Two days later, Allan West entered regularly upon his new duties as chief dispatcher of the Ohio Division of the P. & O. railway. Meantime, news of his promotion had got about, and it seemed as though every employee of the division, high or low, had made it a point to seek him out and congratulate him. For Allan, in the eight years he had been with the road, had endeared himself to everyone by kindness and considerateness, and even those engineers and conductors who had a standing grievance against all dispatchers had come to confess that he was the squarest one they had ever met.

The chief dispatcher’s office is a large and pleasant room, looking down over the busy yards, and is shared by Mr. Plumfield, the train master. A great desk stands between the front windows, one side of which belongs to the train master and the other to the chief dispatcher. On it two sounders clicked, and from the open door of the dispatchers’ office, at Allan’s back, came the incessant clamouring of other instruments.

To one unaccustomed to it, this ceaseless noise would have been perfectly distracting, but to the habituÉs of the offices it was scarcely noticeable. And yet, though they seemingly paid no heed to it, it had a meaning for them, and anything out of routine attracted their attention instantly. For telegraphers develop a sixth sense, which takes up and translates what the instruments are saying without interfering with any of the others.

Perhaps you have seen an engineer sitting beside his engine, reading a paper while the complicated mechanism whirls smoothly along at its appointed task. Suddenly, without cause so far as you can see, he starts up, snatches up an oil can or a wrench, and squirts a jet of oil upon a bearing or tightens a nut somewhere. No sign of trouble has been audible to you, but his trained ear, even though his brain was otherwise engaged, had caught an unaccustomed burr or rattle and had called his attention to it.

Such instances might be multiplied indefinitely. Everyone who works at a certain task, or goes through a certain set of motions, becomes, after a time, to some extent automatic. Physiologists call such motions “reflex,” and tell us that in time the brain passes on such volitions to the spinal cord and so frees itself for other work—one of the wise provisions of our bodily mechanism, whose wonder and perfection very few of us understand or appreciate.

Allan was, of course, acquainted, in a general way, with the duties of his new position, and he lost no time in further familiarizing himself with them. All of the operators along the line were under his control. He assigned them to their duties, promoted them or discharged them as occasion might arise, investigated any delinquency on their part, and held them accountable for the proper performance of their duties. In addition to this, he was required to see that empty freight cars were furnished the various agents along the line, as they needed them, and that loaded cars were taken up promptly and sent forward to their destinations. Every day, each agent wired in his car requirements, and it was the chief dispatcher’s business to see that these requirements were filled as speedily as possible. He was also expected to see that the dispatchers understood their duties, and to unravel any knotty point which any of them might not understand.

Further than that, the clerical duties of the position were very heavy. He must make daily reports of the amount of freight handled; and if any freight crew was kept on the road more than sixteen hours, a special report must be prepared for the Interstate Commerce Commission, giving the facts in the case, and explaining why the crew had been kept out so long; for it is unlawful to keep any crew on duty for more than that length of time. A wise provision, for before this law was enacted, in busy seasons, railroads sometimes kept their crews on duty for twenty-four, thirty-six and even forty-eight hours at a stretch—an abuse which inevitably resulted in accidents from the men going to sleep while on duty, or being so exhausted by the long hours as to grow careless and forgetful of orders.

These were the duties when everything was moving in regular order. At other times, the supreme duty of every one connected with the office was to get them back to regular order. For a great railroad system is like a complicated machine—no part can run smoothly unless all are running smoothly, and the throwing of the smallest cog out of gear cripples the entire mechanism. Although the train master was the “trouble man,”—in other words, the man whose especial duty it was to superintend the clearing away of wrecks, and the straightening out of traffic—whenever anything happened to interfere with it, all other work became subordinate to that of restoring traffic to its normal condition.

On this morning, however, everything was moving in regular order; the sounders clicked out the reports of trains on time; there were no calls for cars which could not be answered promptly and no freight along the line which the regular locals could not handle. Conductors came and registered, compared their watches with the big electric clock which kept official time for the division, and departed; others reported in; trainmen loitered before the bulletin board, or gossiped in their lounging-room across the hall; the typewriting machine of the train master’s stenographer clicked steadily away; and there was about the place a contented hum of industry, such as one hears about a bee-hive on a warm day in late spring when the apples are in bloom.

“I heard some bad news about Heywood, while I was in Cincinnati yesterday,” remarked Mr. Plumfield casually, in the course of the morning, referring to the general superintendent.

“Bad news?” questioned Allan, looking up quickly.

“I don’t believe he’s making good. Nothing definite, you know; just a general feeling of dissatisfaction with him. I shouldn’t be surprised if he lost out.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“You knew his wife died?”

“Yes.”

“She was a mighty sweet woman, and I imagine had lots of influence on Heywood. Well, after her death, he seemed to go to pieces more or less. His daughter, Betty, was away at school, or somewhere, and didn’t know until she came home. You knew her?”

“Oh, yes; very well. I used to see her when they lived here.”

“Yes; I rather fancied, sometimes—”

“I thought a great deal of her and still do,” Allan interrupted.

