Jimmy the Wind

The Yellow Mail Story
Jimmie the Wind
by Frank H. Spearman
From Held for Orders, published in 1901.

THERE wasn't another engineer on the division who dared talk to
Doubleday the way Jimmie Bradshaw did.
But Jimmie had a grievance, and every time he thought about it, it
made him nervous.
Ninety-six years. It seemed a good while to wait; yet in the regular
course of events on the mountain division there appeared no earlier
prospect of Jimmie's getting a passenger run.
"Got your rights, ain't you?" said Doubleday, when Jimmie
complained.
"I have and I haven't," grumbled Jimmie, winking hard; "there's
younger men than I am on the fast runs."
"They got in on the strike; you've been told that a hundred times. We
can't get up another strike just to fix you out on a fast run. Hang on to
your freight. There's better men than you in Ireland up to their belt in
the bog, Jimmie."
"It's a pity they didn't leave you there, Doubleday."
"You'd have been a good while hunting for a freight run if they had."
Then Jimmie would get mad and shake his finger and talk fast: "Just

the same, I'll have a fast run here when you're dead."
"Maybe; but I'll be alive a good while yet, my son," the master
mechanic would laugh. Then Jimmie would walk off very warm, and
when he got into private with himself he would wink furiously and say
friction things about Doubleday which needn't now be printed, because
it is different. However, the talk always ended that way, and Jimmie
Bradshaw knew it always would end that way.
The trouble was, no one on the division would take Jimmie seriously,
and he felt that the ambition of his life would never be fulfilled; that he
would go plugging to gray hairs and the grave on an old freight train;
and that even when he got to the right side of the Jordan there would
still be something like half a century between him and a fast run. It was
funny to hear him complaining about it, for everything, even his
troubles, came funny to him,and in talking he had an odd way of
stuttering with his eyes, which were red. In fact, Jimmie was nearly all
red; hair, face, hands -- they said his teeth were freckled.
When the first rumors about the proposed Yellow Mail reached the
mountains Jimmie was running a new ten-wheeler; breaking her in on a
freight "for some fellow without a lick o' sense to use on a limited
passenger run," as Jimmie observed bitterly. The rumors about the mail
came at first like stray mallards -- opening signs of winter -- and as the
season advanced flew thicker and faster. Washington never was very
progressive in the matter of improving the transcontinental service, but
they once put in a postmaster-general down there, by mistake, who
wouldn't take the old song. When the bureau fellows that put their
brains up in curl papers told him it couldn't be done he smiled softly,
but he sent for the managers of the crack lines across the continent,
without suspecting how it bore incidentally on Jimmie Bradshaw's
grievance against his master mechanic.
The postmaster-general called the managers of the big lines, and they
had a dinner at Chamberlain's, and they told him the same thing. "It has
been tried," they said in the old, tired way; "really it can't be done."
"California has been getting the worst of it for years on the mail

service," persisted the postmaster-general moderately. "But
Californians ought to have the best of it. We don't think anything about
putting New York mail in Chicago in twenty hours. It ought to be
simple to cut half a day across the continent and give San Francisco her
mail a day earlier. Where's the fall-down?" he asked, like one refusing
no for an answer.
The general managers looked at our representative sympathetically, and
coughed cigar smoke his way to hide him.
"West of the Missouri," murmured a Pennsylvania swell, who pulled
indifferently at a fifty-cent cigar. Everybody at the table took a drink on
the expose', except the general manager, who sat at that time for the
Rocky Mountains.
The West End representative was unhappily accustomed to facing the
finger of scorn on such occasions. It had become with our managers a
tradition. There was never a conference of continental lines in which
we were not scoffed at as the weak link in the chain of everything --
mail, passenger, specials, what not -- the trouble was invariably laid at
our door.
But this time there was a new man sitting for the line at the
Chamberlain dinner; a youngish man with a face that set like cement
when the West End