The Engineer’s Ash-Box Ghost: A Tale of New Year’s Eve Peril

By The Thickness of Buttons.

"How 'bout us at 10 you say?" yelled up the head of steam on a long time cried old Engineer Zimmerman to several strange figures, who, deeply buried in thick furs that left only glaring eyes exposed, came peeping, stamping, and covered with snow, into the engine room at Seattle.

It is New Year's eve, and the thick engineman's room is covered with an exceptionally neat cloth, and on its legs stand the mighty hearth which old Zimmerman is vigorously working; while the clouds of steam lie at his feet. The empty room that stands in front is devoted to good punch.

"The devil! Cried Zimmerman; but old boy," says a new comer, shaking off the snow, and pulling off fur muffs, jacket's and outer clothes. "What do you sugar babies know of hard days in your glass houses, on your machines that rock you with easy springs gently if you have in your warm arms? You ought to have stood with us back in steel and did on the little machines that went so hard and jolting you felt every jog of the rails from the soles of your feet up under your caps, and that wouldn't budge a bit if the snow lay a hand's-breadth deep on the rails; and then we stood all out-of-doors, day and night, without screen or shelter. Summer and winter, the hottest days in July and the coldest nights in December, without any protection but our coats and buffalo-skin overcoats, that had been well drubbed, I can tell you, by the storms. That was something like hard times. But what do you know about it? For that matter, what's the worst you have to do to what they've put our engineer through here today, who has made off A 1 from his examination? And here he is now."

"Hallo old fellow. How was it? How did it go? Did they make you A 1? Come, sit down, bring on the punch!" were the exclamations poured on the new comer from all sides.

"Hush noise, there," broke in the harsh voice of old Zimmerman. "Sit down? Yes! Punch No! Hennig and Franz aren't here yet, that are coming in with the freight. It is twenty minutes behind now, and must be in a minute or two more. Pass around glass about for all, that's fair play."

"Well, now," began the young candidate, wiping from his forehead the perspiration that broke out afresh at the recollection, "they gave it to me well, I can tell you. I was examined by the new rules, you know. There was a row of chaps, I guess a rod long, and nary one of 'em, except our engine master, did I ever see on an engine or in a shop. And our engine master wasn't the worst, either. They questioned me sharp, that's a fact, right up to the handle, but one could understand them, and give them some sort of reasonable answer. But what the other fellows asked me I didn't more'n half understand. 'Twasn't any railroad lingo they used and what they were driving at well, yes, I know—I'd looked it up in the books. Superintendent Herzel lent me, just to be able to answer. Never saw anything of it in service, never had any occasion for it, and don't believe I ever shall if I live to be a hundred."

"And what in thunder is it all, then?" said a guest of the crowd, lighting his cigar, just as the door was suddenly thrown open. A cloud of snow burst in, and out of it emerged the dim forms of two new arrivals—the expected engineers of the two engines that had brought in the delayed freight train.

"Bravo! Had you've got him?" was the greeting that met them. "Now round the punch, and let's have the solids in from what's-his-name's! Here's a bit of roast for one thing," cried one of the last arrived, and raised to view a half-scorched hare, that he held by the hind legs.

"Where did you get that creature? And what are you going to do with him?"

"This fellow wished to do himself the honor of making a part of Hennig's treat to-night, but probably was in too much of a hurry, and did himself a little too brown," laughed the possessor of the hare. "The red lights of my 'Hustle' routed him out of the hole in the snow where he sat crunched on the bank as comfortable as you please, and he began to run a wager with our train. For two or three minutes, perhaps, I saw the little stupid, Mack skimming over the snow in the second track alongside the engine. I gave a short lyff 'That scared him; he put on a spurt, got ahead into the red light of the signal-lantern—perhaps that blinded him—he doubled before the engine as he would before a dog, right the track. I looked at the other side to see when he would come in sight again, but he didn't appear. I thought he was either killed or had run back under the train, and forgot the creature. But when we'd got to Snoqualmie, and the rate of my engine was being clean off, the fellow came out underneath there with the toker called out from the ash-hole: 'Hennig, you've brought a roast with you! I believe the fire of the Plato has cooked the fellow's brains. Come down and see.' Sure enough, as true as I sit here, there lay my hare underneath in my ash-box, dead and half stewed. The ash-box must have caught him on the jump. He was in a hurry to be roasted."

