Francis Lynde

“ As yet, there was neither sight nor sound of the coming Limited. Away up the line, where the siding dovetailed again into the main track through the outlet switch, a light twinkled and stared glassily, stared red; but neither Darragh nor the upcoming fireman saw it or suspected the trap that an absent-minded brakeman on a freight, passing Last Chance an hour earlier, had set for them.
None the less, the trap was there, as the red eye of the switch lamp sufficiently advertised; and malignant ingenuity could scarcely have devised a better one. ”

“ Utterly weary, as it seemed, she had leaned her head against the cushioned box back and closed her eyes. Darragh did not try to make her talk. The cab clamor of a fast locomotive in full flight bars anything milder than a shout with lips to ear; and, besides, the young Irishman had all of the rough man's gentleness and compassion for the woman loved.
He was making the slow-down for the siding at Last Chance before she opened her eyes and started, awake.
“Where are we, Jack, dear?” she asked, in weak bewilderment.
“At Last Chance Siding. We meet the Limited.” ”

“ Darragh, the man at the throttle of the 809, was all right till an enemy put the “black curse" on him. Perhaps he should have laughed when the Clurichawn—the little old dwarf with the long white beard—confronted him. But Darragh hailed from Enniskiilen and the fear of death gripped him. The mysticism in the blood of the Celtic race dies hard. ”

“ By the time the Brewster distance signals were flicking to the rear, Darragh had read his clearance order, and was humped over his levers, nursing the big ten-wheeler up to its speed by all the little arts known to the skilled time cutter. ”

“ An emergency crew was hurriedly replacing the defective brass of the hot box under the second car; and the throng of station loungers, gathered to see the fast train go through, massed itself about the hastening workers. Darragh leaned out of his cab window and babbled curses. Five minutes only had been allowed on the special schedule for the engine changing at Brewster; and they were gone, with five more on top of them to add to the ten minutes lost by the late arriving—fifteen minutes to make up, and a promise of more. ”

“ He was leaning out of the cab window and staring fixedly at something on the station platform when the train shot over the westward switch of the siding and Carter climbed over the coal to be ready to pull down the spout of the watering tank. Almost as soon as it took shape, the “something” evolved itself into the figure of a woman starting to her feet from her seat on a rude bench at the end of the building, and shading her eyes with her hand from the dazzling glare of the upcoming headlight. ”

“ Just then the superintendent and, MacFarland came up.
“It's up to you, Darragh,” shouted Maxwell, bellowing, to make himself heard above the sudden stuttering roar of the 1098's pop valve. “You've got the honor of the Red Butte Western in your hand to-night. Go to it like a man.”
Darragh nodded without taking his eyes from the hurrying conductor. Carter, returning from his errand, caught Jenkins in mid flight, and, snatching the duplicate copy of the train order, hurled himself up the engine steps. ”

“ One hour and fifty-five minutes was the time allowance for the special from Angels to the mid-desert station of Navajo, where it would take its new time-card rights as regular train Number 20; and Darragh, taking advantage of the long, level desert tangents, pushed the big ten-wheeler so successfully that his watch was ticking off the last half minute of the one hundred and fifteen when the lonely little cattle-loading station in the midst of the desolations came into sight. ”

“ Through the tangents in the park, and around the looping curves in the foothills, the five-car train raced in a spark-throwing projectile flight, with the engineer crouching motionless on his high seat, and the agile little fireman dancing back and forth on the foot-board, hearing nothing but the roar of the exhaust, and seeing nothing but the sliding cataract of coal and the white-hot cavern he was skillfully filling against the fire-cutting grades of the cañon run just ahead. ”

“ Kitty Clare had put one round, white arm on top of the gate palings, and was crying softly into the crook of it.
“And still they'll be making you take the fast mail run,” she sobbed brokenly. “'Tis your grandfather and my grandmother—she's always saying that your luck would turn.”
It is not often that the man becomes the comforter; but this time Darragh proved the exception.
“Don't cry, Kitty, colleen. The luck's with us yet. Three times have I seen the Darragh dwarf, and twice death has leaped at me. But I've got to be a man, darlin' ”

“ MacFarland was comparatively new to Brewster and the Red Butte Western, and he cocked his ear—his Scotch ear—apprehendingly.
“So that's it, is it?” he snorted. “That's why Darragh never opens his pay envelope till he gets to the savings bank with it? Kitty's a good girl, but she shouldn't be trying to chock the wheels of the service. ”

“ He's too good a man to take the back track in his trade for the anxious fears of the little lunch-counter girl. But we won't mess or meddle in the little girl's love affair—not any.”
This talk in the dispatcher's office befell only a few days before the deliveries of the new locomotives began, and something less than a fortnight before the new time card was to go into effect. For reasons wholly mysterious to the roundhouse contingent at Brewster, and to the railroad colony at large, Lucky Darragh was still trying to fight off his promotion on the very eve of its materialization ”

“ Kinney, my new shorthand man, gets his meals at the lunch counter now and then, and Kitty has been pumping him to try to find put if Darragh was going to be put on the fast train. Kinney says she is scared stiff for fear Jack's luck will turn and he won't live long enough to marry her. ”

“ Farther along, when he had been promoted to a passenger run, there were more of the striking dissertations upon the maxim that it is better to be born luck}' than rich. Once, when he was racing the day express down the western grades in the Crosswater Hills, the off-shift dispatcher went to sleep on the job and let the Denver Limited pass the last station at which he could have given it a “meet” order with Darragh's belated train. ”

“ Maxwell's special, and we oughta got it at Angels. If I'd pulled through, as I was goin' to, we'd 'a' got 'em somewhere along about Dry Gulch—a head-ender, with a bunch of us chewed up and steam cooked. ”