Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (415 page)

                  All creatures great and small,

                  All things wise and wonderful,

                  The Lawd Gawd He made all!”

.007 moved out the cars and delivered them to the regular road-engine. He had never felt quite so limp in his life before.

“Curious, ain’t it?” said Poney, puffing, on the next track. “You an’ me, if we got that man under our bumpers, we’d work him into red waste an’ not know what we’d done; but-up there — with the steam hummin’ in his boiler that awful quiet way...”

“I know,” said.007. “Makes me feel as if I’d dropped my Fire an’ was getting cold. He is the greatest man on earth.”

They were at the far north end of the yard now, under a switchtower, looking down on the four-track way of the main traffic. The Boston Compound was to haul .007’s string to some far-away northern junction over an indifferent road-bed, and she mourned aloud for the ninety-six pound rails of the B. & A.

“You’re young; you’re young,” she coughed. “You don’t realise your responsibilities.”

“Yes, he does,” said Poney, sharply; “but he don’t lie down under ‘em.” Then, with aside-spurt of steam, exactly like a tough spitting: “There ain’t more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth o’ freight behind her anyway, and she goes on as if ‘t were a hundred thousand — same as the Mogul’s. Excuse me, madam, but you’ve the track.... She’s stuck on a dead-centre again — bein’ specially designed not to.”

The Compound crawled across the tracks on a long slant, groaning horribly at each switch, and moving like a cow in a snow-drift. There was a little pause along the yard after her tail-lights had disappeared; switches locked crisply, and every one seemed to be waiting.

“Now I’ll show you something worth,” said Poney. “When the Purple Emperor ain’t on time, it’s about time to amend the Constitution. The first stroke of twelve is — ”

“Boom!” went the clock in the big yard-tower, and far away.007 heard a full, vibrating “Yah! Yah! Yah!” A headlight twinkled on the horizon like a star, grew an overpowering blaze, and whooped up the humming track to the roaring music of a happy giant’s song:

  “With a michnai — ghignai — shtingal!  Yah!  Yah!  Yah!

   Ein — zwei — drei — Mutter!  Yah!  Yah!  Yah!

        She climb upon der shteeple,

        Und she frighten all der people.

   Singin’ michnai — ghignai — shtingal!  Yah!  Yah!”

The last defiant “yah! yah!” was delivered a mile and a half beyond the passenger-depot; but .007 had caught one glimpse of the superb six-wheel-coupled racing-locomotive, who hauled the pride and glory of the road — the gilt-edged Purple Emperor, the millionaires’ south-bound express, laying the miles over his shoulder as a man peels a shaving from a soft board. The rest was a blur of maroon enamel, a bar of white light from the electrics in the cars, and a flicker of nickel-plated hand-rail on the rear platform.

“Ooh!” said.007.

“Seventy-five miles an hour these five miles. Baths, I’ve heard; barber’s shop; ticker; and a library and the rest to match. Yes, sir; seventy-five an hour! But he’ll talk to you in the round-house just as democratic as I would. And I — cuss my wheel-base! — I’d kick clean off the track at half his gait. He’s the Master of our Lodge. Cleans up at our house. I’ll introdooce you some day. He’s worth knowin’! There ain’t many can sing that song, either.”

.007 was too full of emotions to answer. He did not hear a raging of telephone-bells in the switch-tower, nor the man, as he leaned out and called to .007’s engineer: “Got any steam?”

“‘Nough to run her a hundred mile out o’ this, if I could,” said the engineer, who belonged to the open road and hated switching.

“Then get. The Flying Freight’s ditched forty mile out, with fifty rod o’ track ploughed up. No; no one’s hurt, but both tracks are blocked. Lucky the wreckin’-car an’ derrick are this end of the yard. Crew ‘ll be along in a minute. Hurry! You’ve the track.”

“Well, I could jest kick my little sawed-off self,” said Poney, as .007 was backed, with a bang, on to a grim and grimy car like a caboose, but full of tools — a flatcar and a derrick behind it. “Some folks are one thing, and some are another; but you’re in luck, kid. They push a wrecking-car. Now, don’t get rattled. Your wheel-base will keep you on the track, and there ain’t any curves worth mentionin’. Oh, say! Comanche told me there’s one section o’ sawedged track that’s liable to jounce ye a little. Fifteen an’ a half out, after the grade at Jackson’s crossin’. You’ll know it by a farmhouse an’ a windmill an’ five maples in the dooryard. Windmill’s west o’ the maples. An’ there’s an eighty-foot iron bridge in the middle o’ that section with no guard-rails. See you later. Luck!”

