The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras | Page 8

attempts to enliven him, Top, Senior, let him alone. He was not in a talkative mood himself. The tea-table chat ran in his head and set him to dreaming and calculating. In five years Junior would be seventeen--old enough, even for a lad who was "not strong," to earn his living. If all went well, there ought to be a hundred and fifty dollars in the bank by then. There might be something in Mother's idea of setting him up as a florist. And Mother could help with the flowers.
"Hello! ole feller! look out!"
Stokes had stumbled over the fuel in the tender, in replenishing the boiler-fires. He recovered himself with an oath at the "slippery rubbish." Something had upset his temper, but he neither spoke nor looked like a man who had been drinking. The teazing, chilling drizzle continued. The headlight of the locomotive glanced sharply from glazed rails and embankments; the long barrel-back of the engine shone as with fresh varnish.
"D'ye know that on a night like this She beats out the tune o' Home, Sweet Home, 's plain as ever you heerd a band play it?" said Top, Senior, cheerily out of the thickening damps. "It makes me see Mother 'n the boy clear 's ken be. It's a great thing fur a man to hev a comfortable home, 'n a good woman in it!"
Stokes burst out vehemently at that: "This is worse than a dog's life! We--you 'n me--are no more to them selfish creturs in there"--nodding backwards at the passenger cars--"then the ingine that draws 'em. I'm sick o' freezin' an' slavin' an' bein' despised by men no better 'n I be! How a man of any sperrit 'n' ambition ken stan' it fur twenty years as you hev, beats my onderstandin'."
He will always remember the pause that prefaced the reply, and how Top, Senior, patted the polished lever under his hand as he spoke: "She's a pretty respectable cretur, take Her all in all. When you 'n I run into the las' dark deepo that's waitin' fur us at the end, I hope we'll be able to show's good stiffikits as hern. Here's the bridge! Will be soon home, now."
It was a long bridge, built far out to be above high tides. As they touched it the furnace-door flew open. Some said, afterwards, that the door was not properly secured, others spoke of a "back-draught," others suspected that the fire was over-fed. The volume of flame that leaped out licked the very faces of the two men. They recoiled with a bound and made a simultaneous rush for the air-brake in the forward passenger-car to stop the train and check the backward sweep of the blaze. The passengers, seeing the flash and hearing the whistle and shouts of "Down brakes!" pressed against the front windows and a dense living mass blocked the door against which Topliffe Briggs flung all his weight.
[Illustration: HE HELD FAST!]
"Git in ef you ken," he said to the fireman. "I'll try Her!" He fastened the shaggy great-coat up to his chin as he faced the pursuing fires, walked forward to the stand where lapped and curled the fiercest flames, laid hold of steam-brake and the lever by which he "drove" the engine. His fur-lined gauntlets scorched and shrivelled as he grasped the bar; the fire seized upon his hair and garments with an exultant roar. He held fast. He must get the passengers off the floorless bridge that might ignite at any moment. He must check the engine as soon as he cleared the last pier, or the cars would take fire before they could be uncoupled. He shut his eyes from the maddening heat and glare, and drove straight on. Not so fast as to hurry the greedy flames that were doing their worst upon him, but at a rate that ran them over the river and upon solid earth as the fuel in the tender burst into a blaze and the forward car began to crackle and smoke in the hot draught. At that point steam and air-brakes did their work in effecting a safe halt.
"The fireman was badly scorched," reported the press next day, "but train and passengers were saved by the heroism of the engineer."
The words flashed along the wires over land and ocean; were set up in startling type in hundreds of newspaper offices while he who did not know heroism by name was breathing his last on a mattress laid on the yellow-painted floor of the room he had seen so "clear" when the engine-throb and piston-beat played Home, Sweet Home. The sunshine that had followed the rain touched the white cheek of the opened lily before falling on his sightless eyes and charred right hand.
When they brought him in he knew whose silent tears