“it’s all I can do to keep track of our makes,” was the answer, “without lookin’ after your back-numbers. Guess it’s something Peter Cooper left over when he died.”
.007 quivered; his steam was getting up, but he held his tongue. Even a hand-car knows what sort of locomotive it was that Peter Cooper experimented upon in the far-away Thirties. It carried its coal and water in two apple-barrels, and was not much bigger than a bicycle.
Then up and spoke a small, newish switching-engine, with a little step in front of his bumper-timber, and his wheels so close together that he looked like a broncho getting ready to buck.
“Something’s wrong with the road when a Pennsylvania gravel-pusher tells us anything about our stock, I think. That kid’s all right. Eustis designed him, and Eustis designed me. Ain’t that good enough?”
.007 could have carried the switching-loco round the yard in his tender, but he felt grateful for even this little word of consolation.
“We don’t use hand-cars on the Pennsylvania,” said the Consolidation. “That — er — peanut-stand is old enough and ugly enough to speak for himself.”
“He hasn’t bin spoken to yet. He’s bin spoke at. Hain’t ye any manners on the Pennsylvania?” said the switching-loco.
“You ought to be in the yard, Poney,” said the Mogul, severely. “We’re all long-haulers here.”
“That’s what you think,” the little fellow replied. “You’ll know more ‘fore the night’s out. I’ve bin down to Track 17, and the freight there — oh, Christmas!”
“I’ve trouble enough in my own division,” said a lean, light suburban loco with very shiny brake-shoes. “My commuters wouldn’t rest till they got a parlourcar. They’ve hitched it back of all, and it hauls worsen a snow-plough. I’ll snap her off someday sure, and then they’ll blame every one except their foolselves. They’ll be askin’ me to haul a vestibuled next!”
“They made you in New Jersey, didn’t they?” said Poney. “Thought so. Commuters and truck-wagons ain’t any sweet haulin’, but I tell you they’re a heap better ‘n cuttin’ out refrigerator-cars or oil-tanks. Why, I’ve hauled — ”
“Haul! You?” said the Mogul, contemptuously. “It’s all you can do to bunt a cold-storage car up the yard. Now, I — ” he paused a little to let the words sink in — ”I handle the Flying Freight — e-leven cars worth just anything you please to mention. On the stroke of eleven I pull out; and I’m timed for thirty-five an hour. Costly-perishable-fragile, immediate — that’s me! Suburban traffic’s only but one degree better than switching. Express freight’s what pays.”
“Well, I ain’t given to blowing, as a rule,” began the Pittsburgh Consolidation.
“No? You was sent in here because you grunted on the grade,” Poney interrupted.
“Where I grunt, you’d lie down, Poney: but, as I was saying, I don’t blow much. Notwithstandin’, if you want to see freight that is freight moved lively, you should see me warbling through the Alleghanies with thirty-seven ore-cars behind me, and my brakemen fightin’ tramps so’s they can’t attend to my tooter. I have to do all the holdin’ back then, and, though I say it, I’ve never had a load get away from me yet. No, sir. Haulin’s’s one thing, but judgment and discretion’s another. You want judgment in my business.”
“Ah! But — but are you not paralysed by a sense of your overwhelming responsibilities?” said a curious, husky voice from a corner.
“Who’s that?”.007 whispered to the Jersey commuter.
“Compound-experiment-N.G. She’s bin switchin’ in the B. & A. yards for six months, when she wasn’t in the shops. She’s economical (I call it mean) in her coal, but she takes it out in repairs. Ahem! I presume you found Boston somewhat isolated, madam, after your New York season?”
“I am never so well occupied as when I am alone.” The Compound seemed to be talking from half-way up her smoke-stack.
“Sure,” said the irreverent Poney, under his breath. “They don’t hanker after her any in the yard.”
“But, with my constitution and temperament — my work lies in Boston — I find your outrecuidance — ”
“Outer which?” said the Mogul freight. “Simple cylinders are good enough for me.”
“Perhaps I should have said faroucherie,” hissed the Compound.
“I don’t hold with any make of papier-mache wheel,” the Mogul insisted.
The Compound sighed pityingly, and said no more.
“Git ‘em all shapes in this world, don’t ye?” said Poney, “that’s Mass’chusetts all over. They half start, an’ then they stick on a dead-centre, an’ blame it all on other folk’s ways o’ treatin’ them. Talkin’ o’ Boston, Comanche told me, last night, he had a hot-box just beyond the Newtons, Friday. That was why, he says, the Accommodation was held up. Made out no end of a tale, Comanche did.”
“If I’d heard that in the shops, with my boiler out for repairs, I’d know ‘t was one o’ Comanche’s lies,” the New Jersey commuter snapped. “Hot-box! Him! What happened was they’d put an extra car on, and he just lay down on the grade and squealed. They had to send 127 to help him through. Made it out a hotbox, did he? Time before that he said he was ditched! Looked me square in the headlight and told me that as cool as — as a water-tank in a cold wave. Hot-box! You ask 127 about Comanche’s hot-box. Why, Comanche he was side-tracked, and 127 (he was just about as mad as they make ‘em on account o’ being called out at ten o’clock at night) took hold and snapped her into Boston in seventeen minutes. Hot-box! Hot fraud! that’s what Comanche is.”
