Various
Golden Stories
VI
PRISONERS IN THE TOWER
An Episode of Travel
By LUCY COPINGER
"In the words of Macaulay this, ladies and gentleman, is the saddest spot on earth." The white-haired old Tower guard in charge of the little chapel of Saint Peter waved his hand impressively toward the open door. "Through that door"—the heads of the American tourists who were doing the Tower all turned in unison—"you may see the block upon which many a royal head has rested, and beneath these very stones lie buried two dukes between two queens—Dukes of Northumberland and of Somerset, with the Queens Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard—all beheaded."
The chapel was a crypt-like place, windowless, dark, and musty, and at this mournful climax one of the tourists who was nervous moved suddenly off that particular stone upon which she had been standing; the school teachers out for self-improvement began to write it all in their note-books, while a stout matron evidently of good old Dutch stock looked sadly down at the flat, gray stones. "Poor things!" she murmured, "and there ain't one of them got a respectable white tombstone with a wreath carved on it." Then, in their usual two-by-two line, the party moved down the aisle wearily, but triumphant in the fact that they had succeeded in doing the Tower, the Abbey, and the Museum all in one day. Peggy Wynne, in demurely severe blue suit and jaunty panama, lagged at the end of the line while she looked critically at her compatriots.
"The animals went out two by two,
The elephant and the kangaroo,"
she murmured to herself, "and I'm so tired of playing Noah's Ark or a Christian Association out for a lark," she continued in unconscious poetical despair. Then, warned by the attitude of the guard, that wonderful attitude of the haughty Briton in hopes of a tip, she opened her ridiculously tiny gold-linked purse and gave herself up to the absorbing question as to which of the pieces therein was a shilling. Having at last decided this, she presented it to the guard with a dazzling smile. It had been so long since Peggy had had an opportunity to smile at anything masculine that the smile was unusually bright.
She had already passed through the little door when she suddenly turned back. The other tourists, noses in Baedekers, were hurrying on before, the guard was busily counting his sixpences, and she slipped back into the dim chapel unperceived.
"They'll think I've gone back to those dingy lodgings," she reflected, as she groped her way between the benches into an even more shadowy corner—a little recess, with a tiny niche in the wall, that had probably been the sanctuary of some pious king. She seated herself comfortably behind the pillar in the corner and gazed pensively at the stones.
"Tombs and tombs and tombs!" she murmured mournfully, "even in Paris, instead of Maxim's and the cafes, nothing but tombs! The next time I want to see where anybody is buried I will just go out to the cemetery instead of coming across that dreadful ocean. Oh, just to have one adventure before I go home!" she continued with a long sigh, "a real adventure with a real man in it—not a horrid, womanish Frenchman or a stolid, conceited Britisher, but a nice, safe American—like—like—like—my American."
Then the dimple in her right cheek that was probably responsible for the calling her Peggy, in spite of her many protests for her rightful dignity of "Margaret," came out suddenly as it always did when she thought of her American. She had called him that from the time when, in the midst of the perplexities of the English luggage system, she had looked up and found him watching her. The cut of his gray suit and his shoes had told her his nationality at once, and they had looked for a moment at each other with that peculiar friendliness that compatriots in a strange land always feel. She had forgotten him until, leaning from a taxi-cab in the Rue de la Paix, she had met the same eyes, this time so unrefrainedly joyful in their recognition that she had suddenly blushed. When, a week later at Calais, as she stood by the rail of the departing Channel steamer she caught a glimpse of him on the dock, he had seemed like an old friend, and before she had thought she had smiled in answer to his lifted hat. She had grown so sure of seeing him that now when they had been in London a week and he had not appeared she found herself suddenly sick of tombs and tourists.
Peggy's day had been a strenuous one of trams, motor-busses, abbeys, and galleries, and though she realized an adventure might probably await her outside, it was pleasant to sit for awhile in the dimness of the quiet chapel. From her recess she could look out through the open doors upon the tragic Tower Green, where in the sunlight two sparrows were frivolously flirting. Even as she watched, the sparrows grew dim, her ridiculously tiny purse slipped from her hand, her head with its thick dark hair dropped against the pillar, and her lashes touched her cheek. After awhile a cautious footfall sounded in the chapel, then somewhere a heavy door closed, and all was still.
