Steve and the Steam Engine Part 6

Tolman. "How are you, Steve? Fainting away?"

The boy laughed.

"Well, I could eat something if I had it," he confessed.

"I wish I hadn't mentioned food," went on Mr. Tolman humorously. "It was an unfortunate suggestion."

"I'm hungry, too," piped Doris.

"There, you see the epidemic you have started, Henry," called Mrs.

Tolman accusingly. "Here is Doris vowing she is in the last throes of starvation."

n.o.body noticed that in the meanwhile the mother had reached down and lifted into her lap the small suitcase hidden in the bottom of the car.

She opened the cover and began to remove its contents.

At length, when a remark her husband made to her went unheeded, he sensed her preoccupation and came around to the side of the car where she was sitting. Immediately he gave a cry of surprise.

"My word!" he exclaimed. "Steve, come here and see what your mother has."

Stephen looked.

There sat Mrs. Tolman, unpacking with quiet enjoyment sandwiches, eggs, cake, cookies, and olives.

A shout of pleasure rose from the famished travelers.

"So it was not your jewels, after all, Mater!" cried Stephen.

"No, and after the way you have slandered me and my little suitcase, none of you deserve a thing to eat," his mother replied. "However, I am going to be magnanimous if only to shame you. Now climb in and we will have our lunch. You can fix the tire afterward."

The men were only too willing to obey.

As with brightened faces they took their seats in the car, Stephen smiled with affection at his mother.

"Well, Mater, Watt was not the only person who lived to see himself appreciated; and I don't believe people were any more grateful to him for his steam engine than we are to you right now for this luncheon. You are the best mother I ever had."

CHAPTER IV

THE STORY OF THE FIRST RAILROAD

The new tire went on with unexpected ease and early afternoon saw the Tolmans once more bowling along the highway toward Northampton. The valley of the Connecticut was decked with harvest products as for an autumnal pageant. Stacks of corn dotted the fields and pyramids of golden pumpkins and scarlet apples made gay the verandas of the old homesteads or brightened the doorways of the great red barns flanking them.

"All that is needed to transform the scene into a giant Hallowe'en festival is to have a witch whisk by on a broomstick, or a ghost bob up from behind a tombstone," declared Mrs. Tolman. "Just think! If we had come by train we would have missed all this beauty."

"I see plainly that you do not appreciate the railroads, my dear,"

returned her husband mischievously. "This is the second time to-day that you have slandered them. You sound like the early American traveler who a.s.serted that it was ridiculous to build railroads which did very uncomfortably in two days what could be done delightfully by coach in eight or ten."

"Why, I should have thought people who had never heard of motor-cars would have welcomed the quicker transportation the railroads offered,"

was Mrs. Tolman's reply.

"One would have thought so," answered Mr. Tolman. "Still, when we recall how primitive the first railroads were, the prejudice against them is not to be wondered at."

"How did they differ from those we have now, Dad?" Doris asked.

"In almost every way," answered her father, with a smile. "You see at the time Stephenson invented his steam locomotive nothing was known of this novel method of travel. As I told you, persons were accustomed to make journeys either by coach or ca.n.a.l. Then the steam engine was invented and immediately the notion that this power might be applied to transportation took possession of the minds of people in different parts of England. As a result, first one and then another made a crude locomotive and tried it out without scruple on the public highway, where it not only frightened horses but terrified the pa.s.sers-by. Many an amusing story is told of the adventures of these amateur locomotives. A machinist named Murdock, who was one of James Watt's a.s.sistants, built a sort of gra.s.shopper engine with very long piston rods and with legs at the back to help push it along; with this odd contrivance he ventured out into the road one night just at twilight. Unfortunately, however, his restless toy started off before he was ready to have it, and turning down an unfrequented lane encountered a timid clergyman who was taking a peaceful stroll and frightened the old gentleman almost out of his wits. The poor man had never seen a locomotive before and when the steaming object with its glowing furnace and its host of moving arms and legs came puffing toward him through the dusk he was overwhelmed with terror and screamed loudly for help."

A laugh arose from the listeners.

"And that is but one of the many droll experiences of the first locomotive makers," continued Mr. Tolman. "For example Trevithick, another pioneer in the field, also built a small steam locomotive which he took out on the road for a trial trip. It chanced that during the experimental journey he and his fireman came to a tollgate and puffing up to the keeper with the baby steam engine, they asked what the fee would be for it to pa.s.s. Now the gate keeper, like the minister, had had no acquaintance with locomotives, and on seeing the panting red object looming like a specter out of the darkness and hearing a man's voice intermingled with its gasps and snorts, he shouted with chattering teeth:

"There is nothing to pay, my dear Mr. Devil! Just d-r-i-v-e along as f-a-s-t--as--ever--you--can."

