Джозеф Киплинг - The Day's Work - Volume 1

"Say! Eustis knew what he was doin' when he designed this rig. She's a hummer. New, too."

"Snff! Phew! She is new. That ain't paint, that's—"

A burning pain shot through .007's right rear driver—a crippling, stinging pain.

"This," said .007, as he flew, "is a hot–box. Now I know what it means. I shall go to pieces, I guess. My first road–run, too!"

"Het a bit, ain't she?" the fireman ventured to suggest to the engineer.

"She'll hold for all we want of her. We're 'most there. Guess you chaps back had better climb into your car," said the engineer, his hand on the brake lever. "I've seen men snapped off—"

But the crew fled back with laughter. They had no wish to be jerked on to the track. The engineer half turned his wrist, and .007 found his drivers pinned firm.

"Now it's come!" said .007, as he yelled aloud, and slid like a sleigh. For the moment he fancied that he would jerk bodily from off his underpinning.

"That must be the emergency–stop that Poney guyed me about," he gasped, as soon as he could think. "Hot–box–emergency–stop. They both hurt; but now I can talk back in the round–house."

He was halted, all hissing hot, a few feet in the rear of what doctors would call a compound–comminuted car. His engineer was kneeling down among his drivers, but he did not call.007 his "Arab steed," nor cry over him, as the engineers did in the newspapers. He just bad worded.007, and pulled yards of charred cotton–waste from about the axles, and hoped he might some day catch the idiot who had packed it. Nobody else attended to him, for Evans, the Mogul's engineer, a little cut about the head, but very angry, was exhibiting, by lantern–light, the mangled corpse of a slim blue pig.

"T were n't even a decent–sized hog," he said. "'T were a shote."

"Dangerousest beasts they are," said one of the crew. "Get under the pilot an' sort o' twiddle ye off the track, don't they?"

"Don't they?" roared Evans, who was a red–headed Welshman. "You talk as if I was ditched by a hog every fool–day o' the week. I ain't friends with all the cussed half–fed shotes in the State o' New York. No, indeed! Yes, this is him—an' look what he's done!"

It was not a bad night's work for one stray piglet. The Flying Freight seemed to have flown in every direction, for the Mogul had mounted the rails and run diagonally a few hundred feet from right to left, taking with him such cars as cared to follow. Some did not. They broke their couplers and lay down, while rear cars frolicked over them. In that game, they had ploughed up and removed and twisted a good deal of the left–hand track. The Mogul himself had waddled into a corn–field, and there he knelt—fantastic wreaths of green twisted round his crankpins; his pilot covered with solid clods of field, on which corn nodded drunkenly; his fire put out with dirt (Evans had done that as soon as he recovered his senses); and his broken headlight half full of half–burnt moths. His tender had thrown coal all over him, and he looked like a disreputable buffalo who had tried to wallow in a general store. For there lay scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars, type–writers, sewing–machines, bicycles in crates, a consignment of silver–plated imported harness, French dresses and gloves, a dozen finely moulded hard–wood mantels, a fifteen–foot naphtha–launch, with a solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows, a case of telescopes and microscopes, two coffins, a case of very best candies, some gilt–edged dairy produce, butter and eggs in an omelette, a broken box of expensive toys, and a few hundred other luxuries. A camp of tramps hurried up from nowhere, and generously volunteered to help the crew. So the brakemen, armed with coupler–pins, walked up and down on one side, and the freight–conductor and the fireman patrolled the other with their hands in their hip–pockets. A long–bearded man came out of a house beyond the corn–field, and told Evans that if the accident had happened a little later in the year, all his corn would have been burned, and accused Evans of carelessness. Then he ran away, for Evans was at his heels shrieking: "'T was his hog done it—his hog done it! Let me kill him! Let me kill him!" Then the wrecking–crew laughed; and the farmer put his head out of a window and said that Evans was no gentleman.

But .007 was very sober. He had never seen a wreck before, and it frightened him. The crew still laughed, but they worked at the same time; and 007 forgot horror in amazement at the way they handled the Mogul freight. They dug round him with spades; they put ties in front of his wheels, and jack–screws under him; they embraced him with the derrick–chain and tickled him with crowbars; while .007 was hitched on to wrecked cars and backed away till the knot broke or the cars rolled clear of the track. By dawn thirty or forty men were at work, replacing and ramming down the ties, gauging the rails and spiking them. By daylight all cars who could move had gone on in charge of another loco; the track was freed for traffic; and 007 had hauled the old Mogul over a small pavement of ties, inch by inch, till his flanges bit the rail once more, and he settled down with a clank. But his spirit was broken, and his nerve was gone.

"'T weren't even a hog," he repeated dolefully; "'t were a shote; and you—you of all of 'em—had to help me on."

"But how in the whole long road did it happen?" asked 007, sizzling with curiosity.

"Happen! It didn't happen! It just come! I sailed right on top of him around that last curve—thought he was a skunk. Yes; he was all as little as that. He hadn't more 'n squealed once 'fore I felt my bogies lift (he'd rolled right under the pilot), and I couldn't catch the track again to save me. Swivelled clean off, I was. Then I felt him sling himself along, all greasy, under my left leadin' driver, and, oh, Boilers! that mounted the rail. I heard my flanges zippin' along the ties, an' the next I knew I was playin' 'Sally, Sally Waters' in the corn, my tender shuckin' coal through my cab, an' old man Evans lyin' still an' bleedin' in front o' me. Shook? There ain't a stay or a bolt or a rivet in me that ain't sprung to glory somewhere."

"Umm!" said 007. "What d' you reckon you weigh?"

"Without these lumps o' dirt I'm all of a hundred thousand pound."

"And the shote?"

"Eighty. Call him a hundred pound at the outside. He's worth about four 'n' a half dollars. Ain't it awful? Ain't it enough to give you nervous prostration? Ain't it paralysin'? Why, I come just around that curve—" and the Mogul told the tale again, for he was very badly shaken.

"Well, it's all in the day's run, I guess," said 007, soothingly; "an'—an' a corn–field's pretty soft fallin'."

"If it had bin a sixty–foot bridge, an' I could ha' slid off into deep water an' blown up an' killed both men, same as others have done, I wouldn't ha' cared; but to be ditched by a shote—an' you to help me out—in a corn–field—an' an old hayseed in his nightgown cussin' me like as if I was a sick truck–horse!…Oh, it's awful! Don't call me Mogul! I'm a sewin'–machine, they'll guy my sand–box off in the yard."

And 007, his hot–box cooled and his experience vastly enlarged, hauled the Mogul freight slowly to the roundhouse.

"Hello, old man! Bin out all night, hain't ye?" said the irrepressible Poney, who had just come off duty. "Well, I must say you look it. Costly–perishable–fragile–immediate—that's you! Go to the shops, take them vine–leaves out o' your hair, an' git 'em to play the hose on you."