Allan laboured with the others. One thought sang in his brain, keeping time to the steady rise and fall of the : “The track must be cleared; the track must be cleared.” The great pile of coal before him took on a and threatening personality—it was a dragon, with its claws at the road’s throat. It must be conquered—must be dragged away. From time to time he stopped a moment to one of the sandwiches, not noticing the dirt and coal-dust that settled upon it. He was not hungry, but he felt that he must eat the food.
Most of the other men were chewing tobacco, their working convulsively in with their arms. They had long since ceased to be human beings—they had become machines. Their movements were precise, automatic, regular. Their faces grew gradually black and blacker in the perpetual dust which arose from the coal; their eyes became with black, and bloodshot under the constant of the dust. They breathed it in, swallowed it, absorbed it. Their sense of smell and taste gradually left them—or, at least, they could smell and taste only one thing, coal-dust. They ceased to resemble men; one coming upon them unawares would have taken them for some horrible group from Dante’s , doing terrible through . They looked neither to the right nor left; their eyes were always on the coal—on this shifting black monster with which they were doing battle. Their hands seemed welded to the shovels, which rose and fell, rose and fell.
The cold rain beat in sheets around them, soaking their clothes, and yet they scarcely felt this added , so intent were they upon the task before them. Most of them had thrown off their coats at the beginning of the struggle, and now their wet shirts stuck tightly to their skins, showing every muscle. Gradually, by almost imperceptible degrees, the pile of coal on the banks of the cut grew higher; gradually the pile on the track grew less, but so slowly that it was .
Above them on the bank, the great locomotive, there and turned completely around by the force of the collision, stood a grim sentinel. It was the one piece of luck, the officers told themselves, in connection with this , that the engine had been tossed there out of the way. To have raised it from the track and placed it there would have taken hours, and every minute was so precious! It would take hours to get it down again, but that need not be done until the track was clear.
Toward the middle of the morning, three fresh gangs of men came from the east and fell to work beside the others. But the others did not think of stopping. Instead, with staring eyes and tight-set teeth, they worked a little harder, to keep pace with the freshness and of the newcomers. Ninety shovels were the coal aside, digging into it, eating it away. Here, there, and everywhere the officials went, seeing that every stroke told, that not an ounce of energy was wasted, taking a hand themselves, driving themselves as hard as any of the men. Soon the coal was heaped so high along the sides of the cut that a force was put to work throwing it farther back. Almost all of it had to be handled twice!
Noon came—a dark noon without a sun; a noon marked by no hour of rest for these toilers. Back in the wrecking-car a great of coffee steamed and bubbled; the cook carried pails of it among the men, who paused only long enough to swallow a big dipperful. Even Allan, who had no taste for it, drank deep and long, and he was astonished at the flood of warm vigour it seemed to send through him. Every half-hour this coffee was passed around, strong and black and . It was a for which the men would pay later on in limp reaction, but it did its work now.
Experience had proved that no other means was so good as this to sustain men against , hour after hour, and to drive away sleep from the brain. Time was when the railroad company had experimented with other , but they had long since been discarded.
Still the rain , and a biting wind from the north turned the weather colder and colder. A sheet of formed over the coal, welding it into a solid mass, which required the vigorous use of picks to dislodge. The men slipped and stumbled, with , but still the shovels rose and fell. Here and there, the twisted and broken track began to appear.
At the side of the track the train-master called a lineman, who carried a wire up a pole and attached it to one of the wires overhead. A telegraph instrument was connected with this, and, sitting down upon the bank, the train-master ticked in to headquarters the news that the track would be clear at midnight, and repaired six hours later.
In this, as in everything, the train-master knew his men. Ten minutes before midnight the last of coal was out of the way,—the track was clear,—one part of the battle had been won. But another part yet remained to fight,—the track must be rebuilt, and the work of doing it began without a moment’s delay. The twisted rails and splintered ties were out of the way; the road-bed, which had been ploughed up by the wheels of the derailed cars, was hastily levelled. From the wrecking-car gangs of men staggered under new ties and rails, which were piled along beside the track where they would be needed.
At last the road-bed was fairly level again, and ties were laid with energy by the light of the torches, which gave the scene a which it had lacked by day. of men moved back and , now disappearing in the darkness, now leaping into view again, working on, to their very last ounce of strength and endurance.
As the ties were got into place, the rails were down upon them and fish-pl............