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Updated: June 18, 2025
At five o'clock that morning despatchers and night men under the Wickiup gables, sitting moodily around the big stove, sprang to their feet together. From up the distant gorge, dying far on the gale, came the long chime blast of an engine whistle; it was the lost Special. They crowded to the windows to dispute and listen.
Trainmen and engineers for months carried "slow" orders for Goose Creek bridge, and Bucks grew weary with warnings from the despatchers to careless enginemen about crossing it.
At the moment that Morrison took hold of the key Giddings opened the door from the despatchers' room. "Mr. Callahan, there's a message coming from Francis, conductor of Number Two. They've had a cloudburst on Dry Dollar Creek," he said, excitedly; "twenty feet of water came down Rat Cañon at five o'clock. The track's under four feet in the cañon."
He asked me if I didn't know there were other despatchers in that office besides myself; men who knew more in a minute about the business than I did in a month; and didn't I suppose that the order book would be verified, and the train sheet consulted before sending out the extra? He hoped I would never show such a case of the rattles again. That was all. Good morning.
Is it because in the winter night the wind never sleeps in the gorge above the headquarters shack that despatchers talk yet of a wind that froze the wolf and the sheep and the herder to marble together? Is it because McGraw runs no more that switchmen tell of the run he made over Sweetgrass the night he sent a plough through eight hundred head of sheep in less than a tenth as many seconds?
Meantime there was much excitement at the despatchers' office in Medicine Bend over the lost train. It had been reported out of White Horse Station on time, and had not reported at Blackwood. For hours the despatcher waited vainly for some word from the bridge timbers.
The despatchers only work eight hours a day, while the copy operators work twelve, so they work with two despatchers every day. I had the day end of the job and worked from eight A. M. until eight P. M., with an hour off for dinner, so that I really was only on duty for eleven hours. The pay was good for me, seventy dollars per month, and I was thoroughly satisfied.
The despatchers were annulling, holding the freights and distributing passenger trains at eating stations. But an hour's work at the head-breaking problem left the division, Callahan thought, in worse shape than when the planning began, and he got up from the keg in a mental whirl when Duffy at Medicine Bend sent a body blow in a long message supplementary to his first report.
I got in a theatre or two before the other young fellows caught on. About this time there was a dance, and I lost my grip. I took Madelene but couldn't dance, and all the others could, especially Dandy Tamplin, one of the train despatchers. "I took private dancing lessons, however, and squared myself that way.
The change from Alfreda to the chief despatcher's office in Nicholson was, indeed, a pleasant one. The despatchers, especially the first trick man, seemed somewhat dubious as to my ability to do the work, but I was rapidly improving in telegraphy, and, in spite of my extreme youth I was allowed to remain.
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