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It was early in June of the year marking the opening of the completed Western Extension for through Pacific Coast traffic that a one-car train, drawn by the smartest of passenger engines in charge of a diminutive, red-headed Irishman, stormed bravely up the glistening steel on the eastern approach to Plug Pass.
In the height of Angels's prosperity there had been electric lights and a one-car street tramway, a bank, and a Building and Loan Association attesting its presence in rows of ornate cottages on the second mesa alluring bait thrown out to catch the potential savings of the railroad colonists.
The station with its two one-car trains, and the shacks of the little mining-camp beyond, lay shimmering ghost-like in the new-born light of the moon. The engine of the sheriff's car was humming softly with a note like the distant swarming of bees, and from the dancehall in Argentine the snort of a trombone and the tinkling clang of a cracked piano floated out upon the frosty night air.
But in the dash to overtake and pass the general manager's one-car special, the belief was shaken almost to its reversal. He knew the Pacific Southwestern locomotives and something of the men who ran them. The 1016 was one of the fast eight-wheelers; and Olson, the engineer, who had once pulled passenger on the Plug Mountain, was loyal and efficient.
"What in the name o' thunder is the old man's notion of goin' to the front with a picnic party and makin' a night run of it, at that, d'ye reckon?" "The Lord only knows. Easy around this curve you're coming to; it isn't set up yet." The 1012 was a fast eight-wheeler from the main line, and though the grade was a rising four per cent, the big flyer was making light work of her one-car train.
But he elected to stay in the cab, and he was still there, hanging from the open window on Jackson's side, when the one-car special woke the echoes with its whistle, clattered in over the switches at Horse Creek, and came to a stand opposite the MacMorroghs' commissary.
I wanted to check him up see if he had forgotten any of the little frills and details. He hadn't. On the contrary, he was able to add what seems to me a very important detail. About an hour after the disappearance of the one-car train with my bridge-timbers, he heard something that he had heard many times before. He says it was the high-pitched song of a circular saw. I asked him if he was sure.
Half an hour later the one-car special was retracing its way westward up the valley of the Tumbling Water, and Lidgerwood was trying to go to sleep in the well-appointed little state-room which it was Tadasu Matsuwari's pride to keep spick and span and spotlessly clean.
I paid little attention to the one-car train as it passed me, save to note that there were women among the railroad official's guests. The sightseers were quite outside of my purview or within it only as temporary hindrances to a job we were all pushing at top speed. A short distance beyond me the train came to a stand in the midst of Dorgan's crew and I saw some of the people getting off the car.
"Keep in touch with your old man, and tell him to count on us for protection," he said; and Benson nodded acquiescence as the one-car train crept out upon the dismantled bridge. Having an appointment with Leckhard, of the main line, timed for an early hour the following morning, Lidgerwood gave his conductor instructions to stop at Angels only long enough to get orders for the eastern division.
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