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Updated: May 25, 2025
At this juncture a temporary station had been left in the shape of several box-cars where the telegraph operators and a squad of troopers lived. As the work-train lumbered along to the crest of this heave of barren land Casey observed that some one at the station was excitedly waving a flag. Thereupon Casey, who acted as brakeman, signaled the engineer.
This simple story of an unpretentious man came out in broken sections as the special sped along the smooth track, while the General Manager talked with the resident director and the General Superintendent talked with his assistant, who, not long ago, was the conductor of a work-train upon which the G.S. was employed as brakeman.
In the evening, when the men are singing their throats dry on the doorstep, or around the camp-fire beside the work-train, the women usually sit and comb their hair. While Johnny was gesticulating and telling everybody what to sing and how to sing it, Thea put out her foot and touched the corpse of Silvo with the toe of her slipper. "Aren't you going to sing, Silvo?" she asked teasingly.
Utensils, bedding, food, grain, tools, and instruments everything of value except the papers Neale had saved had gone up in smoke. The troopers who had rescued the work-train must now depend upon that train for new supplies. Many of the graders had been wounded, some seriously, but none fatally. Nine of them were missing, as was Allie Lee. The blow was terrible for Neale.
The pilot train was coming and below where he stood he could see green lights swinging. The locomotive of the work-train was at the hind end and the roadmasters standing on the first flat car were signalling. Mauls were ringing at the last spikes when the head flat car moved cautiously out on the new track.
Under the headlining system of the English newspapers the derailment of a work-train in Arizona, wherein several Mexican tracklayers get mussed up, becomes Another Frightful American Railway Disaster! But a head-on collision, attended by fatalities, in the suburbs of Liverpool or Manchester is a Distressing Suburban Iincident.
"Dom' coorious that," remarked Casey to his comrade McDermott. "Thim operators knowed we'd stop, anyway." That was the opinion of the several other laborers on the front car. And when the work-train halted, that car had run beyond the station a few rods. Casey and his comrades jumped off. A little group of men awaited them. The operator, a young fellow named Collins, was known to Casey.
"We can hold out here if the troopers hurry back," said Neale. "Sure. But maybe they're hard at it, too. I've no hope this is the same bunch of Sioux that held up the work-train." "Neither have I. And if the troops don't get here before dark " Neale halted, and Baxter shook his gray head. "That would be bad," he said. "But we've squeezed out of narrow places before, buildin' this U. P. R."
They expected the regular train from the east to overtake them, but did not even see its smoke. There must have been a wreck or telegraph messages to hold it back at Medicine Bow. Toward sunset the work-train reached the height of desert land that sloped in long sweeping lines down to the base of the hills.
But at last human instincts encroached upon Neale's superlative detachment from self. It seemed all of a sudden that he stepped toward an east-bound train. When he reached the coach something halted him a thought where was he going? The west-bound work-train was the one he wanted. He laughed, a little grimly. Certainly he had grown absentminded.
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