Jebb: And the Light Devils

by Francis Lynde

JEBB: AND THE LIGHT-DEVILS

By FRANCIS LYNDE

 

IT was beginning to spit rain out of a sky of velvety blackness when Engineman John Jebb, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, stumbled across the many-tracked Castle Cliff yard to the roundhouse. It was past midnight. The switching engine, with fire banked, and a leaking throttle singing softly through an open cylinder cock, stood in the shadow of the coal chutes; the night crew had finished its work and had gone home, and the yard circuit of masthead electrics starred an area of silence and desertion.

Time was when Jebb, crossing the yard to take his engine for the night run, dwelt normally upon the sizzling arcs overhead; which is to say that only their absence would have recorded a conscious impression. Of late, however, since he had been promoted to the "Flyer" run and had been given the new, electric-headlighted 1013, he was becoming unpleasantly aware of them in the yard crossings. Their scintillating stars dazzled him, and he found himself looking purposefully otherwhere as he dodged the blockading cars on the sidings; preferably into the soft upper blacknesses which answered to the eye plunge as a cooling bath to a parched skin.

The night repair gang, idle between engine arrivals, was lounging on the tool-room benches when Jebb reached the roundhouse and went in to light his torch. In the smoky dimness of the place he kicked the "doper's" clumsy wooden stool and sent it flying.

"Why in blazes don't you fellows light up in here?" he barked angrily.

"Sure, we would if we could," said McGlanahan, the little Irish boilermaker. "'Tis a dom poor light these teapot lamps do be giving, and that's the truth, Misther Jebb."

There was a momentary hush in the tool room when Jebb lighted his torch at one of the "teapot" lamps and crossed to the pit track where the 1013, a huge compound "Pacific type," stood crooning the low overture to the steam song of the black mountain

"Jebb's gettin' cusseder at every trip, now," remarked Ettrick, the air-brake repairer. "What's eatin' him, 'ye reckon? Miss Josephine been givin' him the back of her hand?"

Stevens, the fat boss machinist, wagged his beard. "'C'n search me," he offered. "Bloodgood and some o' the others lay it on the new time card. Jebb's been on the carpet, with 'Little Millions' dancing on his collar, twice for not makin' his schedule with the 'Flyer.'"

Larkin, the second machinist, removed his pipe to say: "I hain't got much use for a runner that's lost his sand. Now, when I was pullin' the 'Limited,' on the old I. B. and W.——"

A chorus of groans, in which even the wipers and the "dopey guy" joined, cut the tale short.

Jebb heard the groaning chorus and seemed to take it as a personal affront. Struggling into his overclothes, he bullied his fireman for not having the oil can ready to his hand. Afterwards he went slowly around the big compound, prying and peering and testing as if looking for trouble which could be charged to the neglect of the repairers. Failing to find it, he climbed to the cab and sent the 1013 clanking out upon the turntable.

It still lacked twenty minutes of the fast train's scheduled arriving time when the compound, stabbing the soft darkness with the white beam of its electric, purred up through the yard to its waiting stand at the eastern end of the station.

The station dining room was closed; but the waiting rooms were open and lighted, the usual few who eat and drink at all hours perching on the stools at the lunch counter. Jebb left his engine and went in to become himself a percher on one of the high stools; the one nearest to the cash-register desk. A pretty, sober-faced young woman came down from her place at the cashier's wicket to get him his cup of coffee.

"You no need to be waiting on me," said Jebb, when she had served him. "It's tough enough for you to have to sit up and punch them keys at this time o' night."

"Oh, I have plenty of time off," she answered cheerfully. "I can sleep between the day meals."

"But you don't," he complained sourly. "When are you going to lake your time check and let me put you where you belong, Jo?"

She shook her head slowly, a little sadly, perhaps. It was at such times as this, when Jebb had the midnight run out, that she found her fortitude least responsive.

"Not yet, John; you know I can't—not yet."

He took a gulp of the scalding coffee.

"How much is it now?" he asked.

"It's two hundred and eighty-five dollars; only a little more than half."

"And how long've you been chewin' on it?"

"Six months."