Before he knew well what had happened, .007 was flying up the track into the dumb, dark world. Then fears of the night beset him. He remembered all he had ever heard of landslides, rain-piled boulders, blown trees, and strayed cattle, all that the Boston Compound had ever said of responsibility, and a great deal more that came out of his own head. With a very quavering voice he whistled for his first grade-crossing (an event in the life of a locomotive), and his nerves were in no way restored by the sight of a frantic horse and a white-faced man in a buggy less than a yard from his right shoulder. Then he was sure he would jump the track; felt his flanges mounting the rail at every curve; knew that his first grade would make him lie down even as Comanche had done at the Newtons. He whirled down the grade to Jackson’s crossing, saw the windmill west of the maples, felt the badly laid rails spring under him, and sweated big drops all over his boiler. At each jarring bump he believed an axle had smashed, and he took the eighty-foot bridge without the guard-rail like a hunted cat on the top of a fence. Then a wet leaf stuck against the glass of his headlight and threw a flying shadow on the track, so that he thought it was some little dancing animal that would feel soft if he ran over it; and anything soft underfoot frightens a locomotive as it does an elephant. But the men behind seemed quite calm. The wrecking-crew were climbing carelessly from the caboose to the tender — even jesting with the engineer, for he heard a shuffling of feet among the coal, and the snatch of a song, something like this:

   “Oh, the Empire State must learn to wait,

    And the Cannon-ball go hang!

    When the West-bound’s ditched, and the tool-car’s hitched,

    And it’s ‘way for the Breakdown Gang (Tare-ra!)

    ‘Way for the Breakdown Gang!”

“Say! Eustis knew what he was doin’ when he designed this rig. She’s a hummer. New, too.”

“Snff! Phew! She is new. That ain’t paint, that’s — ”

A burning pain shot through .007’s right rear driver — a crippling, stinging pain.

“This,” said .007, as he flew, “is a hot-box. Now I know what it means. I shall go to pieces, I guess. My first road-run, too!”

“Het a bit, ain’t she?” the fireman ventured to suggest to the engineer.

“She’ll hold for all we want of her. We’re ‘most there. Guess you chaps back had better climb into your car,” said the engineer, his hand on the brake lever. “I’ve seen men snapped off — ”

But the crew fled back with laughter. They had no wish to be jerked on to the track. The engineer half turned his wrist, and .007 found his drivers pinned firm.

“Now it’s come!” said .007, as he yelled aloud, and slid like a sleigh. For the moment he fancied that he would jerk bodily from off his underpinning.

“That must be the emergency-stop that Poney guyed me about,” he gasped, as soon as he could think. “Hot-box-emergency-stop. They both hurt; but now I can talk back in the round-house.”

He was halted, all hissing hot, a few feet in the rear of what doctors would call a compound-comminuted car. His engineer was kneeling down among his drivers, but he did not call.007 his “Arab steed,” nor cry over him, as the engineers did in the newspapers. He just bad worded.007, and pulled yards of charred cotton-waste from about the axles, and hoped he might some day catch the idiot who had packed it. Nobody else attended to him, for Evans, the Mogul’s engineer, a little cut about the head, but very angry, was exhibiting, by lantern-light, the mangled corpse of a slim blue pig.

“T were n’t even a decent-sized hog,” he said. “‘T were a shote.”

“Dangerousest beasts they are,” said one of the crew. “Get under the pilot an’ sort o’ twiddle ye off the track, don’t they?”

“Don’t they?” roared Evans, who was a red-headed Welshman. “You talk as if I was ditched by a hog every fool-day o’ the week. I ain’t friends with all the cussed half-fed shotes in the State o’ New York. No, indeed! Yes, this is him — an’ look what he’s done!”

