Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1882 — THE HEADLIGHT. [ARTICLE]

THE HEADLIGHT.

Union Paeifie Conductor. (Laramie Boomerang.! “Yes," said the conductor, biting ofl the tip of his cigar, and slowly scratching a match along his leg, “I’ve &een>» good deal of railroad’ Ijfe that’s interesting and exciting in the twenty years that I've behn twisting brakes and slamming doors for a living." "There is one incident in my railroad life,” continued the conductor, running his tongue carefully over a broken place in the wrapper’of his cigar, “that I never spoke of before to any one. It has caused me more misery than any one thing that ever happened to me in my official career.” “Sometimes even now, after a lapse of many years, I wake in the night with the cold ’drops of agony standing on my face and the nightmare upon me with its terrible surroundings, as plain as on the memorable night it occutred. “I was running extra on the Union Pacific for a conductor who was an old friend of mine, and who had gone South on a vacation. “At about 7 :30, as near as I cap remember, we were sailing along all comfortable one evening, with a straight stretch of track ahead for ten or fifteen miles, running on time, and everybody feeling tip-top, as overland travelers do who are acquainted with each other and feel congenial. All at once the train suddenly slowed down, ran in an old siding, and stopped. “Of course I got out and ran ahead of the engine to see what was the matter. Old Antifat, the engineer, had gone down, and was on the main track looking ahead to where, twinkling along about six or seven miles down the road, apparently, was the headlight of an approaching train, It was evidently ‘wild,’ for nothing was due that we knew of at that hour. “However, we had been almost miraculously saved from a frightful wreck by the engineer’s watchfulness, and everybody went forward and shook old Antifat by the hand and cried.and thanked him until it was the most affecting scene for awhile that I ever witnessed. It was as though we had stopped at the very verge of a-bottom-less chasm, and everybody was crying at once, till it was kind of a cross between a revival and a picnic. “After we had waited about half an hour, I should say, for the blasted train to come up and pass us, and, apparentshe was no nearer, a cold, clammy suspicion began to bore itself into the adamantine shell of my intellect. The more I thought of it the more unhappy I felt. I almost "wished that I was dead. Cold streaks ran up my back, followed by hot ones. I. wanted to go home. I wanted to be where the hungry, prying eyes of the great, throbbing, work-day world could not see me. “I called Antifat to one side and said something to him. He swore softly to himself and kicked the ground, and looked at the headlight still glimmering in the distance. Then he got on his engine and I yelled ‘All aboard!’ In a few moments we were moving again, and the general impression was that the train ahead was side-tracked and waited for us, although there wasn’t a sidetrack within twenty miles, except the one we had just left. “It was never exactly clear to the passengers where we passed that wild train, but I didn’t explain it to them. I was too much engrossed with my surging thoughts. “I never felt my own inferiority so much as I did that night. I never’ so fully realized what a mere speck man is upon the bosom of the universe. “When I surveyed the starry vault of heaven and considered the illimitable qpace, where, beyond and stretching on and on forever, countless suns are placed as centers, around which solar systems are revolving in their regular orbits, each little world peopled, perhaps, with its teeming millions of struggling humanity, and then the other and mightier systems of worlds revolving around these systems till the mind is dazed and giddy with the mighty thought; and then when I compared all this universal magnificence, this brilliant aggregation of worlds and systems of worlds, with one poor groveling worm of the dust, only a little insignificant atom, only a poor, weak, erring, worthless, fallible, blind, groping railroad conductor, with my train peacefully side-tracked in the gathering gloom and patiently waiting for the planet Venus to pass on the main track, there was something about the sombre picture, that has overshadowed my*whole life and made me unhappy and wretched while others were gay“Sometimes and mysejf meet at some liquid restaurant fend silently take something in memory of our great sorrow, but never mention it. We never’ tear open the old rankling wound or laugh over the night gave the main track to Venus, while w r e stood patiently on the siding.”