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Updated: April 30, 2025
"No, you weren't alone; and if the switchman and the switchman's wife weren't dead and out of it all; and if the other man that didn't matter any more than you wasn't alive and hadn't a family that does matter, I wouldn't be asking you peaceably for two thousand dollars as my fee for getting you off two cases that might have sent you to prison for twenty years, or, maybe, hung you to the nearest tree."
The next night he told me to keep the key till the old switchman came back on duty so he must have had an extra one of his own. They are easily got it's a common, ordinary lock." Bart's lips shut close. He went outside, looked keenly around, and jumped down from the platform. The watchman trailed out after him, watching him in a worried, discouraged way.
The red-shirted river-driver from Manitou and the lawyer's clerk from Lebanon; the Presbyterian minister and a Christian brother of the Catholic school; a Salvation Army captain and a black-headed Catholic shantyman; the President of the Order of Good Templars and a switchman member of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament slaved together on the hand-engine, to supplement the work of the two splendid engines of the Lebanon fire-brigade; or else they climbed the roofs of houses, side by side, to throw on the burning shingles the buckets of water handed up to them.
He was still keeping up the pursuit and importuning the affronted official as both were lost to view behind a track of freights. Bart of course surmised that Lem Wacker was on the trail of the "better job" he had announced he was after to the old switchman, Evans. "I don't think he has made a very promising impression," decided Bart, as he got back to his writing. "Say, you!"
And so thirty years slipped from Barclay as he stood in the doorway of his car looking at the Arizona stars. A flicker of light high up in the sky-line seemed to move. It was the headlight of a train coming over the mountain. A switchman with a lantern was passing near the car, and Barclay called to him, "Is that headlight No. 2?"
Is it the inventor of the locomotive, or the workman of Newcastle, who suggested replacing the stones formerly laid under the rails by wooden sleepers, as the stones, for want of elasticity, caused the trains to derail? Is it the engineer on the locomotive? The signalman who stops the trains, or lets them pass by? The switchman who transfers a train from one line to another?
From every direction men were running toward the scene of the wreck, calling to each other in hoarse, throaty bellows, while here and there in the darkness lanterns flashed. Sick and dizzy he lowered himself to the ground and staggered across some tracks. He snatched a lantern from the hand of a bewildered switchman and stumbled again toward the overturned car. Others swarmed upon it.
He kept on commenting aloud by way of dictating to his stenographer, who sat behind him, and praise and criticism followed rapidly. I heard him utter in his monotonous way: "Switch misplaced, we will all be in hell in a minute," and then a second afterwards continue: "We jumped the switch and are on the track again. Discharge that switchman."
The engine was within a few seconds of reaching his signal box when, on turning his head, the switchman saw his little boy playing on the line of rails over which the train was to pass. "Lie down!" he shouted to the child; but, he himself, remained at his post. The train passed safely on its way.
'Tis a good thing, but I want to keep it bottled up," he says. "Thin Jawn took th' thrain an' begun confidin' his secret to a few select frinds. He give it to th' conductor on th' thrain, an' th' porther, an' th' candy butcher; he handed it to a switchman that got on th' platform at South Bend, an' he stopped off at Detroit long enough to tell about it to the deepo' policeman.
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