The Real Man. Lynde Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ replacing the outside fastening of the door from within. There was loose hay under-foot and it gave him his idea. Groping again, he found a piece of wire, a broken bale-tie. The box car was old and much of its inner sheathing had disappeared. With the help of his pocket-knife he enlarged a crack in the outer sheathing near the door, and a skilful bit of juggling with the bent wire sufficed to lift the hasp into place on the outside and hook it.

      Following this clever removal of one of the hazards, he squatted upon the floor near the door and waited. Though he was familiar with the schedules of the passenger-trains serving the home city, he knew nothing of the movements of the freights. Opening the face of his watch, he felt the hands. It was half-past nine, and the thrust and whistle of the air-brakes under the cars gave notice that the road engine had been coupled on. Still the train did not pull out.

      After a little he was able to account for the delay. Though his knowledge of railroad operating was limited, common sense told him that the freight would not be likely to leave, now, ahead of the ten o'clock passenger. That meant another half-hour of suspense to be paid for in such coin as one might be able to offer. The fugitive paid in keen agonies of apprehension. Surely, long before this the watchman would have returned to the bank, and the hue and cry being raised, the pursuit must now be afoot. In that case, the dullest policeman on the force would know enough to make straight for the railroad yard.

      Smith knelt at the crack of the car door and listened, while the minutes dragged slowly in procession. Once, through the crack, he had a glimpse of the smoky flare of a kerosene torch in the hands of a passing car-inspector; and once again, one of the trainmen walked back over the tops of the cars, making a creaky thundering overhead as he tramped from end to end of the "empty." But as yet there was no hue and cry, or, if there were, it had not reached the railroad yard.

      Keenly alive to every passing sound, Smith finally heard the passenger-train coming in from the east; heard the hoarse stridor of the engine's pop-valve at the station stop, and the distance-diminished rumblings of the baggage and express trucks over the wooden station platform. The stop was a short one, and in a few minutes the passenger-train came down through the yard, its pace measured by the sharp staccato blasts of the exhaust. It was the signal of release, and as the quickening staccato trailed away into silence, Smith braced himself for the slack-taking jerk of the starting freight.

      The jerk did not come. Minute by minute the interval lengthened, and at last the listener in the "empty" heard voices and saw through the crack of the door a faint nimbus of lantern light approaching from the rear of the train. The voices came nearer. By the dodging movements of the light rays, Smith knew instantly what was coming. His pursuers were out, and they were overhauling the waiting freight-train, searching it for a stowaway.

      He hardly dared breathe when the lantern-bearers reached his car. There were a number of them, just how many he could not determine. But McCloskey, the Lawrenceville chief of police, was one of the number. Also, there was an Irish yardman who was carrying one of the lanterns and swinging it under the cars to show that the truss-rods and brake-beams were empty.

      "'Tis not the likes of him that do be brake-beamin' their way out of town, Chief," the Irishman was saying. "'Tis more likely he's tuk an autymobile and the middle of the big road."

      "There's no automobile missing, and his own car is still in the garage," Smith heard the police chief say. And then: "Hold your lantern up here, Timmy, till we see if this car door is fastened shut."

      It was a measure of the distance that the bank clerk and small-city social leader had already travelled on the road toward a complete metamorphosis that the only answer to this threat of discovery was a tightening of the muscles, a certain steeling of thews and sinews for the wild-beast spring if the door should be opened. One thought dominated all others: if they took him they should not take him alive.

      Happily or unhappily, as one may wish to view it, the danger passed. "The door's fastened, all right," said one of the searchers, and the menace went on, leaving Smith breathing hard and chuckling grimly to himself over the cunning forethought which had prompted him to grope for the bit of wire bale-tie.

      Past this there was another interval of waiting – a brief one, this time. Then the long freight began to move out over the switches. When he could no longer see the sheen of the city electrics in the strip of sky visible through his door crack, Smith gathered up the leavings of hay on the car floor and stretched himself out flat on his back. And it was another measure of the complete triumph of the elemental underman over the bank clerk that he immediately fell asleep and did not awaken until a jangling of draw-bars and a ray of sunlight sifting through the crack of the door told him that the train had arrived at some destination, and that it was morning.

      Sitting up to rub his eyes and look at his watch, the fugitive made a hasty calculation. If the train had been in motion all night, this early morning stopping-place should be Indianapolis. Getting upon his feet, he applied an investigative eye to the crack. The train, or at least his portion of it, was side-tracked in a big yard with many others. Working the pick-lock wire again, he unhasped the door and opened it. There was no one in sight in this particular alley of the crowded yard, and he dropped to the ground and slid the door back into place.

      Making a note of the initials and number, so that he might find the car again, he crawled under three or four standing trains and made his way to a track-side lunch-counter. The thick ham sandwich and the cup of muddy coffee eaten and drunk with the appetite of a starved vagrant set up another mile-stone in the distances traversed. Was it, indeed, only on the morning of yesterday that he had sent his toast back because, forsooth, the maid at Mrs. Gilman's select boarding-house for single gentlemen had scorched it a trifle? It seemed as incredible as a fairytale.

      Beyond the quenching of his hunger and the stuffing of his pockets with two more of the sad sandwiches, he went back to his box car, knowing that, in the nature of things, his flight was as yet only fairly begun. His train, or some train in which his car was a unit, was just pulling out, and he was barely in time to slide the door and scramble in. Once inside, he made haste to close the opening before the train should emerge from the shelter of its mate on the next track. But before he could brace himself for the shove, a hand came down from the car roof, a brakeman's coupling-stick was thrust into the riding-rail of the door, and the closing operation was effectively blocked.

      Smith stood back and waited for a head to follow the hand. It came presently; the bare, tousled head of a young brakeman who had taken off his cap and was lying on his stomach on the car roof to look under the eaves into the interior. Smith made a quick spring and caught the hanging head in the crook of his elbow. "You're gone," he remarked to the inverted face crushed in the vise of forearm and biceps. "If you turn loose, you'll break your back as you come over, and if you don't turn loose, I can pull your head off."

      "Leggo of me!" gasped the poor prisoner, drumming with his toes on the roof. "Wha – whadda you want with my head? You can't do nothin' with it when you get it!"

      "I have got it," said Smith, showing his teeth. "By and by, when we get safely out of town, I'm going to jump up and bite you."

      The brakeman tried to cry out that he was slipping; that the fall would kill him. Smith felt him coming and shifted his hold just in time to make the fall an assisted somersault, landing the man clumsily, but safely, inside of the car. The trigging stick had been lost in the scuffle, and Smith's first care was to slide the door.

      "Say; what kind of a 'bo are you, anyway?" gasped the railroad man, flattening himself against the side of the car and struggling to regain his suddenly lost prestige; the time-honored authority of the trainman over the ride-stealer. "Don't you know you might 'a' killed me, pullin' me off'm the roof that way?"

      "I can do it yet, if you feel that you've missed anything that was rightfully coming to you," Smith laughed. Then: "Do you happen to have a pipe and a bit of tobacco in your clothes?"

      "My СКАЧАТЬ