When Peggy sat up indignantly with the queer sensation that she had been violently shaken, darkness surrounded her, a darkness so deep that she could not see her hand as she ran it along the bench in front of her. With the movement came remembrance of her surroundings, and also a realization in strained and aching muscles that a stone pillar is not a wise choice for a head-rest.
"Oh!" she gasped painfully.
"Don't be frightened," entreated a voice quite near to her, and out of the lesser darkness a tall black figure rose suddenly.
"I am not at all frightened," said Peggy at once. In spite of the bigness of the figure there was something reassuring in the voice with its crisp, humorous note and its intonation that Peggy at once recognized as American.
"What are you doing here?" she continued, inhospitably addressing the darkness before her.
"I went to sleep" the voice explained, "on the other side of the pillar."
"How silly!" said Peggy, severely, "didn't you see me here?"
"It was a little dim," the voice apologized and, Peggy's silence still condemning, "you should have snored," it continued extenuatingly.
Peggy arose with a dignity that she hoped penetrated the darkness. Then she groped along the bench.
"My purse," she explained anxiously, "and it had a sixpence for tea and two shillings for tips," she continued with an unconscious epitome of the joys of traveling. As she groped along bench and floor she was conscious of assistance from her companion, and just as she grasped the discovered purse she felt purse and hand caught and retained in a firm grip.
"I apologize," he said at once, still however, holding on to her hand, "I thought it was the purse."
Peggy jerked her hand loose indignantly, and speechless with wrath she hurried toward the door only to find that she had mistaken her direction. In her effort to recover her bearings she become hopelessly confused, stumbled noisily over a bench, and fell headlong into the arms of her companion.
"You had better sit down again," he remarked coolly as he returned her to her seat and sat down calmly beside her. As he did so Peggy noted curiously the dim attractive silhouette of his head and the remarkably good line from ear to shoulder.
"I am going at once," she said haughtily, but without moving.
"You can't," the man beside her replied, "and if you promise not to cry or fall over any more benches I will tell you why—although I myself do not object to the latter," he continued judicially, "but for the sake of your own bones, merely."
Peggy ignored the last.
"Why can't I go?" she said defiantly.
"Because the door is locked," he explained succinctly.
"We can both scream or you can throw a bench through the window," said Peggy triumphantly.
The unseen laughed a nice laugh that Peggy liked.
"In that latter case, beside the fact that there is no window, we would surely be had up before the head-warden of this old jail. Besides, do you know what time it is?"
"About tea time," said Peggy who had lunched frugally at one of the tea-shops on a cup of tea and a jam roll.
"Just before you woke up," said her companion, "I used my last match—it always is the last in a case like this—to look at my watch. It was half-past twelve. Remember, you promised–" at a warning gurgle from Peggy.
Then suddenly a laugh rang out sweet and clear in the darkness of the musty chapel, a laugh that echoed into the recesses of the old tombs—perhaps in its musical cadences stirring pleasantly the haughty slumber of their noble occupants.
"What are you laughing at?" said the voice suspiciously.
"An adventure at last!" Peggy cried, clapping her hands applaudingly.
"I am glad you take it so cheerfully," returned her companion. "There is only one thing to do," he continued practically, "I thought it out for myself before you woke up and complicated matters by your appearance. Of course with sufficient yelling we can arouse the barrack sentry, and for our pains we'd probably have the whole barrack out to arrest us. There is no way in which you can offend the noble and independent Briton more deeply than by treating lightly his worship of royalty, dead or alive, and we would probably be held for committing lese majeste by getting ourselves locked up with the numerous relicts of Henry the Eighth. But if we wait until morning we can run good chances of slipping out unperceived with the first crowd of tourists."
"I feel just like the little princes in the Tower, or Queen Mary or Charlotte Corday," murmured Peggy in ecstatic historical confusion, "or somebody noble and romantic and beheaded. I think I shall play at being Queen Mary. I once learned a piece about her. It was very sad, but I always stuck at the fifth line and had to sit down. Since we have to stay here till morning we might as well amuse ourselves and you may be Rizzio."
"Who was he?" asked her companion sceptically, "sounds like one of those Italian fellows."