"Six months!" he exploded. "And it'll take six more, and then some."

"Yes; but it's all right, John. I shall never be able to thank Mr. Upham enough for giving me a chance to work it off."

As on any one of a dozen previous and similar occasions, Jebb dug into an inside pocket, fished out a coal-grimed and well-thumbed savings-bank pass hook, and pushed it across lo her.

"There's four times as much as you need in there: take it and square the deal. I'll never believe your daddy took it; but that's past and gone, and he's gone, and you're dead set on payin' it back. All right; pay it back. It'll only mean that we don't get quite so many chairs and bedsteads and chicken fixin's for one o' them little houses that Doc Wester's building to rent up on Butte Street."

The young woman flushed, shook her head, and returned the pass book.

"You're good to me, John—too good. But I must earn the money myself."

"But why?" he argued. "It ain't paying a debt, Jo. For you to pay it back is mighty nigh like admitting that your daddy took it."

For a moment she hesitated, and the flush deepened painfully. Then she leaned toward him with the light of utter honesty in her eyes.

"Listen," she said. "I've never told anybody else—I haven't admitted it even to myself. But John: he was staking a man named Giddings, who has a mine back of Chrysolite. Giddings wanted more money: I heard him tell father it was five hundred dollars down, or they'd lose everything."

Jebb nodded gravely. "And five hundred dollars was just what your daddy checked up short. In spite o' that, I'm all in on the other side, Jo. Your daddy got me my first job—wipin' engines in the old Chillicothe roundhouse back in Mizzoo. I don't forget that."

The gray eyes were loyal bright when they met the glow of the brown ones under the visor of the shop cap.

"I'm on that side, too," she rejoined. "I should die if I couldn't be. But the cloud is on his name, just the same, and I must take it off—with my own money."

He let it go at that and absently put a second spoonful of sugar into his coffee. It was a well-trampled battlefield between them. Barton, the father, had been agent at Oro what time Jebb was running ore trains on the branch, and Josephine was her father's day operator and assistant. Their courtship had grown as naturally as courtships do in real life: Jebb was big and strong and handsome; the agent's daughter was pretty and sensible, with ambitions domestic and housewifely.

So they had come together as inevitably as the birds mate; unhastily, and with definite plans well considered. They would wait until Jebb had a main-line run, and had demonstrated his ability to earn good money and to save it. Then they would marry and settle down and live happily ever after.

Thus ran the river of hope through the pleasant vale of anticipation in the happy summer of ore-train pullings. In September Jebb had been advanced to a fast-freight run on the main line. In November he had made the passenger rank, and was in line with the best men on the division; a little in advance, perhaps, since, in addition to the steadiness born of his engagement to Josephine, he had the high mechanical gift of making a poor tool do good work.

It was early in the spring that the blow had fallen at Oro. Barton had one day checked up in his station accounts short by five hundred dollars. The shock of the auditor's discovery had struck the old man dumb. To all questions he could only reply that the money had been locked in the safe. The end had come quickly—a few days of misery, the payment of the shortage by the insuring bond company, a threat of prosecution, and an old man found dead in his bed. "Heart failure" the doctors had said, but Josephine knew that the heart was broken.

Upham, the superintendent, had found a place for the orphan as cashier for the hotel department at Castle Cliff, Jebb disapproving. Having a good run and money in the bank, Jebb thought proudly of Josephine's determination to square accounts with the bond company, and less well of "Little Millions" for allowing her to do it. As to this, even Josephine was in doubt. If the snappy superintendent knew, he made no sign; and as time rolled on, Jebb had troubles of his own.

It was of these troubles that Josephine spoke when a boy from the dispatcher's office chalked the overdue "Flyer" up as ten minutes late.

"Is the new time card any easier to make now, John?" she asked, noting his scowl for the bulletin-board announcement.

"Not for me," he denied. "I was twenty minutes off again last night, and 'Little Millions' had me in the sweat box for it. It's the mail contract; it costs the company one hundred dollars every time we miss getting that train to Denver on the dot."

"Perhaps it's the 1013," she suggested.

"No, the engine's all right; it's me," he frowned. "I'm losing my nerve."

