was to keep it clear. Every day we sent out trains
with the fear that we should not see them again for a week. Freight we
didn't pretend to move; local passenger business had to be abandoned.
Coal, to keep our engines and our towns supplied, we had to carry; and
after that all the brains and muscle and motive power were centered on
keeping One and Two, our through passenger trains, running.

Our trainmen worked like Americans; there were no cowards on our rolls.
But after too long a strain men become exhausted, benumbed, indifferent;
reckless, even. The nerves give out, and will-power seems to halt on
indecision; but decision is the life of the fast train. None of our
conductors stood the hopeless fight like Sankey. He was patient,
taciturn, untiring; and in a conflict with the elements, ferocious. All
the fighting blood of his ancestors seemed to course again in that
struggle with the winter king. I can see him yet, on bitter days,
standing alongside the track in a heavy pea-jacket and Napoleon boots, a
sealskin cap drawn snugly over his straight black hair, watching,
ordering, signaling, while Number One, with its frost-bitten sleepers
behind a rotary, tried to buck through ten and twenty-foot cuts which
lay bank-full of snow west of McCloud.

Not until April did it begin to look as if we should win out. A dozen
times the line was all but choked on us. And then, when snow-plows were
disabled and train crews desperate, there came a storm that discounted
the worst blizzard of the winter. As the reports rolled in on the
morning of the 5th, growing worse as they grew thicker, Neighbor,
dragged out, played out, mentally and physically, threw up his hands. It
snowed all day the 6th, and on Saturday morning the section men reported
thirty feet in the Blackwood canyon. It was six o'clock when we got the
word, and daylight before we got the rotary against it. They bucked away
till noon without much headway, and came in with their gear smashed and
a driving-rod fractured. It looked as if we were at last beaten. Number
One pulled into McCloud that day eighteen hours late; it was Sankey's
and Sinclair's run west.

There was a long council in the round-house. The rotary was knocked out;
coal was running low in the chutes. If the line wasn't kept open for the
coal from the mountains, it was plain we should be tied until we could
ship it from Iowa or Missouri. West of Medicine Pole there was another
big rotary working east, with