Foley made sport of the remodelled engine. He used to stand by while the old engineer was oiling and ask him whether he thought she could catch a jack-rabbit. "I mean," Foley would say, "if the rabbit was feeling well."
Dad Sinclair took it all grimly and quietly; he had railroaded too long to care for anybody's chaff. But one day, after the Sky-Scraper had gotten her flues pretty well chalked up with alkali, Foley insisted that she must be renamed.
"I have the only genuine sky-scraper on the West End now myself," declared Foley. He did have a new class H engine, and she was awe-inspiring, in truth. "I don't propose," he continued, "to have her confused with your old tub any longer, Dad."
Dad, oiling his old tub affectionately, answered never a word.
"She's full of soda, isn't she, father?" asked Georgie, standing by.
"Reckon she is, son."
"Full of water, I suppose?"
"Try to keep her that way, son."
"Sal-soda, isn't it, Dad?"
"Now I can't say. As to that I can't say."
"We'll call her Sal Soda, Georgie," suggested Foley.
"No," interposed Georgie; "stop a bit. I have it. Not Sal Soda, at all make it Soda-Water Sal."
Then they laughed uproariously; and in the teeth of Dad Sinclair's protests for he objected at once and vigorously the queer name stuck to the engine, and sticks yet.
To have seen the great hulking machine you would never have suspected there could be another story left in her. Yet one there was; a story of the wind. As she stood, too, when old man Sinclair took her on the Acton run, she was the best illustration I have ever seen of the adage that one can never tell from the looks of a frog how far it will jump.
Have you ever felt the wind? Not, I think, unless you have
lived on the seas or on the plains. People everywhere think the wind blows; but it really blows only on the ocean and on the prairies.
The summer that Dad took the Acton run, it blew for a month steadily. All of one August hot, dry, merciless; the despair of the farmer and the terror of trainmen.
It was on an August evening, with the gale still sweeping up from the southwest, that Dad came lumbering into Acton with his little trolley train. He had barely pulled up at the platform to unload his passengers when the station-agent, Morris Reynolds, coatless and hatless, rushed up to the engine ahead of the hostler and sprang into the cab. Reynolds was one of the quietest fellows in the service. To see him without coat or hat didn't count for much in such weather; but to see him sallow with fright and almost speechless was enough to stir even old Dad Sinclair.
It was not Dad's habit to ask questions, but he looked at the man in questioning amazement. Reynolds choked and caught at his breath, as he seized the engineer's arm and pointed down the line.
"Dad," he gasped, "three cars of coal standing over there on the second spur blew loose a few minutes ago."
"Where are they?"
"Where are they? Blown through the switch and down the line, forty miles an hour."
The old man grasped the frightened man by the shoulder. "What do you mean? How long ago? When is 1 due? Talk quick, man! What's the matter with you?"
"Not five minutes ago. No. 1 is due here in less than thirty minutes; they'll go into her sure. Dad," cried Reynolds, all in a fright, "what'll I do? For Heaven's sake do something. I called up Riverton and tried to catch 1, but she'd passed. I was too late. There'll be a wreck, and I'm booked for the penitentiary. What can I do?"
All the while the station-agent, panic-stricken, rattled on Sinclair was looking at his watch casting it up charting it all under his thick, gray, grizzled wool, fast as thought could compass.
No. 1 headed for Acton, and her pace was a hustle every mile of the way; three cars of coal blowing down on her, how fast he dared not think; and through it all he was asking himself what day it was. Thursday? Up! Yes, Georgie, his boy, was on the Flyer No. 1. It was his day up. If they met on a curve "Uncouple her!" roared Dad Sinclair, in a giant tone.
"What are you going to do?"
"Burns," thundered Dad to his fireman, "give her steam, and quick, boy! Dump in grease, waste, oil, everything! Are you clear there?" he cried, opening the throttle as he looked back.
The old engine, pulling clear of her coaches, quivered as she gathered herself under the steam. She leaped ahead with a swish. The drivers churned in the sand, bit into it with gritting tires, and forged ahead with a suck and a hiss and a roar. Before Reynolds had fairly gathered his wits, Sinclair, leaving his train on the main track in front of the depot, was clattering over the switch after the runaways. The wind was a terror, and they had too good a start. But the way Soda-Water Sal took the gait when she once felt her feet under her made the wrinkled engineer at her throttle set his mouth with the grimness of a gamester. It meant the runaways and catch them or the ditch for Soda-Water Sal; and the throbbing old machine seemed to know it, for her nose hung to the steel like the snout of a pointer.