She smiled incredulously.

"When that happens, you'll be in the hospital, and I'll be nursing you," she asserted. And then, with a sudden note of apprehension in her voice: "You are not sick?"

"I guess not," he laughed. "I eat and sleep as well as ever. Just the same, Jo, I tell you I'm losing my sand: I can't hit 'em up with the 1013 like I used to."

There was a cash-registering interruption, and when Josephine came back, the mellow chime of the incoming train was vibrating in the air.

"That's me," said Jebb, sliding down from the high stool. "So long, little woman; be good to yourself," and he was gone.

A "Pacific type" one-hundred-and-ten-ton compound, pulling a heavy train uphill on a quick card, does not give its fireman much time for reflective side issues. None the less, on this night of velvety skies and spitting raindrops, Gifford, Jebb's understudy, saw things not connected with his proper business of keeping the steam-gauge index at two hundred pounds pressure.

The unconnected things centered in the singular behavior of the big man humped on the right-hand box. On the new card the "Flyer" made few stops and was practically given the right of road. Station after station the signals stood at "Clear"; each an unwinking eye of white with the red below it. Gifford, swinging rhythmically back and forth between tender and fire door, saw Jebb crouch and grip throttle and air-brake lever as each pair of signals sprang out of the darkness ahead; and not infrequently the throttle went home with a sudden shove, only to be jerked open again hastily as the signals hurtled past.

Gifford kept his own counsel, as an understudy should; but when the 1013 stormed out of the upper portal of Black Rock Canyon to deliver her train at Chrysolite to the engine of the Mountain Division, he was not surprised to find that the "Flyer's" loss had increased from ten to twenty-five minutes.

As a matter of course, Engineman John Jebb found his third summons awaiting him when he reached Castle Cliff on the return run. He went up to the superintendent's office just as he was—in his overclothes, and with wide-staring eyes showing in the coal grime on his face like two burned boles in a blanket.

"Little Millions" was rocking gently in his swing chair when the door opened to admit Jebb; rocking and twirling his eyeglasses by the cord, signs which the rank and file had come to recognize as the precursors of a storm. But this time the storm lacked the usual accompaniments of thunder and lightning. The superintendent merely held up three fingers and said, with something of the coldness which in the beginning had made him the most hated official on the line:

"'Three strikes and out' has been the rule on this road, Jebb, and you've had your third whack at the ball. What's the matter?"

Jebb was crushing his cap in his big hands.

"I don't know, Mr. Upham; and that's God's own truth," he said slowly.

"But you must know. The other men are saying that you have lost your nerve. Is that it?"

Jebb, eyes on the carpet at his feet, shook bis head. "I don't know," he repeated.

"Then find out!" snapped the superintendent, losing patience at the unresponsiveness of the culprit. "I'll be plain with you, Jebb: if you can't make your time, I'll have to give your run to somebody who can."

There was the look of a tortured animal in Jebb's eyes when he turned away and felt for the gate in the counter railing. To lose his run and his engine; to take the fatal step down and backward on the steeply inclined ladder of promotion; to become the butt and gibe of the roundhouse and the road: these were the bitter penalties wrapped up in the superintendent's sentence. The big engineman was inarticulate, after his kind; but even the dumb can suffer.

At the door the master halted him.

"There is just one possible excuse for you," he said, less harshly, "Are you sick?"

Jebb, with his, hand on the door knob, paused long enough to consider. "No; I ain't sick," he said, and he went out.

Twelve hours off and a day's work on was the unwritten law of the D, and U. P.; though the other rule of "first in, first out," sometimes cut the lay-over short; and Jebb had his full allowance of sleep before the call-boy summoned him to take the midnight run east on the day of reprovings.

As at other times, he turned out promptly and stumbled across to the roundhouse, rubbing his eyes and testing them reluctantly against the glare of the masthead electrics.

"They're devils," he muttered, with a half-fearful glance up the yard pricked out like an illuminated map by the scores of switch lights: "Big devils and little devils, white-eyed and green and red. I wouldn't care so much if the damned little imps would quit winking and changing colors on me!" Then he shut his fists and swore hardily. "God Almighty! I'll keep on saying that till I believe it, and I know it ain't so!"