Mr. Plumfield nodded.

“Well, she came home and tried to brace him up, and I dare say succeeded pretty well for a while—”

He stopped. There was no need that he should say anything more.

Allan, staring at the report before him, remembered how kind Mr. Heywood had been to him years before; remembered his first vision of Betty Heywood, as she came bursting into her father’s office, one day when he was there. He had not seen her for nearly four years—not since the night when she had ridden away on the east-bound flyer to go to school in the East. Had she changed, he wondered, or was she still the same warm-hearted, impulsive girl whom he had known?

The sounder on Allan’s desk began to call him, and he came back to the present with a start. He opened the key and replied with the quick .., .., which told that he was ready to receive the message.

“Chief dispatcher, Ohio Division,” clicked out the little instrument. “A special train consisting of combination coach and private car will leave Cincinnati east-bound about ten o’clock to-morrow morning. You will have your best engines ready to take it through to Wadsworth, and from there to Parkersburg. This special is to run without orders, its time to be governed only by the maximum speed of the engine, and is to be given a clear track with rights over everything. It must be expedited in every way possible.”

Mr. Plumfield whistled softly, as the message ended.

“Who do you suppose it is?” he asked. “The Emperor of Germany?”

“That’s certainly an unusual order,” agreed Allan.

“I never saw but one like it before,” added Mr. Plumfield. “That was when the president of the road was somewhere in the west, and his wife was reported dying back at Baltimore. We gave him right of way then.”

“Did he get there in time?” asked Allan.

“Oh, she didn’t die. Maybe it was his presence saved her. Anyway, his train covered the two hundred miles from Cincinnati to Parkersburg at an average speed of fifty-three miles an hour. That was going some.”

“We’ll see if we can beat it to-morrow,” Allan answered, and turned to the task of clearing the track for the special.

As he knew only the approximate time that the special would leave Cincinnati, it was necessary to prepare several plans, the one to be adopted depending upon the exact time the train pulled out from the Grand Central depot. From Cincinnati to Loveland he had a double track to work with, but from Loveland east, only a single track, and it was necessary to so arrange the schedule that no train would interfere with the special and at the same time to provide that they be interfered with as little as possible. Another difficulty arose from the fact that it was impossible to tell exactly how fast the special would run, and Allan’s brow wrinkled perplexedly as he bent above the time-card.

“I tell you what I’m going to do,” he said, at last, “I’m going over the road with this train myself. I’m not going to take any chances.”

And that night, with the time-card in his pocket and his plans carefully laid, Allan boarded the accommodation for Cincinnati.

The man in whose behalf this extraordinary order had been issued was no less a personage than a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. His election had been thought fairly certain, but hinged upon New York State. This, he had been confidently assured by the party leaders, he would carry without difficulty; and he had not visited it except early in the campaign, for a few speeches. He had then devoted his attention to some doubtful states in the middle west, when, with the election only ten days off, he had received a message urging him to reach New York at the earliest possible moment, that unexpected opposition had developed there, and that every moment was precious. In this strait, he had appealed to the railroads, and they had leaped to his aid.

Not because of the man, nor because of the fact that he was a candidate for the greatest office within the gift of the people of this republic; but because they regarded his election as vital to their welfare. For the railroads had fallen among troublous times. The business regeneration of the past few years had affected them deeply. Whether rightly or wrongly, the American public, or a large portion of it, had come to believe that railroad management was corrupt and wasteful, that it discriminated against its patrons and used its wealth and influence to secure the passage of laws inimicable to public welfare. So severe measures had been taken to curtail this power, and to protect the interests of both the stockholders of the roads and of the people who gave them business. The issuing of passes had been forbidden; a commission had been established by the government to prevent and punish any discrimination in favour of any shipper of freight; laws had been passed curtailing the hours of railway employees; in many states the legal fare to be charged passengers had been reduced by act of legislature from three to two cents a mile, and there had sprung up a wide-spread demand that freight rates be also regulated by law. Many roads felt that ruin was staring them in the face, and an all-important question with them was the election of a president who would regard them with friendly eyes and who would throw his influence against any revolutionary measures which might be aimed at them.

It was not wonderful, then, that they should have rushed to the assistance of this man, since his opponent was pledged to work for the very measures which the roads dreaded; and that, when his election seemed in danger, they should have placed their resources absolutely at his disposal, and have given him right of way over everything. He had been hurried across the plains of Missouri, shot into Saint Louis, flung across the prairies of Illinois and Indiana, and now, at 9.45 o’clock in the morning, the train shot into the Grand Union station at Cincinnati, and came to a stop with a jerk.

Ten minutes before, Allan, able at last to time the exact minute of its arrival, had sent out the messages which would govern its movements from Cincinnati to Wadsworth. There were to be no stops, except one for water, and, if all went well, He was determined to cover the hundred miles in a hundred minutes. He knew his engine and knew the engineer—957, with Tom Michaels, lean, gray-haired, a bundle of nerves, a man to take chances if necessary, yet never to take one that was unnecessary; and he believed that the distance could be covered in that time.