Then.007 put both drivers and his pilot into it, as the saying is, for he asked what sort of thing a hot-box might be?
“Paint my bell sky-blue!” said Poney, the switcher. “Make me a surface-railroad loco with a hard-wood skirtin’-board round my wheels. Break me up and cast me into five-cent sidewalk-fakirs’ mechanical toys! Here’s an eight-wheel coupled ‘American’ don’t know what a hot-box is! Never heard of an emergency-stop either, did ye? Don’t know what ye carry jack-screws for? You’re too innocent to be left alone with your own tender. Oh, you — you flatcar!”
There was a roar of escaping steam before any one could answer, and .007 nearly blistered his paint off with pure mortification.
“A hot-box,” began the Compound, picking and choosing her words as though they were coal, “a hotbox is the penalty exacted from inexperience by haste. Ahem!”
“Hot-box!” said the Jersey Suburban. “It’s the price you pay for going on the tear. It’s years since I’ve had one. It’s a disease that don’t attack shorthaulers, as a rule.”
“We never have hot-boxes on the Pennsylvania,” said the Consolidation. “They get ‘em in New York — same as nervous prostration.”
“Ah, go home on a ferry-boat,” said the Mogul. “You think because you use worse grades than our road ‘u’d allow, you’re a kind of Alleghany angel. Now, I’ll tell you what you... Here’s my folk. Well, I can’t stop. See you later, perhaps.”
He rolled forward majestically to the turn-table, and swung like a man-of-war in a tideway, till he picked up his track. “But as for you, you pea-green swiveling’ coffee-pot (this to.007’), you go out and learn something before you associate with those who’ve made more mileage in a week than you’ll roll up in a year. Costly-perishable-fragile immediate — that’s me! S’ long.”
“Split my tubes if that’s actin’ polite to a new member o’ the Brotherhood,” said Poney. “There wasn’t any call to trample on ye like that. But manners was left out when Moguls was made. Keep up your fire, kid, an’ burn your own smoke. ‘Guess we’ll all be wanted in a minute.”
Men were talking rather excitedly in the roundhouse. One man, in a dingy jersey, said that he hadn’t any locomotives to waste on the yard. Another man, with a piece of crumpled paper in his hand, said that the yard-master said that he was to say that if the other man said anything, he (the other man) was to shut his head. Then the other man waved his arms, and wanted to
know if he was expected to keep locomotives in his hip-pocket. Then a man in a black Prince Albert, without a collar, came up dripping, for it was a hot August night, and said that what he said went; and between the three of them the locomotives began to go, too — first the Compound; then the Consolidation; then.007.
Now, deep down in his fire-box, .007 had cherished a hope that as soon as his trial was done, he would be led forth with songs and shoutings, and attached to a green-and-chocolate vestibuled flyer, under charge of a bold and noble engineer, who would pat him on his back, and weep over him, and call him his Arab steed. (The boys in the shops where he was built used to read wonderful stories of railroad life, and .007 expected things to happen as he had heard.) But there did not seem to be many vestibuled fliers in the roaring, rumbling, electric-lighted yards, and his engineer only said:
“Now, what sort of a fool-sort of an injector has Eustis loaded on to this rig this time?” And he put the lever over with an angry snap, crying: “Am I supposed to switch with this thing, hey?”
The collarless man mopped his head, and replied that, in the present state of the yard and freight and a few other things, the engineer would switch and keep on switching till the cows came home. .007 pushed out gingerly, his heart in his headlight, so nervous that the clang of his own bell almost made him jump the track. Lanterns waved, or danced up and down, before and behind him; and on every side, six tracks deep, sliding backward and forward, with clashings of couplers and squeals of hand-brakes, were cars — more cars than .007 had dreamed of. There were oil-cars, and hay-cars, and stock-cars full of lowing beasts, and ore-cars, and potato-cars with stovepipe-ends sticking out in the middle; cold-storage and refrigerator cars dripping ice water on the tracks; ventilated fruit — and milk-cars; flatcars with truck-wagons full of market-stuff; flat-cars loaded with reapers and binders, all red and green and gilt under the sizzling electric lights; flat-cars piled high with strong-scented hides, pleasant hemlock-plank, or bundles of shingles; flat-cars creaking to the weight of thirty-ton castings, angle-irons, and rivet-boxes for some new bridge; and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of box-cars loaded, locked, and chalked. Men — hot and angry — crawled among and between and under the thousand wheels; men took flying jumps through his cab, when he halted for a moment; men sat on his pilot as he went forward, and on his tender as he returned; and regiments of men ran along the tops of the box-cars beside him, screwing down brakes, waving their arms, and crying curious things.