The night gang was working on a disabled engine, and there was no one to remark it when he blundered and stumbled in the dark tool room in search of a torch. Gifford was on hand as usual, silent and helpful, and presently the big compound bumped out over the turntable. In the yard Jebb did an unprecedented thing.

"Take her up to the station, Billy," he said; "it's time you was learnin' how to handle her," and when the 1013 rolled past the passenger platform, he dropped off and went in to the lunch counter for his midnight cup of coffee.

Josephine came down from the cashier's wicket and served him herself, as she always did. There was troubled joy and unjoyous trouble in the gray eyes when she gave him the cup and let his big fingers close for an instant over hers. A personal telegram from the superintendent, whose service car was at Chrysolite, accounted for the anxious joy; and for the sorrow, there was the gossips' story of Jebb's third summons to the "sweat box."

"What was it this time, John?" she asked, going at once to the heart of the matter.

"Same old sore," he returned. "Only this time I got the 'P. Q.' If I can't make my time, I can come off the perch and let some other fellow make it—pretty quick."

She was plainly shocked. As a member of the great railway family, born and bred in the service, she knew well what the carrying out of Mr. Upham's sentence meant. Her big, handsome lover, her tower of strength, would be a broken man.

"John, I believe it would break my heart," she said quietly.

"Mine's busted now, Jo. 'Little Millions' wasn't fierce at me; he just laid down the law. If I couldn't make the 'Flyer's' schedule, it was up to me to come off. I didn't have a blessed thing to say."

"But why, John?—why?" she insisted.

"It's just as I was telling you; and as I couldn't tell 'Little Millions': I'm losing my sand, 'r my mind, one o' the six. Even Billy Gifford's onto it."

Again she begged for his confidence, striving in loving despair to be at the reason of the reason; but in the field of details he confessed defeat.

"If I could name it and chase it down, I'd break its neck and that'd be the end of it," he declared; then, abruptly: "You knew old Bob Yarnell, up at Oro? Maybe you've heard him tell about seeing things—after one o' his high-winders?"

She nodded. Yarnell had been one of her father's purse burdens.

"That's me," he said gravely. "I don't drink old Yarnell's kind o' liquor; but I see 'em, all the same."

"What are they?" she asked, awe-sobered.

"Devils," he rejoined calmly; "devils sittin' on the switch stands and climbin' up on the semaphore arms. I see a 'clear' signal, and I know it's a 'clear'; white over red. Then, just for the crazy half of a second, one o' them imps'll chase up the pole and make me see two reds; and by that time I'm shuttin' her off and grabbin' for the air. You don't need to be told what a few breaks like that means for a train speeded up to the last wheel turn. I can't make my time!"

The young woman glanced up at the clock on the opposite wall, slipped away to lock the tiny safe under her cashier's desk, and appeared again to Jebb in coat and hat and drawing on her gloves. There was a purposeful light in her eyes when she said:

"I meant to tell you: I have a lay-off and a pass, and I am going up the road—to Chrysolite. Take me on the 1013 with you."

At first he said no, having the devils and their possible doings in mind. Then, when she insisted, he thrust his arm under hers, walked her out to the stub track, and lifted her to the footplate of the compound just as the "Flyer" thundered in from the west.

"What you going to Chrysolite for?" he demanded, beginning to make Gifford's box comfortable for her.

"I'm going on a wire that came just after supper. I'll tell you all about it when we get there. I shall want you with me." Then, when she saw what he was doing: "I don't want to sit on Billy's box. I want to ride with you."

"Why, of course you do," he said; and he lifted her to his own cushioned seat behind the reversing lever.

By this time the main line was clear for Jebb to pull down and couple to his train. Opening the starting valve of the compound, he gave the engine steam ahead. A yardman stood at the switch, and the eye of the signal light flicked from the main track "white" to the stub track "red" to let the 1013 out. The compound was halfway down the stub when Jebb suddenly leaned forward to stare at the switch light. Josephine saw, and caught his hand as he was about to jam the throttle shut.