Three minutes were allowed in which to change engines, and half a dozen men were waiting to make the change. The air-hose was uncoupled and the old engine backed away. While the 957 was run down and coupled up, four men with flaring torches had been making an examination of the coach and private car, and in just three minutes, or at 9.48 A. M., the conductor held up his hand and Michaels gently opened the throttle.

The old engineer’s face was gleaming. It was the first time in his long life at the throttle that he had ever been given a free track and told to go ahead. But he nursed her carefully over the network of tracks in the yards, out through the ditch and past the stock-yards before he really let her out. Then, slowly and slowly, he drew the throttle open, and with every instant the great engine gathered speed, while the fireman, equally interested and enthusiastic, nursed the fire until the fire-box was a pit of white-hot, swirling flame.

Allan had ensconced himself on the forward end of the fireman’s seat, and sat for a time, watch in hand. Then he looked over at Michaels and nodded. They were making their mile a minute.

“It’s like ridin’ on a shootin’ star,” the fireman shouted up, as he rested for a moment from his exertions, bracing himself, his feet wide apart, against the swaying of the engine. “Right through the middle of a white-hot comet,” he added, scraping the sweat from his forehead. “It surely is a hot day.”

Then he bent again to his task. Every thirty-five seconds he threw three scoops-full of coal into the fire-box, then closed the door for the same length of time. And always he kept his eye on the indicator, to see that the pressure never fell below the “popping-off” point. It may be that, for this occasion, Michaels had hung a little extra weight on the lever of his safety-valve. At any rate, no steam was wasted through it.

There was a block system as far as Loveland, but beyond that, they had to trust to the observance of orders issued from division headquarters. On and on sped the train, the speed creeping up to sixty-five miles an hour, and once to seventy-four on a long down-grade. The whistle seemed to shriek its warning almost continuously; stations seemed to crumble to pieces with a crash as the train leaped past them; farm houses fluttered by or wheeled in stately procession across the landscape. And always Michaels sat, his hand on the throttle, his eyes on the track ahead, swaying to the motion of the engine, as a rider sways to his steed; only moving from time to time to glance at his watch or at the steam and water gauge, to blow the whistle and open the injector which shot the water from the tank to the boiler of the engine. The track ahead seemed to be rushing toward them only to be swallowed up; the nearer landscape was merely a gray blur; the telegraph poles flashed by “like the teeth of a fine-tooth comb,” as the fireman remarked; and always there was the roar of the great machine, the crash and rumble as the engine hurled itself along the rails. It was a marvel that it kept them, or seemed so—a marvel that it did not hurtle away cross-country at its own sweet will.

At New Vienna they paused for water. Michaels, with the skill of a magician, brought his engine to a stop with the tank-opening exactly underneath the penstock beside the track. The fireman lowered it with a clang and the water rushed and foamed down into the almost empty tank. Then, as the penstock swung up into place, Michaels opened the throttle and they were off again.

Allan, glancing across at the engineer, saw how the sweat was pouring down his face; how his face had aged and lined under the strain; how the lips had tightened. It was a hot day, unusually hot for so late in the year, and the atmosphere was close with threatened storm—but it was not the heat alone which brought out the sweat upon the engineer, nor the discomfort which lined and aged his face. Yet he sat erect as ever, his eyes glancing from the track ahead to the gauges, and back again. Once he stooped from his seat to shout a warning word to the fireman, when the needle for an instant dropped a notch. Allan, glancing back, saw that the rear car was lost in a whirl of dust. It seemed as insignificant as a tail—a mere appendage to be whipped hither and thither as the engine willed. He had ridden in cabs before—many times—but never under such conditions as these. He knew the track—he knew the rattle of every target as they flashed past it, the roar of every bridge as they rushed through it; and suddenly he remembered the sharp curve just beyond Greenfield, and wondered if Michaels would slow up for it.

The huddle of roofs that marked the town flashed into sight ahead, grew and grew, was upon them. The rattle of switches told that they were in the yards, but yard-limit speed had no bearing upon this case. He caught a glimpse of the signal before the station, and saw with relief that it was set at safety. Everything was working well, then, as he had planned it. Twenty miles more and they would be at Wadsworth, with the first leg of the journey covered. There was no need that he should go further with the train—he had tested its capabilities—he would know how to provide for it. Then the curve was upon them, and he braced himself for the jar he knew must come as the engine struck it. Michaels, his face drawn and tense, sat staring ahead, but made no move toward closing the throttle, even a hair’s-breadth.

There was a mighty jolt, and the engine seemed to climb over the rails. Allan could feel it lift perceptibly, but the wheels held. A moment more—

And then, as they cleared the curve and caught a glimpse of the straight track beyond, he saw steaming toward them, under full headway, not a hundred yards away, another engine. Only for an instant he saw it; then, as Michaels closed the throttle and jerked on the brakes, he closed his eyes involuntarily, for he knew that no power on earth could stop the train in time.