"He was Queen Mary's chaperon," Peggy explained vaguely, "and he sang her love songs."
"Good," said the voice agreeably.
"Can't you think of something else for me?" said the unseen, gloomily appalled by the prospect of having doughnut recipes pronounced over his remains.
"How would you like to be Darnley?" said Peggy. "He was her husband." "I'll be Darnley," came from the darkness so decidedly that Peggy jumped.
"You have to get blown-up right off," she hastened to add. "Darnley did."
"Oh he did, did he?" the voice spoke with deeper gloom.
"Queen Mary did it," added Peggy.
"Well, even in the Dark Ages matrimony seems to have given your sex the same privileges," philosophized her companion cynically.
"How mean!" said Peggy coldly, "I shall play at being Elizabeth all alone."
"It wouldn't suit you," said her discarded leading man, "not with your voice."
"Why not?" said Peggy.
"Because it's not hard and cold and metallic enough. Because it has too much womanly sweetness in it and not enough harsh masculinity."
"What a good dramatic critic you would make!" said Peggy a little spitefully, "and since you are reading voices I can tell quite well by yours that you are fat and red faced."
The man laughed.
"And by the same token you are all sweetness and blue eyes and dearness and dimples," he punished her. Then the banter in his tones died suddenly out.
"There's something I want to tell you," he said abruptly, with a movement that seemed in the darkness like a sudden squaring of his shoulders. "But first I want you to tell me your name."
"What a sudden descent from romance and poetry to mere stupid facts," hedged Peggy. "Think, in this atmosphere of royalties if it should be Bridget, or, still more horrible, Mamie."
"Please," the voice persisted in its gravity, "we have been fellow-prisoners, you know, and you should be kind."
Peggy told him with the full three-syllabled dignity of the "Margaret."
"Mine," he continued, "is John Barrett."
"Now," cried Peggy, "if this were a proper adventure we have reached the place when I should be able to say, 'Why! not the Jack Barrett that Brother Billy knew at Harvard?' Then you would cry, 'And this is my old chum William's little sister Peggy that used to send him fudge!' and then everything would be all right. But I haven't any brother at all," she finished regretfully.
"And Harvard wasn't my college," said her companion. "However," he went on, "it would take more than the conventional backing of many brother Billies to put me right with you after I've told you what I have to tell you."
"Then don't do it," said Peggy softly.
"If I didn't know you'd find it out in a very few minutes I wouldn't," he confessed shamelessly. "But before I tell you I want you to know what finding you here meant to me. You've got to realize the temptation before you can understand the fall. You always got away from me, from that first time in Liverpool–"
"Oh!" said Peggy with a gasp.
"And at Paris and at Calais when you smiled adorably at me–"
"I didn't" said Peggy, blushing in the darkness.
"When you didn't smile adorably at me, then," pursued the voice relentlessly. "It was always the same. I found you and you were gone—snatched away by an unkind fate in the form of your man from Cook's. When you sailed away from me at Calais I was booked to leave that same day from Antwerp, but I came on here after you instead. London is small—the American tourist London, that is—the Abbey, the Museum, the galleries, and the Tower, but I seemed to miss you everywhere. It was fate again that sent me here to find you asleep in the corner."
"Now I know you are going to tell something very foolish," said Peggy reflectively, "when people begin to talk about fate like that you always find they are just trying to shift the responsibility."
"I want you to know it wasn't premeditated, however," pursued the voice. "It wasn't till the guard shut the door that I thought of it. You will believe that, won't you?" he pleaded.
The dimple appeared suddenly in Peggy's cheek. There came an echo from without of many footsteps.
"And so," she took up the tale quickly, "having nicely planned it all out you shook me rudely to wake me up, told me the door was locked, and that it was midnight when it was only four in the afternoon. And it wasn't at all necessary to shake me so hard," she continued, "because I woke up when you came in."
"Peggy you knew!" the voice cried with a sudden realization, "you knew and you stayed!" He caught her hand, and in the darkness she could feel his nearness. Then suddenly the door opened letting into the chapel a flood of bright sunlight. "Ladies and gentlemen," the sonorous voice of the old guard came to them, "this, in the words of Macaulay, is the saddest spot on earth," continued the mournful recital, even as, in happy contradiction, Peggy and her American, secure in their little recess, looked blissfully into each other's eyes.
