out yourself. To begin with, fifty passengers' lives--that's
$5000 apiece, isn't it?" Callahan had a cold-blooded way of figuring a
passenger's life from the company standpoint. "It would have killed
over fifty passengers if the runaway had ever struck 59. There wouldn't
have been enough left of 59 to make a decent funeral. Then the
equipment, at least $50,000. But there was a whole lot more than
$300,000 in it for Bucks."

"How so?"

"He told me once that if he hadn't saved 59 that night he would never
have signed another order anywhere on any road."

"Why?"

"Why? Because, after it was all over, he found out that his own mother
was aboard 59. Didn't you ever hear that? Well, sir, it was Christmas
Eve, and the year was 1884."

* * * * *

Christmas Eve everywhere; but on the West End it was just plain December
24th.

"High winds will prevail for ensuing twenty-four hours. Station agents
will use extra care to secure cars on sidings; brakemen must use care to
avoid being blown from moving trains."

That is about all Bucks said in his bulletins that evening; not a word
about Christmas or Merry Christmas. In fact, if Christmas had come to
McCloud that night they couldn't have held it twenty-four minutes, much
less twenty-four hours; the wind was too high. All the week, all the
day, all the night it had blown--a December wind; dry as an August noon,
bitter as powdered ice. It was in the early days of our Western
railroading, when we had only one fast train on the schedule--the St.
Louis-California Express; and only one fast engine on the division--the
101; and only one man on the whole West End--Bucks.

Bucks was assistant superintendent and master-mechanic and train-master
and chief dispatcher and storekeeper--and a bully good fellow. There
were some boys in the service; among them, Callahan. Callahan was
seventeen, with hair like a sunset, and a mind quick as an air-brake. It
was his first year at the key, and he had a night trick under Bucks.

Callahan claims it blew so hard that night that it blew most of the
color out of his hair. Sod houses had sprung up like dog-towns in the
buffalo grass during the fall. But that day homesteaders crept into
dugouts and smothered over buffalo chip fires. Horses and cattle huddled
into friendly pockets a little out of the worst of it, or froze mutely
in pitiless fence corners on the divides. Sand drove gritting down from
the Cheyenne hills l