Crouching under the mountains in the grip of the storm Medicine Bend
slept battened in blankets and beds. All night at the Wickiup, O'Neill
and Giddings, gray with anxiety, were trying to keep track of Glover's
Special. It was the only train out that night on the mountain
division. For the first hour or two they kept tab on her with little
trouble, but soon reports began to falter or fail, and the despatchers
were reduced at last to mere rumors. They dropped boards ahead of
Special 1018, only to find to their consternation that she was passing
them unheeded.
Once, at least, they knew that she herself had slipped by a night
station unseen. Oftener, with blanched faces they would hear of her
dashing like an apparition past a frightened operator, huddled over his
lonely stove, a spectral flame shot across the fury of the sky--as if
the dread night breathing on the scrap-pile and the grave had called
from other nights and other storms a wraith of riven engines and
slaughtered men to one last phantom race with death and the wind.
Within two hours of division headquarters a train ran lost--lost as
completely as if she were crossing the Sweetgrass plains on pony trails
instead of steel rails. Not once but a dozen times McGraw and Glover,
pawning their lives, left the cab with their lanterns in a vain
endeavor to locate a station, a siding, a rock. Numbed and bitten at
last with useless exposure they cast effort to the wind, gave the
engine like a lost horse her head, and ran through everything for
headquarters and life. Consultation was abandoned, worry put away, one
good chance set against every other chance and taken in silence.
At five o'clock that morning despatchers and night men under the
Wickiup gables, sitting moodily around the big stove, sprang to their
feet together. From up the distant gorge, dying far on the gale, came
the long chime blast of an engine whistle; it was the lost Special.
They crowded to the windows to dispute and listen. Again the heavy
chime was sprung and a second blast, lasting and defiant, reached the
Wickiup--McGraw was whistling for the upper yard and the long night of
anxiety was ended. Unable to see a car length into the storm howling
down the yard, save where the big arc-lights of the platform glared
above the semaphores, the men swarmed to the windows to catch a glimpse
of the belated engine. When the rays of its electric headlight pierced
the Western night they shouted like boys, ran to the telephones, and
while the roundhouse, the superintendent, and the master-mechanic were
getting the news the Special engine steamed slowly into sight through
the whirling snow and stopped at the semaphore. So a liner shaken in
the teeth of a winter storm, battered by heading seas, and swept by
stiffening spray, rides at last, ice-bound, staggering, majestic, into
port.