He was pushed forward a foot at a time; whirled backward, his rear drivers clinking and clanking, a quarter of a mile; jerked into a switch (yard-switches are very stubby and unaccommodating), bunted into a Red D, or Merchant’s Transport car, and, with no hint or knowledge of the weight behind him, started up anew. When his load was fairly on the move, three or four cars would be cut off, and .007 would bound forward, only to be held hiccupping on the brake. Then he would wait a few minutes, watching the whirled lanterns, deafened with the clang of the bells, giddy with the vision of the sliding cars, his brake-pump panting forty to the minute, his front coupler lying sideways on his cow-catcher, like a tired dog’s tongue in his mouth, and the whole of him covered with half-burnt coal-dust.
“‘Tisn’t so easy switching with a straight-backed tender,” said his little friend of the round-house, bustling by at a trot. “But you’re comin’ on pretty fair. ‘Ever seen a flyin’ switch? No? Then watch me.”
Poney was in charge of a dozen heavy flat-cars. Suddenly he shot away from them with a sharp “Whutt!” A switch opened in the shadows ahead; he turned up it like a rabbit as it snapped behind him, and the long line of twelve-foot-high lumber jolted on into the arms of a full-sized road-loco, who acknowledged receipt with a dry howl.
“My man’s reckoned the smartest in the yard at that trick,” he said, returning. “Gives me cold shivers when another fool tries it, though. That’s where my short wheel-base comes in. Like as not you’d have your tender scraped off if you tried it.”
.007 had no ambitions that way, and said so.
“No? Of course this ain’t your regular business, but say, don’t you think it’s interestin’? Have you seen the yard-master? Well, he’s the greatest man on earth, an’ don’t you forget it. When are we through? Why, kid, it’s always like this, day an’ night — Sundays an’ week-days. See that thirty-car freight slidin’ in four, no, five tracks off? She’s all mixed freight, sent here to be sorted out into straight trains. That’s why we’re cuttin’ out the cars one by one.” He gave a vigorous push to a west-bound car as he spoke, and started back with a little snort of surprise, for the car was an old friend — an M. T. K. box-car.
“Jack my drivers, but it’s Homeless Kate! Why, Kate, ain’t there no gettin’ you back to your friends? There’s forty chasers out for you from your road, if there’s one. Who’s holdin’ you now?”
“Wish I knew,” whimpered Homeless Kate. “I belong in Topeka, but I’ve bin to Cedar Rapids; I’ve bin to Winnipeg; I’ve bin to Newport News; I’ve bin all down the old Atlanta and West Point; an’ I’ve bin to Buffalo. Maybe I’ll fetch up at Haverstraw. I’ve only bin out ten months, but I’m homesick — I’m just achin’ homesick.”
“Try Chicago, Katie,” said the switching-loco; and the battered old car lumbered down the track, jolting: “I want to be in Kansas when the sunflowers bloom.”
“‘Yard’s full o’ Homeless Kates an’ Wanderin’ Willies,” he explained to.007. “I knew an old Fitchburg flat-car out seventeen months; an’ one of ours was gone fifteen ‘fore ever we got track of her. Dunno quite how our men fix it. ‘Swap around, I guess. Anyway, I’ve done my duty. She’s on her way to Kansas, via Chicago; but I’ll lay my next boilerful she’ll be held there to wait consignee’s convenience, and sent back to us with wheat in the fall.”
Just then the Pittsburgh Consolidation passed, at the head of a dozen cars.
“I’m goin’ home,” he said proudly.
“Can’t get all them twelve on to the flat. Break ‘em in half, Dutchy!” cried Poney. But it was.007 who was backed down to the last six cars, and he nearly blew up with surprise when he found himself pushing them on to a huge ferry-boat. He had never seen deep water before, and shivered as the flat drew away and left his bogies within six inches of the black, shiny tide.
After this he was hurried to the freight-house, where he saw the yard-master, a smallish, white-faced man in shirt, trousers, and slippers, looking down upon a sea of trucks, a mob of bawling truckmen, and squadrons of backing, turning, sweating, spark-striking horses.
“That’s shippers’ carts loadin’ on to the receivin’ trucks,” said the small engine, reverently. “But he don’t care. He lets ‘em cuss. He’s the Czar-King-Boss! He says ‘Please,’ and then they kneel down an’ pray. There’s three or four strings o’ today’s freight to be pulled before he can attend to them. When he waves his hand that way, things happen.”
A string of loaded cars slid out down the track, and a string of empties took their place. Bales, crates, boxes, jars, carboys, frails, cases, and packages flew into them from the freight-house as though the cars had been magnets and they iron filings.
“Ki-yah!” shrieked little Poney. “Ain’t it great?”
A purple-faced truckman shouldered his way to the yard-master, and shook his fist under his nose. The yard-master never looked up from his bundle of freight receipts. He crooked his forefinger slightly, and a tall young man in a red shirt, lounging carelessly beside him, hit the truckman under the left ear, so that he dropped, quivering and clucking, on a hay-bale.
“Eleven, seven, ninety-seven, L. Y. S.; fourteen ought ought three; nineteen thirteen; one one four; seventeen ought twenty-one M. B.; and the ten westbound. All straight except the two last. Cut ‘em off at the junction. An’ that’s all right. Pull that string.” The yard-master, with mild blue eyes, looked out over the howling truckmen at the waters in the moonlight beyond, and hummed:
“All things bright and beautif
ul,
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:
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 320