Samuel Merwin - The Road Builders

“When Charlie saw this laid out right before his eyes, he took frightened all of a sudden – his knees were going like that. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back into the shadow.

“‘Hen, for heaven’s sake, let’s get out of here quick. This means the penitentiary.’

“‘You can go,’ said I. ‘I didn’t invite you to the party.’

“Right beside the tracks there was a watch-box, shut up as if there wasn’t anybody in it, but I could see the light coming out at the top. It was going to be ticklish business, I knew that. We had to haul out over a drawbridge, for one thing, to get out of the yards, and then whistle for the switch over to the southwestern tracks. Had to use the signals of the other roads, too. But I was in for it.

“‘Well, Hen,’ said Charlie, ‘if you’re going to do it, what in – are you standing around for now?’

“‘Got to wait for the Lake Shore Express to go through,’ said I.

“Charlie sort of groaned at this and for an hour we sat there and waited. I tried to talk about the oil explosion down by Titusville, but Charlie, somehow, wasn’t interested. All the while those engines were blowing off tremendous, and the crews were sitting around just smoking steady.

“Finally, at one o’clock, I went over to the engineer of the first engine. ‘How many men have you got?’ said I.

“‘Four brakemen,’ he said, ‘each of us.’

“‘All right,’ said I. ‘I guess I don’t need to tell you what to do.’

“They all heard me, and say, you ought to have seen them jump up. The engineer was up and on his engine before I got through talking; and he just went a-flying down the yard, whistling for the switch. The four brakemen ran back along the fifty-car string. You see they had to couple up at those four crossings and that was the part I didn’t like a bit. But I couldn’t help it. The engineer came a-backing down very rapid, and bumped that front car as if he wanted to telescope it.

“Well, sir, they did it – coupled up, link and pin. The engineer was leaning ‘way out the window, and he didn’t wait very long after getting the signal, before he was a-hiking it down the yard, tooting his whistle for the draw. Heaven only knows what might have happened, but nothing did. He got over the draw all right with his fifty cars going clickety – clickety – clickety behind him, and then I could see his rear lights and hear him whistling for the switch over to the southwestern tracks. Then I gave the signal for the other engine. Charlie, all this time, was getting worse and worse. He was leaning up against me now, just naturally hanging on to me, looking like a somnambulist. You could hear his knees batting each other. And the engineer of that second engine turned out to be in the same fix. He was so excited he never waited for the signal that the cars were all coupled up, and he started up with a terrific toot of his whistle and a yank on the couplings, leaving thirty cars and one brakeman behind. But I knew it would never do to call him back.

“Well, now, here is where it happened. That whistle was enough to wake the sleeping saints. And just as the train got fairly going for the draw, tooting all the way, the door of that watch-box burst open and three policemen men came running out, hard as they could run. Of course there was only one thing to do, and that’s just the thing that Charlie Greenman didn’t do. He turned and ran in the general direction of the Swift House as fast as those long legs of his could carry him. Two of the officers ran after him and the other came for me. I yelled to Charlie to stop, but he’d got to a point where he couldn’t hear anything. The other officer came running with his night-stick in the air, but my Scotch-Irish was rising, and I threw up my guard.

“‘Don’t you touch me,’ I yelled; ‘don’t you touch me!’

“‘Well, come along, then,’ said he.

“‘Not a bit of it,’ said I. ‘I’ve nothing to do with you.’

“‘Well, you ran,’ he yelled; ‘you ran!’

“I just looked at him. ‘Do you call this running?’ said I.

“‘Well,’ said he, ‘the other fellow ran.’

“‘All right,’ said I, ‘we’ll run after him.’ So we did. Pretty soon they caught Charlie. And I was a bit nervous, for I didn’t know what he might say. But he was too scared to say anything. So I turned to the officer.

“‘Now,’ said I, ‘suppose you tell us what it is you want?’

“‘We want you,’ said one of them.

“‘No, you don’t,’ said I.

“‘Yes, we do,’ said he.

“It seemed to be getting time for some bluffing, so I hit right out. ‘Where’s your headquarters?’ said I.

“‘Right over here,’ said he.

“‘All right,’ said I, ‘that’s where we’re going, right now. We’ll see if two railroad men can’t walk through Chaplin’s yards whenever they feel like it.’

“And all the while we were talking I could hear that second train a-whooping it up for the state line – clickety – clickety – whoo-oo-oo! – clickety – clickety – getting fainter and fainter.

“There was a big captain dozing on a bench in the station house. When he saw us come in, he climbed up behind his desk so he could look down on us – they like to look down at you, you know.

“‘Well, Captain,’ said the officer, ‘we’ve got ’em.’

“‘Yes,’ the captain answered, looking down with a grin, ‘I think you have.’

“‘Well now,’ said I, to the captain, ‘who have you got?’

“‘That’ll be all right,’ said he, with another grin.

“It was pretty plain that he wasn’t going to say anything. There was something about the way he looked at us and especially about that grin that started me thinking. I decided on bluff number two. I took out my pass case, opened it, and spread out annual passes on the Great Windy, the Erie, the South-eastern, and the Lake Shore. My name was written on all of them, H. L. Tiffany, Pittsburg. The minute the captain saw them he looked queer, and I turned to Charlie and told him to get out his passes, which he did. For a minute the captain couldn’t say anything; then he turned on those three officers, and you ought to have heard what he said to them – gave ’em the whole forty-two degrees right there, concentrated.

“‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said to us, when he’d told the officer all that was on his mind, ‘this is pretty stupid business. I’m very sorry we’ve put you to this trouble, and I can tell you that if there is anything I can do to make it right, I’ll be more than glad to do it.’

“Well, there wasn’t anything in particular that I wanted just then except to get out of Buffalo quick. But I did stop to gratify my curiosity.

“‘Would you mind telling me, Captain,’ said I, ‘who you took us for?’

“The captain looked queer again, then he said, solemn, ‘We took you for body snatchers.’

“‘Body snatchers!’ I looked at Charlie, and Charlie, who was beginning to recover, looked at me.

“‘You see,’ the captain went on, ‘there’s an old building out there by the yard, and some young surgeons and medical students have been using it nights to cut up people in, and when the boys saw two well-dressed young fellows hanging around there in the middle of the night, they didn’t stop to think twice. I’m very sorry, indeed. I’ll send two of these men over to escort you to your hotel, with your permission.’

“That didn’t please me very much, but I couldn’t decline. So we started out, Charlie and I and the two coppers. But instead of going to the Swift House I steered them into the Mansion House, and dampened things up a bit. Then I got three boxes of cigars, Havana imported. I gave one to each of the officers, and on the bottom of the third I wrote, in pencil, ‘To the Captain, with the compliments of H. L. Tiffany, of the A. & G. W., Pittsburg, Pa.’ I thought he might have reason to be interested when he got his next morning’s paper in knowing just who we were. The coppers went back, tickled to death, and Charlie and I got out into the street.