It was not a bad night’s work for one stray piglet. The Flying Freight seemed to have flown in every direction, for the Mogul had mounted the rails and run diagonally a few hundred feet from right to left, taking with him such cars as cared to follow. Some did not. They broke their couplers and lay down, while rear cars frolicked over them. In that game, they had ploughed up and removed and twisted a good deal of the left-hand track. The Mogul himself had waddled into a corn-field, and there he knelt — fantastic wreaths of green twisted round his crankpins; his pilot covered with solid clods of field, on which corn nodded drunkenly; his fire put out with dirt (Evans had done that as soon as he recovered his senses); and his broken headlight half full of half-burnt moths. His tender had thrown coal all over him, and he looked like a disreputable buffalo who had tried to wallow in a general store. For there lay scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars, type-writers, sewing-machines, bicycles in crates, a consignment of silver-plated imported harness, French dresses and gloves, a dozen finely moulded hard-wood mantels, a fifteen-foot naphtha-launch, with a solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows, a case of telescopes and microscopes, two coffins, a case of very best candies, some gilt-edged dairy produce, butter and eggs in an omelette, a broken box of expensive toys, and a few hundred other luxuries. A camp of tramps hurried up from nowhere, and generously volunteered to help the crew. So the brakemen, armed with coupler-pins, walked up and down on one side, and the freight-conductor and the fireman patrolled the other with their hands in their hip-pockets. A long-bearded man came out of a house beyond the corn-field, and told Evans that if the accident had happened a little later in the year, all his corn would have been burned, and accused Evans of carelessness. Then he ran away, for Evans was at his heels shrieking: “‘T was his hog done it — his hog done it! Let me kill him! Let me kill him!” Then the wrecking-crew laughed; and the farmer put his head out of a window and said that Evans was no gentleman.

But .007 was very sober. He had never seen a wreck before, and it frightened him. The crew still laughed, but they worked at the same time; and 007 forgot horror in amazement at the way they handled the Mogul freight. They dug round him with spades; they put ties in front of his wheels, and jack-screws under him; they embraced him with the derrick-chain and tickled him with crowbars; while .007 was hitched on to wrecked cars and backed away till the knot broke or the cars rolled clear of the track. By dawn thirty or forty men were at work, replacing and ramming down the ties, gauging the rails and spiking them. By daylight all cars who could move had gone on in charge of another loco; the track was freed for traffic; and 007 had hauled the old Mogul over a small pavement of ties, inch by inch, till his flanges bit the rail once more, and he settled down with a clank. But his spirit was broken, and his nerve was gone.

“‘T weren’t even a hog,” he repeated dolefully; “‘t were a shote; and you — you of all of ‘em — had to help me on.”

“But how in the whole long road did it happen?” asked 007, sizzling with curiosity.

“Happen! It didn’t happen! It just come! I sailed right on top of him around that last curve — thought he was a skunk. Yes; he was all as little as that. He hadn’t more ‘n squealed once ‘fore I felt my bogies lift (he’d rolled right under the pilot), and I couldn’t catch the track again to save me. Swivelled clean off, I was. Then I felt him sling himself along, all greasy, under my left leadin’ driver, and, oh, Boilers! that mounted the rail. I heard my flanges zippin’ along the ties, an’ the next I knew I was playin’ ‘Sally, Sally Waters’ in the corn, my tender shuckin’ coal through my cab, an’ old man Evans lyin’ still an’ bleedin’ in front o’ me. Shook? There ain’t a stay or a bolt or a rivet in me that ain’t sprung to glory somewhere.”

“Umm!” said 007. “What d’ you reckon you weigh?”

“Without these lumps o’ dirt I’m all of a hundred thousand pound.”

“And the shote?”

“Eighty. Call him a hundred pound at the outside. He’s worth about four ‘n’ a half dollars. Ain’t it awful? Ain’t it enough to give you nervous prostration? Ain’t it paralysin’? Why, I come just around that curve — ” and the Mogul told the tale again, for he was very badly shaken.

“Well, it’s all in the day’s run, I guess,” said 007, soothingly; “an’ — an’ a corn-field’s pretty soft fallin’.”

“If it had bin a sixty-foot bridge, an’ I could ha’ slid off into deep water an’ blown up an’ killed both men, same as others have done, I wouldn’t ha’ cared; but to be ditched by a shote — an’ you to help me out — in a corn-field — an’ an old hayseed in his nightgown cussin’ me like as if I was a sick truck-horse!... Oh, it’s awful! Don’t call me Mogul! I’m a sewin’-machine, they’ll guy my sand-box off in the yard.”