"It's all right, John," she said steadily. "Did you think it wasn't?"

He made no reply in words, but she saw his face in the Light of the gauge lamp. It was a moment of terrible revelations, and while it endured her world crashed into chaos. But the fine fortitude which was her best gift had come steadfastly to its own when she said, without a tremor:

"You can't see anything out ahead with me sitting here in your way: let me call the signals for you, John—for this one time," and when the switch was passed, she was leaning out of the open cab window to give him the word to back to the waiting train.

That was the beginning of the record run of the "Nevada Flyer." When the conductor's cry of "All aboard!" lifted itself above the clamor of trucks and the shouts of the express checkers, Josephine glanced at her watch. The train had been given to the D. and U. P. at the west end fifteen minutes late; it was still fifteen minutes late.

"Go!" she cried from her lookout window; and when the first shuddering exhaust from the stack sobbed into the night, she faced about quickly to add: "All clear in the yard!" Jebb, from sheer force of habit, would have looked to see for himself, but she pushed him aside in mock petulance. "I'm on this part of the job," she reminded him. "You run the 1013, and make it go!"

Gifford, spreading his fire judiciously against the time when speed and grade would combine to make him the brother to a wet rag, saw a curious change come over the man who had latterly seemed to be running on bare nerves. Jebb appeared to forget the track ahead, giving himself wholly to the goading and coaxing of the 1013. A compound is delicately responsive to skillful driving; "woman engines" they called them on the D. and U. P. when they first came in; and when it came to getting the final wheel turn of speed and efficiency out of the sensitive mechanism, Jebb had few equals and no superiors on the Canyon Division.

From time to time Gifford would see the great white beam of the electric pick up a semaphore in the void ahead; and instantly he would hear the clear tones of the young woman on the opposite box crying, "All clear, John!" Whereupon the purring of the stack would go on without cessation, and Jebb's grasp of the throttle would be only to send a little more of the quickening life breath into the pipes and cylinders of his roaring monster.

So it went on through the small hours, with the Boiling Water valley narrowing mile by mile, and at Broken Arrow there was a stop for water. Jebb made it, almost mechanically, as it seemed to his companion, "spotting" the tender under the tank spout, and taking the word from Gifford without looking. In the momentary interval of tank filling he drew his watch from the pocket of his blouse and scowled down at its face.

"Sufferin' Jehu!" he muttered. "That blame' gauge lamp gets worse and worse every trip! What time is it, Jo?" and he thrust out the watch for her to see.

A sudden lump swelled in her throat, threatening to choke her if she might not cry out; but she mastered the impulse and answered him calmly. "It is three-fifty-two," she said, and the sound of her own voice terrified her afresh.

He flung his head up with a laugh.

"We're doing it, Jo; you and me and Billy and the old '13. We've made up twelve of the fifteen minutes, and by grabs! we'll grind the other three out in the canyon, 'r bend a side rod!"

Josephine turned away and wiped the tears from her eyes. It was needful that they should be clear and keen-sighted for those thirty-six final miles through the great gorge.

A minute later the big compound was storming through the portal of Black Rock Canyon, and Josephine caught her lip between her teeth when the huge engine struck the first of the curves, careening like a ship in a seaway. It was not her first locomotive ride by many; but never before had she been called upon to share even constructively the responsibilities of the man at the throttle. Now she knew that the responsibility was all hers, Gifford having reached the wet-rag stage. If sudden peril should spring up in the black-walled chasm, could she be quick enough to see and act through the nerves and muscles of the man at her side? It was hers to dare, and she braced herself for the trial.

So, during the terrible hour and twelve minutes that followed she never once let her eyes swerve from their task of track watching. Up the crooked crevice of the mountain torrent the "Flyer" raced, thundering over the culverts, swaying to right and left around the curves, roaring over the bridge in mid-canyon almost without a perceptible slackening of speed. Time and again the black shadow of an overhanging cliff transformed itself into a seeming obstruction on the track; and at such moments the conquering of the impulse to scream a warning to Jebb left her gasping and weak and ready to sob and cry—only there was no time.

