who was a dandy. I was running from Hamilton and I found out he had neither money nor ticket, so I put him off at Waterdown. I thought that settled him, but in going through the cars I found him on the rear platform, looking as comfortable as you please. I jilted him off at Bronte and told him that if he got on again I would paralyze him. When we reached Oakville the station-master told me that a man had ridden in on the cowcatcher. I went forward and caught my joker sitting on the pilot smoking a clay pipe.

I FIRED HIM OUT

of that, but when I was collecting tickets for Mimico I found him sound asleep in a cushioned chair in a first-class coach. I kicked him this time, but when we got to the Queen’s wharf he jumped down from the top of one of the coaches and disappeared in the darkness. Oh, he was a thoroughbred, I tell you. When I was a freight conductor I used to have a lot of trouble with them. I soon was able to distinguish between the regular tramp and the poor fellow who was in a hole and trying to get home to his friends. That kind of a man I would give a lift to, but the others, you bet, I give them the grand bounce every time. I have caught them riding astride of the bumpers; I have caught them under the car swinging by the rods; I have caught them in the bonded cars, in the cattle cars, anywhere they could get, and always bounced them. They are a funny crowd.”

“Have you much trouble with gamblers and crooks on the cars?”

“Not much now, but we used to, though. The line from Detroit east is still infested with them. They are confidence men and three-card monte players chiefly. You know what three-card monte is, and how it is worked, don’t you? Well, one night a man rushed into the car where I was and told me he had been swindled at cards. I went out, and when I entered the coach where the deed had been done three men rose from their seats, darted to the other end of the train and jumped off. We were going at the rate of forty miles an hour through a rough country, and I was sure they would be killed, but I never heard of them after—they escaped by a miracle. On another division of the road, however, a gambler jumped off and paid the penalty of his crookedness by breaking his neck.”