Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
If he was inside the train, it seemed that he must have the trick of invisibility to escape. At that moment, an idea came into Jim's mind suggested by a former experience. "Maybe the beggar has crawled up on top of the cars," he said. "He must be an acrobat," remarked the conductor, "to do that." "I'm going to have a look, anyway," Jim declared. The trainmen regarded him with amazement.
The garb of the men themselves ran the scale: from the comme il faut of slender shoes, fashionably cut coats and pantaloons, and modish cravats, through the campaign uniforms of army officers and enlisted men, to the frontier corduroy and buckskin of surveyors and adventurers, the flannel shirts, red, blue and gray, the jeans and cowhide boots of trainmen, teamsters, graders, miners, and all.
A little later, when the stars were shining brightly overhead, they passed into the express car, and sent for the conductor and other trainmen, and for Foster. In a few words Sinclair explained the position of affairs. His statement was received with perfect coolness, and the men only asked what they were to do.
For a minute or more they threaded the mixed throngs of civilians, officials, soldiers of all grades and many nationalities, together with trainmen, guards, gendarmes and what not, to a line of waiting cabs, taxies, motor-cars just beyond a series of high iron gates.
A little later, when the stars were shining brightly overhead, they passed into the express car, and sent for the conductor and other trainmen, and for Foster. In a few words Sinclair explained the position of affairs. His statement was received with perfect coolness, and the men only asked what they were to do.
As they had lost seven minutes, it was necessary for the conductor to report "cause of delay;" and that was the first hint the officials of any of the Western lines had of the "unseen hand." Presently trainmen, swapping yarns at division stations, heard of the mysterious signal on other roads.
As the train slowed up, all the girls made a rush for their bags and bundles, and five minutes later they were standing and watching the disappearing train, waving to the amused conductor and trainmen, who were all on the platform of the last car.
That led to a parley, which ended by Porter's hiring the whole band to brake on freight trains. Old man Sankey was said to have been one of that original war party. Now this is merely a caboose story, told on winter nights when trainmen get stalled in the snow that drifts down from the Sioux country. But what follows is better attested.
He talked to the trainmen who came in to register, to enginemen waiting for orders, to yardmen in the yards, and to shopmen after hours; and many of them, catching the contagion, urged him to organize a company, and he did. He continued to work days and to drill his men in the twilight. He would have been up and drilling at dawn if he could have gotten them together.
In a little while he had gathered that the anxious stranger's wife lay dying in Cheyenne, and that he had been tramping up and down the land for six months looking for work. If Patsy could give him a lift to Omaha he could work his way over the U. P. where he knew some of the trainmen, having worked on the Kansas Pacific out of Denver in the early days of the road.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking