Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 240, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 October 1914 — WAS IMAGINARY HORSE [ARTICLE]

WAS IMAGINARY HORSE

BUT IT MADE MUCH TROUBLE FOR THE ENGINEER. Incident That Proves the Human Equation Cannot Be Ignored, Though Scientific Efficiency May May Be at Its Highest Eugene Field’s poem about the little ,boy who “ain’t afraid of snakes and worms and bugs and toads and mice” would be applicable to engineers. But when it comes to horses and cows there is fear, and a justifiable one, for there is little that can do so much havoc with a moving engine as a cow or a horse that stands in its way. The body of the animal is liable to get wedged between the track and the engine and derail it. “I was fireman with an engineer on a Western road who nearly Iqst his. job because he thought he saw a hohse on the track,” related a veteran recently. “We were making an afternoon run over a level stretch at a pretty fast clip, when the engineer, John Malone, a man of 14 years’ driving on that road, tooted his whistle and told me that he saw a horse on the track, but, said he, it would not move or even prick up its ears, although he three, times in fast succession. “I rushed to the window of the cab, looked out and then took some waste and started rubbing the windows of the pilot cab. And my reason for all this was that I didn’t see any horse at all. And after I had finished cleaning the window he didn’t either. “The horse had been an imaginary horse, a speck on the window that I had just cleaned had taken the form, in his mind, but it was quite a while before I could convince him of i£. “In his desire for safety he had only thought of stopping his train in time, and had not thought of the horse after the first impression he had received from the speck. “The joke was on the engineer, and they kidded him about it until it reached the ears of the traffic superintendent, and then he was dismissed. But when a certificate from an optician was shown to the powers that be stating that his eyes were in perfect condition he was re-instated. “It’s just one of those little incidents that shows that even though we get most everything down to a state of scientific efficiency the human equation cannot be Ignored.”