CHAPTER. I

“Again I ask you, Elsie Macumber, will you marry me?”

“Me, Elsie Macumber, the daughter of a full time engineer on the Pennsy railroad, marry the likes of you, Sam Dobinski? You what’s only a hostler down at the roundhouse! Isn’t it fine nerve you’re possessin’.”

“Because I’m a hostler y’ won’t marry me, eh?” Dobinski punctuated his sentence with a large stream of tobacco juice, as if he wanted to lay all the dust about the signal tower where they were standing. “Because you got fine black hair and pretty black eyes and a hell of a pride you won’t marry a Polack like me. Because you got a pretty face you think you can marry any man on the division, and so you snaps your fingers at a hostler. Tell me once, what was your father when he first went to work on this line?”

“No, Sammy, you’re a hostler. That’s bad enough, but it ain’t the real reason I won’t marry y’. It’s because I don’t love you, that’s what. I would marry the devil, or even a hostler if I was sure I loved him, but if I was dead sure I didn’t love him I wouldn’t marry the guardian angel of Saint Peter, if he was t’ ask me for me heart and hand, and offer me a crown of glory t’ boot. ’Tain’t pride, Sam Dobinski. It’s just me.”

“It’s five times I’ve asked you, and——”

“And if it was fifty times I’d still be sayin’ no, just as I do now. You better stick to that little Duch girl, Marie Gross, that I saw you cuddlin’ down in the park th’ other evening. The man I love has got to be taller than I am, and brave. Y’ ain’t neither.”

“Y’ say I’m not brave, eh?” Sam flushed to the roots of his hair, although his reaction was nearly obscured by his coat of grease and soot. His beady eyes narrowed down to dangerous slits, and the hammer he held in his hand swung dangerously back and forth. “What for do you say that?”

“You know why, Sam Dobinski. Last Saturday you let that young wop dare y’ to be seen again with Marie, an’ y’ didn’t knock his teeth out then and there. And here it is Wednesday an’ you ain’t had a date with her since, an’ what’s more y’ ain’t even asked her for one. She told me so herself. So be off with y’ now, and don’t ask me no more.”

A heavy freight, headed out of Toledo for Mansfield, Ohio, came slowly along the track, and as it passed Elsie handed a dinner pail up to one of the brakemen who boarded with her family. Sam, who had been waiting for clearance on this track in order to drive a free engine down to the roundhouse, climbed deliberately up into the cab, but his blood was boiling furiously.

Elsie, with the long free stride of a big strong girl who has never learned the art of “cultured” walking, swung round the tender of the engine, and started across lots toward the high road. As she did so, Sam grasped the throttle and gave it a vicious jerk.

There was a snort of steam hissing through the valves, as the huge drivers slipped swiftly on the rails, unable to get traction so suddenly. Instead of easing up on the steam pressure, Sam Dobinski, furiously opening the sand pipes, poured sand on the rails. The huge drivers, hissing and screeching, tried to take hold, but went on spinning ineffectually.

Elsie, hearing the racket, glanced back over her shoulder, and remarked to herself, “The blame fool, treatin’ a perfectly good engine like that just because a woman tells him the truth about himself!” Then she continued along her path, ruminating as she went. “Imagine me, a strappin’ big Irish lass, married t’ a little runt of a Polack like Sam. Just picture the census taker a-comin’ to the door. ‘Sure now, and who are you that lives here,’ says he, polite like a raisin’ of his hat. And lookin’ at the likes o’ me he expects t’ hear a good soundin’ name that reeks o’ the Emerald Isle, somethin’ like—well, just for fun let’s say Mrs. Patrick O’Hara.”

If a certain young giant of a brakeman on the Toledo division had heard that last observation he would have made the fur fly proposing to Elsie Macumber. But then if he had been there the remark would never have been made.

Perhaps it was the fact that she had a date with Patrick for that evening that put his name in her mind, and there may have been a bit more to it than that.

“But instead of sayin’ Mrs. Patrick O’Hara,” Elsie said to herself, “I blushes an’ says, Mrs. Sam Dobinski. Then the census man gets even more polite because he thinks sure I’m lyin’ to him, but he writes the name in the book because it’s his business to record souls and not to save them. ‘And how many little Dobinskis be there,’ he says. ‘Fourteen,’ says I, feelin’ a wee bit embarrassed.”

Elsie burst into a roar of laughter at the idea of herself as the mother of children named Dobinski, and continued across the lots, wondering how long it would be before Patrick O’Hara would have nerve enough to—well, to stop hesitating and get down to the business of buying a ring for her.

“If the great big handsome ox weren’t such a bashful, blushin’ thing, I could have lined him up weeks ago.”

Meanwhile Dobinski recovered sufficiently from his wrath to realize that he was abusing one of Mr. Baldwin’s best locomotives. He curtailed the steam until the drivers began to behave themselves as their inventor intended they should, and the engine moved smoothly off down the siding, crossed over onto the now vacated down track, and proceeded toward the roundhouse.

When Dobinski put the engine in its stall he went about his customary duties, but his fellow workmen declared he swore even more viciously than usual, and they observed that he barked his knuckles by giving an extra hard jerk on a nut he was tightening.

Finally they saw him pick up his hammer and walk deliberately across the roundhouse to a pit where a young Italian was working, and without any warning he fell upon his victim so viciously that the man had to be carried to the hospital for facial repairs.

Only the timely interference of the workmen prevented Dobinski from killing the fellow with the hammer. In the language of the roundhouse “the runt Polack was in one hell of a rage.”

At noon, when Dobinski went off duty, instead of going to the “hash house” for grub, he proceeded to get royally drunk, and during the process gave public vent to uncomplimentary remarks about “that damned stuck up Macumber girl.” By the time his companions carried him to his room Dobinski was in a fine mood to commit murder.