VII
SANKEY'S DOUBLE-HEADER
A Winter's Tale
By FRANK H. SPEARMAN
The oldest man in the train service didn't pretend to say how long Sankey had worked for the company. Pat Francis was a very old conductor; but old man Sankey was a veteran when Pat Francis began braking. Sankey ran a passenger train when Jimmie Brady was running—and Jimmie afterward enlisted and was killed in the Custer fight.
There was an odd tradition about Sankey's name. He was a tall, swarthy fellow, and carried the blood of a Sioux chief in his veins. It was in the time of the Black Hills excitement, when railroad men, struck by the gold fever, were abandoning their trains even at way-stations and striking across the divide for Clark's Crossing. Men to run the trains were hard to get, and Tom Porter, trainmaster, was putting in every man he could pick up without reference to age or color. Porter (he died at Julesburg afterward) was a great "jollier," and he wasn't afraid of anybody on earth. One day a war party of Sioux clattered into town and tore around like a storm. They threatened to scalp everything, even to the local tickets. They dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the despatcher's office upstairs, while the despatcher was hiding below, under a loose plank in the baggage-room floor. Tom, being bald as a sand-hill, considered himself exempt from scalping parties anyway. He was working a game of solitaire when they bore down on him, and got them interested in it. That led to a parley, which ended by Porter's hiring the whole band to brake on freight trains. Old man Sankey was said to have been one of that original war party.
Now this is merely a caboose story, told on winter nights when trainmen get stalled in the snow that drifts down from the Sioux country. But what follows is better attested.
Sankey, to start with, had a peculiar name—an unpronounceable, unspellable, unmanageable name. I never heard it, so I can't give it to you; but it was as hard to catch as an Indian pony, and that name made more trouble on the payrolls than all the other names put together. Nobody at headquarters could handle it; it was never turned in twice alike, and they were always writing Tom Porter about the thing. Tom explained several times that it was Sitting Bull's ambassador who was drawing that money, and that he usually signed the pay-roll with a tomahawk. But nobody at Omaha ever knew how to take a joke. The first time Tom went down, he was called in very solemnly to explain again about the name, and being in a hurry and very tired of the whole business, Tom spluttered: "Hang it, don't bother me any more about that name! If you can't read it make it Sankey, and be done with it."
They took Tom at his word. They actually did make it Sankey; and that's how our oldest conductor came to bear the name of the famous singer. And more I may tell you: good name as it was—and is—the Sioux never disgraced it.
I suppose every old traveler on the system knew Sankey. He was not only always ready to answer questions; but, what is more, ready to answer the same question twice. It is that which makes conductors gray-headed and spoils their chances for heaven—answering the same questions over and over again. Children were apt to be startled a bit at first sight of Sankey, he was so dark. But Sankey had a very quiet smile that always made them friends after the first trip through the sleepers, and they sometimes ran about asking for him after he had left the train. Of late years—and this hurts a bit—these very same children, grown ever so much bigger, and riding again to or from California or Japan or Australia, will ask, when they reach the West End, about the Indian conductor. But the conductors who now run the overland trains pause at the question, checking over the date limits on the margins of the coupon tickets, and handing the envelopes back, look at the children, and say quietly: "He isn't running any more."
If you have ever gone over our line to the mountains or to the coast, you may remember at McCloud, where they change engines and set the diner in or out, the pretty little green park to the east of the depot, with a row of catalpa trees along the platform line. It looks like a glass of spring water. If it happened to be Sankey's run and a regular West End day, sunny and delightful, you would be sure to see standing under the catalpas a shy, dark-skinned girl of fourteen or fifteen years, silently watching the preparations for the departure of the Overland. And after the new engine had been backed champing down, and harnessed to its long string of vestibuled sleepers; after the air-hose had been connected and examined; after the engineer had swung out of his cab, filled his cups, and swung in again; after the fireman and his helper had disposed of their slice-bar and shovel and given the tender a final sprinkle, and after the conductor had walked leisurely forward, compared time with the engineer, and cried, "All Abo-o-o-ard!" then, as your coach moved slowly ahead, you might notice, under the receding catalpas, the little girl waving a parasol or a handkerchief at the outgoing train. That is, at Conductor Sankey; for she was his daughter, Neeta Sankey. Her mother was Spanish, and died when Neeta was a wee bit. Neeta and the Limited were Sankey's whole world.
