Jimmy the Wind | Page 6

Frank H. Spearman
Jimmie Bradshaw
for once in his life had the coveted fast run, and till he sighted Fort
Rucker he never for a minute let up.
Meantime there was a desperate crowd around the despatcher at
Medicine Bend. It was an hour and twenty minutes after Ponca Station
reported the Yellow Mail out, before Fort Rucker, eighteen miles
farther west, reported the box-cars and Jimmie Bradshaw in, and
followed with a wreck report from the Crockett siding. When that end
of it began to tumble into the Wickiup office Doubleday's face went
very hard -- fate was against him, the contract was gone glimmering, he
didn't feel at all sure his own head and the roadmaster's wouldn't follow
it. Then the Rucker operator began again to talk about Jimmie
Bradshaw, and "Who's Bradshaw?" asked somebody; and Rucker went
on excitedly with the story of the Mogul and of three box-cars, and of a
war party of Sioux squatting on the brake-wheels; it came so mixed that
Medicine Bend thought everybody at Rucker Station had gone mad.
While they fumed, Jimmie Bradshaw was speeding the mail through
the mountains. He had Kingsley's fireman, big as an ox and full of his
own enthusiasm. In no time they were flying across the flats of the
Spider Water, threading the curves of the Peace River, and hitting the
rails of the Painted Desert, with the Mogul sprinting like a Texas steer,
and the box-cars leaping like yearlings at the points. It was no case of
scientific running, no case of favoring the roadbed, of easing the strain
on the equipment; it was simply a case of galloping to a Broadway fire
with a Silsby rotary on a 4 -- 11 call. Up hill and down, curve and
tangent, it was all one. There was speed made on the plains with that
mail, and there was speed made in the foothills with the fancy
equipment, but never the speed that Jimmie Bradshaw made when he
ran the mail through the gorges in three box-cars; and frightened
operators and paralyzed station-agents all the way up the line watched
the fearful and wonderful train jump the switches with Bradshaw's red
head sticking out of the cabin window.
Medicine Bend couldn't get the straight of it over the wires. There was

an electric storm in the mountain's, and the wires went bad in the midst
of the confusion. They knew there was a wreck, and supposed there
was mail in the ditch, and, with Doubleday frantic, the despatchers
were trying to get the track to run a train down to Crockett's. But
Jimmie Bradshaw had asked at Rucker for rights to the Bend, and in an
unguarded moment they had been given; after that it was all off.
Nobody could get action on Jimmie Bradshaw to head him off. He took
the rights, and stayed not for stake and stopped not for stone. In thirty
minutes the operating department was ready to kill him, but he was
making such time it was concluded better to humor the lunatic than to
try to hold him up anywhere for a parley. When this was decided
Jimmie and his war party were already reported past Bad Axe, fifteen
miles below the Bend, with every truck an the box-cars smoking.
The Bad Axe run to the Bend was never done in less than fourteen
minutes until Bradshaw that day brought up the mail. Between those
two points the line is modeled on the curves of a ram's horn, but
Jimmie with the Mogul found every twist on the right of way in eleven
minutes; that particular record is good yet. Indeed, before Doubleday,
then in a frenzied condition, got his cohorts fairly on the platform to
look for Jimmie, the hollow scream of the big freight engine echoed
through the mountains. Shouts from below brought the operators to the
upper windows; down the Bend they saw a monster locomotive flying
from a trailing horn of smoke. As the stubby string of freight cars
slewed quartering into the lower yard, the startled officials saw them
from the Wickiup windows wrapped in a stream of flame. Every
journal was afire, and the blaze from the boxes, rolling into the steam
from the stack, curled hotly around a bevy of Sioux Indians, who clung
sternly to the footboards and brake-wheels on top of the box-cars. It
was a ride for the red men that is told around the council fires yet. But
they do not always add in their traditions that they were hanging on, not
only for life, but also for a butt of plug tobacco promised for their
timely help at Crockett siding.
By the time Jimmie slowed up his amazing equipment the fire brigade
was on the run from the roundhouse. The Sioux
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