A loud laughter followed the young engineer's story.

"Now laugh, but you, you stupid blackguards," the poor lass growled Zimmerman. "He filled the glasses because you don't know what a cursed pleasant feeling one has under an ash-box! And do you know that, then?" cried several voices, in tones of strong doubt.

"I know everything, as you rascals know right well, and have been through everything that can happen between the underside of the rails and the tap of the smoke-stack."

"But you haven't been in the ash-box," laughed the company.

"Not exactly," replied the old man, very gravely, "but under it, and partly too, very near it. But I tell you I've been by when a splendid train of magnificent cars, full of people in high spirits, with one just before—before you could lift your hand to your eyebrow—a match was nothing but a heap of kindling-wood, and broken screws and pieces of wood and wheels, out of which and cries for help while desperate men found money wringing their hands and locomotives, like kittens on a roof, down the bank, and rolled over and over, wheels up and smoke-stack underneath, and all was steam, fragments, fire, hitting and shock! But master was beyond thirty years' railroad life—has my heart stood so still it did under the ash-box."

"Tell us about it, Uncle Zim," cried voices one could see were used to making themselves heard above the clatter, rattle, and clank of the locomotives.

"Well, well! I'll do it," he replied, as he slowly filled his tobacco-pouch and began to fill his short pipe, "though I don't like to go over the story. To this day there's always something turns over here under the third rib here when I think of it. You see, boys, the hands that worked this pouch in those days came near being the hands of a widower then, and my Carl and Julia weren't born yet, though you might even then have called me Stout Franz."

"But what's that to do with it, Uncle?" asked the circle.

"Well then, in the devil's name, light up your plagued elegant cigars. They suit you dolls in glass cases, as the short-pipe suits us stout fellows under the free heavens. Pass the glasses this way, and then hold your jaw till I get through."

"It was upon New Year's eve, in the year 1845, thirty good years ago, and a devil of a storm, driving snow and sleet mixed together. I was a young fellow—I'd been married about a year. You know the station is a horrid place for service. Let a storm come which way it will, it always sweeps clear across the square, that's as open and level as the top of this table. In toward the town there is a little cut with two tracks, one or the other of which at always chokes up in the first hour of a drifting snow. Just as you get through the cut, in the third house in Garden Street, behind the old-mills that we often cursed for a nuisance, because we always had to shoot off steam going by for fear of the sparks from the chimney catching in the shingle roof, I lived with my house, and Franz, just born, who is Superintendent now over at Rudrich's."

"So, on Sylvester-eve, 1845, I came into the station with a heavy freight train from Griesthal, after standing for fourteen hours on the engine in a storm at six below. I was frozen stiff as an icicle, and enough, you bet, to get hold of the Sylvester-punch. It was getting dusk already as I came in, and through the whirl of glistening flakes, saw the station with its hundreds on hundreds of lights, like a huge Christmas-box. A poor Christmas-box for me! There were collected through the holidays a regular town of cars, something like five hundred of them, and they'd got to be all made up so that everything could be off directly after New-Year's. Hardly had I got off my engine in the engine-house when up comes the station-master, and says to me: 'Hauser is taken sick, and you will have to take No. 3 in his place.'

"'Ten thousand thunders!' said I; 'but I hope it won't last till midnight, Mr. Station-master, for then I must be at home, or there's ill luck for the New-Year.'

"'Fiddlesticks!' said he; 'only you be sure you're on hand,' and away he was gone in the driving snow."

"I thought I'd taken the matter more to heart than it was worth, and laid the old shiver that crept over my skin to the uncanny blast that came snorting at me as I came out with the engine. The whole air was full of fine snow, and, as the wreaths of it drove like white ghosts across the engine, I could hardly see the smoke-stack."