When Georgie Sinclair began pulling the Limited, running west opposite Foley, he struck up a great friendship with Sankey. Sankey, though he was hard to start, was full of early-day stories. Georgie, it seemed, had the faculty of getting him to talk; perhaps because when he was pulling Sankey's train he made extraordinary efforts to keep on time; time was a hobby with Sankey. Foley said he was so careful of it that he let his watch stop when he was off duty just to save time. Sankey loved to breast the winds and the floods and the snows, and if he could get home pretty near on schedule, with everybody else late, he was happy; and in respect of that, as Sankey used to say, Georgie Sinclair could come nearer gratifying Sankey's ambition than any engine-runner we had. Even the firemen used to observe that the young engineer, always neat, looked still neater on the days when he took out Sankey's train.
By and by there was an introduction under the catalpas. After that it was noticed that Georgie began wearing gloves on the engine—not kid gloves, but yellow dogskin; and black silk shirts—he bought them in Denver. Then—such an odd way engineers have of paying compliments—when Georgie pulled into town on Number Two, if it was Sankey's train, the big sky-scraper would give a short, hoarse scream, a most peculiar note, just as it drew past Sankey's house, which stood on the brow of the hill west of the yards. Thus Neeta would know that Number Two and her father, and naturally Mr. Sinclair, were in again, and all safe and sound.
When the railway trainmen held their division fair at McCloud there was a lantern to be voted to the most popular conductor—a gold-plated lantern with a green curtain in the globe. Cal Stewart and Ben Doton, who were very swell conductors and great rivals, were the favorites, and had the town divided over their chances for winning it. But at the last moment Georgie Sinclair stepped up to the booth and cast a storm of votes for old man Sankey. Doton's friends and Stewart's laughed at first; but Sankey's votes kept pouring in amazingly. The two favorites got frightened; they pooled their issues by throwing Stewart's vote to Doton. But it wouldn't do. Georgie Sinclair, with a crowd of engineers—Cameron, Kennedy, Foley, Bat Mullen, and Burns—came back at them with such a swing that in the final five minutes they fairly swamped Doton. Sankey took the lantern by a thousand votes. But I understood it cost Georgie and his friends a pot of money.
Sankey said all the time that he didn't want the lantern, but just the same he always carried that particular lantern, with his full name, Sylvester Sankey, ground into the glass just below the green mantle. Pretty soon, Neeta being then eighteen, it was rumored that Sinclair was engaged to Miss Sankey, and was going to marry her. And marry her he did; though that was not until after the wreck in the Blackwood gorge after the Big Snow.
It goes by just that name on the West End yet; for never were such a winter and such a snow known on the plains and in the mountains. One train on the northern division was stalled six weeks that winter, and one whole coach was chopped up for kindling wood. The great and desperate effort of the company was to hold open the main line, the artery which connected the two coasts. It was a hard winter on trainmen. Week after week the snow kept falling and blowing. The trick was not to clear the line; it was to keep it clear. Every day we sent out trains with the fear that we should not see them again for a week. Freight we didn't pretend to move; local passenger business had to be abandoned. Coal, to keep our engines and our towns supplied, we had to carry; and after that all the brains and muscle and motive power were centered on keeping One and Two, our through passenger trains, running.
Our trainmen worked like Americans; there were no cowards on our rolls. But after too long a strain men become exhausted, benumbed, indifferent; reckless, even. The nerves give out, and will-power seems to halt on indecision; but decision is the life of the fast train. None of our conductors stood the hopeless fight like Sankey. He was patient, taciturn, untiring; and in a conflict with the elements, ferocious. All the fighting blood of his ancestors seemed to course again in that struggle with the winter king. I can see him yet, on bitter days, standing alongside the track in a heavy pea-jacket and Napoleon boots, a sealskin cap drawn snugly over his straight black hair, watching, ordering, signaling, while Number One, with its frost-bitten sleepers behind a rotary, tried to buck through ten and twenty-foot cuts which lay bank-full of snow west of McCloud.
