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Words: 15832 in 5 pages
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Produced by: Roger Frank and Sue Clark. This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.
Over the Wire
Snow and ice on that mountain. Nothing but snow. The wind drove it with a howl against the windows, where it stuck on the warm panes. Sometimes I could just make out the blur of the semaphore lights and sometimes I couldn't. All day the blizzard had dumped its swirling load about us, and now, when night closed down, the storm took the tower in its teeth, shaking it like you've seen a dog shake a rat.
Oh, we were warm and cozy enough with our stove red hot. Which was more than Donaldson, the agent at Hastings, could say. His wire talk was rotten, chattery, and he told us he'd run out of coal. Looked like he'd freeze to death, according to him. But Big Ben prophesied grimly that Donaldson could take care of himself, so we might as well save our worries.
I don't suppose you ever heard of Big Ben, but that is your loss. Every soul on the Mountain Division knew him. His Morse snapped out like a track torpedo, fast, too, but accurate, staccato, with a smooth flow as if a machine had hold of the key. Dots and dashes were part of him, for, after years of it, he could express himself better that way.
Sort of feeling for the language, I suppose. I've seen the same gift since, but never to the extent Ben possessed it. Why, he could come mighty close to telling the color of your eyes over a telegraph-wire.
He and I had worked tower BB-17 on the Mountain Division for three years, and during that time I never saw him flurried. Once a freight, running extra, got by us--dispatcher tangled up his train-sheet. Forty minutes later a relay came into stop her or she'd meet 87 on the big grade.
It takes just forty minutes to run from our tower to Hastings, further down the line. Hastings is the last station with a siding before the grade. In other words, the freight ought to have been getting her O. K. from Hastings right then.
Was Ben excited? Not one little bit.
Donaldson caught his first call. Clear as a bell it was. And Donaldson had time to flag the freight.
But the particular night I'm speaking of, my side partner appeared a bit uneasy, which was enough to set my think-tank working. He'd drop down alongside the key for a moment; then he'd wander over to the windows, trying to pierce the blizzard.
He was a big man with a hearty laugh and a mouth full of teeth and a whiskered chin full of determination. His red hair, as brilliant as the glow in his corn-cob pipe, usually stood on end. But his eyes were gray and pleasant; that is, generally they were. Yet I've noticed 'em hard as rocks, drilling into you with a gleam in 'em like you see jumping across a spark-gap. Right now they were anxious.
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