Small wonder, then, that she was stiff and sore and strained almost to the collapsing point when, in the dark hour preceding the autumn dawn, the train shot out of the Black Rock upper portal and the welcome signal lights of the division end flashed into the suddenly widened field of Vision. Jebb made the stop at Chrysolite, station with artistic accuracy, and the night hostler climbed aboard.

"By G—⁠gracious," he changed it to, when he saw Josephine, "you've busted all the records, Jebb! A fifteen-minute make-up's never been made before on the uphill run!"

Jebb nodded absently and helped Josephine down from her cramped seat, lifting her in his arms when he felt how helpless she was. When they stood on the platform together, Josephine saw the superintendent hurrying toward them. Mr. Upham's first word was for the breaker of records.

"Good man, Jebb! You've wiped out all the old scores on this run," he said, in hearty commendation. Then, more hurriedly, to Josephine: "You are in time, though Dr. Wester, who is here with me, says the man can't live more than a few hours. He has confessed that he stole the combination and opened the Oro safe. He says he can't die till he has seen you. I have a buckboard ready to drive you."

Jebb had turned toward them, and he was pushing his cap to the back of his head with a hand that shook curiously.

"It's—Mr. Upham—isn't it?" he asked uncertainly; adding, in awkward apology: "It's so blame' dark here that somehow 'r other I can't——"

The hostler was moving the 1013 up to make way for the Mountain Division engines, and Jebb broke off to gaze blankly at the great compound moving slowly up the track, with its searchlight orb flooding the platforms with blinding radiance. The big engineman stared with unwinking eyes full into the focus of brilliancy.

"My God!" he gasped. "Have I been runnin' all night with that headlight short circuitin' that way?" Then, all at once, from Josephine's touch on his arm, from her sobbing cry of despair, or from the superintendent's startled exclamation, he realized, and went down like a man with a bullet in his heart.

 

Wester, chief surgeon of the D. and U. P., was ready with his verdict when Upham and Miss Barton returned from the cabin of the man Giddings, who could not lose his soul until he had craved forgiveness of the daughter of the man he had robbed.

"It's a pure case of eye strain brought on by the man's chasing night after night behind one of your cursed electric headlights," said the man of science. "It means Johns Hopkins, or some other good hospital, till he's cured; and even then he'll probably never be able to distinguish colors at night."

Having thus done his worst, and set Josephine to crying afresh into her handkerchief, the surgeon went back to his patient, who was in bed in a carefully darkened stateroom of Upham's private car; the verdict having been given in the open compartment of the same. The superintendent stood up and addressed himself to the girl.

"What do you think I ought to do to a man who deliberately went on running a fast passenger train when he knew he was half blind, Miss Barton?" he asked crisply.

It was the needed fillip, and it brought Josephine to her feet with the gray eyes flashing through the tears.

"How can you say such a thing as that?" she demanded hotly. "He didn't know—can't you understand? He never knew till that awful minute when he thought the 1013's headlight had gone out!"

"Ha!" said the superintendent; "that's better. I don't like to see a woman cry. But you've got to be disciplined, both of you," he went on in a fine affectation of rage. "You're discharged from the hotel department, Miss Barton—and you'll be reëngaged in the capacity of trained nurse at the same salary from the moment when you can legally call yourself Mrs. Jebb. Then you'll take your patient to the wise men of the East, and when you come back——"

"O Mr. Upham!"

"I say, when you come back, we'll find something that John can do. Possibly he might teach some of these other fellows how to handle the compounds. As traveling engineer, now, for example, he wouldn't have to read signals, you know; and——"

"Oh! please, Mr. Upham! May I go and tell him now—this minute?" she pleaded.

"Certainly; why not? Just turn Wester out, neck and heels: he's only a doctor; and doctors don't count."

When the door of the stateroom closed behind her, "Little Millions" chuckled softly to himself and sauntered to the rear window, jingling the keys and the coins in his pockets.

"The brave, white-souled little fool!" he observed to the plate glass. "To think of her making that handsome young giant eat his heart out waiting until she had paid a debt that she didn't owe, and didn't believe she owed!"