Not until April did it begin to look as if we should win out. A dozen times the line was all but choked on us. And then, when snow-plows were disabled and train crews desperate, there came a storm that discounted the worst blizzard of the winter. As the reports rolled in on the morning of the 5th, growing worse as they grew thicker, Neighbor, dragged out, played out, mentally and physically, threw up his hands. It snowed all day the 6th, and on Saturday morning the section men reported thirty feet in the Blackwood cañon. It was six o'clock when we got the word, and daylight before we got the rotary against it. They bucked away till noon without much headway, and came in with their gear smashed and a driving-rod fractured. It looked as if we were at last beaten. Number One pulled into McCloud that day eighteen hours late; it was Sankey's and Sinclair's run west.
There was a long council in the round-house. The rotary was knocked out; coal was running low in the chutes. If the line wasn't kept open for the coal from the mountains, it was plain we should be tied until we could ship it from Iowa or Missouri. West of Medicine Pole there was another big rotary working east, with plenty of coal behind her; but she was reported stuck fast in the Cheyenne Hills. Foley made suggestions, and Dad Sinclair made suggestions. Everybody had a suggestion left. The trouble was, Neighbor said, they didn't amount to anything, or were impossible. "It's a dead block, boys," announced Neighbor sullenly after everybody had done. "We are beaten unless we can get Number One through to-day. Look there: by the holy poker, it's snowing again."
The air was dark in a minute with whirling clouds. Men turned to the windows and quit talking. Every fellow felt the same—hopeless; at least, all but one. Sankey, sitting back of the stove, was making tracings with a piece of chalk. "You might as well unload your passengers, Sankey," said Neighbor. "You'll never get 'em through this winter."
And it was then that Sankey proposed his double-header.
He devised a snow-plow which combined in one monster ram about all the good material we had left, and submitted the scheme to Neighbor. Neighbor studied it, and hacked at it all he could, and brought it over to the office. It was like staking everything on the last cast of the dice, but we were in the state of mind which precedes a desperate venture. It was talked over an hour, and orders were finally given by the superintendent to rig up the double-header and get against the snow with it.
All that day and most of the night Neighbor worked twenty men on Sankey's device. By Sunday morning it was in such shape that we began to take heart. "If she don't get through, she'll sure get back again, and that's what most of 'em don't do," growled Neighbor, as he and Sankey showed the new ram to the engineers.
They had taken the 566, George Sinclair's engine, for one head, and Burns's, the 497, for the other. Behind these were Kennedy, with the 314, and Cameron, with the 296. The engines were set in pairs, headed each way, and buckled up like pack mules. Over the pilots and stacks of the head engines rose the tremendous plows, which were to tackle the worst drifts ever recorded, before or since, on the West End. The ram was designed to work both ways. Under the coal, each tender was loaded with pig-iron.
The beleaguered passengers on Number One, side-tracked in the yards, eagerly watched the preparations Sankey was making to clear the line. Every amateur on the train had his camera out taking pictures of the ram. The town, gathered in a single great mob, looked silently on, and listened to the frosty notes of the sky-scrapers as they went through their preliminary manœuvers. Just as the final word was given by Sankey, conductor in charge, the sun burst through the fleecy clouds, and a wild cheer followed the ram out of the western yard; it was looked on as a sign of good luck to see the sun again.
Little Neeta, up on the hill, must have seen them as they pulled out. Surely she heard the choppy ice-bitten screech of the 566; for that was never forgotten, whether the service was special or regular. Besides, the head cab of the ram carried this time not only Georgie Sinclair, but her father as well. Sankey could handle a slice-bar as well as a punch, and rode on the head engine, where, if anywhere, the big chances would come. What Sankey was not capable of in the train-service we never knew, because he rose superior to every emergency that ever confronted him.
Bucking snow is principally brute force; there is very little coaxing. West of the bluffs there was a volley of sharp tooting, like code signals between a fleet of cruisers, and in just a minute the four ponderous engines, two of them in the back motion, fires white and throats bursting, steamed wildly into the cañon. Six hundred feet from the first cut, Sinclair's whistle signaled again. Burns and Cameron and Kennedy answered; and then, literally turning the monster ram loose against the dazzling mountain, the crews settled themselves for the shock.