His hearers applauded the story.

"Who did finally invent the railroad?" inquired Doris after the merriment had subsided.

"George Stephenson, an Englishman," replied her father. "For some time he had been experimenting with steam locomotives at the Newcastle coal mines where some agency stronger than mules or horses was needed to carry the products from one place to another. He had no idea of transporting people when he began to work out the suggestion. All he thought of was a coal train which would run on short lengths of track from mine to mine. But the notion a.s.sumed unexpected proportions until the Darlington road, the most ambitious of his projects, reached the astonis.h.i.+ng distance of thirty-seven miles. When the rails for it were laid the engineer intended it should be used merely for coal transportation, as its predecessors had been; but some of the miners who lived along the route and were daily obliged to go back and forth to work begged that some sort of a conveyance be made that could also run along the track and enable them to ride to work instead of walking. So a little log house not unlike a log cabin, with a table in the middle and some chairs around it, was mounted on a cart that fitted the rails, and a horse was harnessed to the unique vehicle."

"And it was this log cabin on wheels that gave Stephenson his inspiration for a railroad train!" gasped Doris.

"Yes," nodded her father. "When the engineer saw the crude object the first question that came to him was why could not a steam locomotive propel cars filled with people as well as cars filled with coal.

Accordingly he set to work and had several coach bodies mounted on trucks, installing a lever brake at the front of each one beside the coachman's box. In front of the grotesque procession he placed a steam locomotive and when he had fastened the coaches together he had the first pa.s.senger train ever seen."

"It must have been a funny looking thing!" Steve exclaimed, smiling with amus.e.m.e.nt at the picture the words suggested.

"It certainly was," agreed his father. "If you really wish to know how funny, some time look up the prints of this great-great-grandfather of our present-day Pullman and you will be well repaid for your trouble; the contrast is laughable."

"But was this absurd venture a success?" queried Mrs. Tolman incredulously.

"Indeed it was!" returned her husband. "In fact, Stephenson, like Watt, was one of the few world benefactors whose gift to humanity was instantly hailed with appreciation. The railroad was, to be sure, a wretched little affair when viewed from our modern standpoint, for there were no gates at the crossings, no signals, springless cars, and every imaginable discomfort. Fortunately, however, our ancestors had not grown up amid the luxuries of this era, and being of rugged stock that was well accustomed to hards.h.i.+ps of every variety they p.r.o.nounced the invention a marvel, which in truth it was.

"You've said it!" chuckled Steve in the slang of the day.

"In the meantime," went on Mr. Tolman, "conditions all over England were becoming more and more congested, and from every direction a clamor arose for a remedy. You see the invention of steam spinning machinery had greatly increased the output of the Manchester cotton mills until there was no such thing as getting such a vast bulk of merchandise to those who were eager to have it. Bales of goods waiting to be transported to Liverpool not only overflowed the warehouses but were even stacked in the open streets where they were at the mercy of robbers and storms. The ca.n.a.ls had all the business they could handle, and as is always the result in such cases their owners became arrogant under their prosperity and raised their prices, making not the slightest attempt to help the public out of its dilemma. Undoubtedly something had to be done and in desperation a committee from Parliament sent for Stephenson that they might discuss with him the feasibility of building a railroad from Manchester to Liverpool. The committee had no great faith in the enterprise. Most of its members did not believe that a railroad of any sort was practical or that it could ever attain speed enough to be of service. However, it was a possibility, and as they did not know which way to turn to quiet the exasperated populace they felt they might as well investigate this remedy. It could do no harm."

Mr. Tolman paused as he stooped to change the gear of the car.

"So Stephenson came before the board, and one question after another was hurled at him. When, however, he was asked, half in ridicule, whether or not his locomotive could make thirty miles an hour and he answered in the affirmative, a shout of derision arose from the Parliament members.

n.o.body believed such a miracle possible. Nevertheless, in spite of their sceptical att.i.tude, it was finally decided to build the Liverpool-Manchester road and about a year before its opening a date was set for a contest of locomotives to compete for the five-hundred-pound prize offered by the directors of the road."

"I suppose ever so many engines entered the lists," ventured Steve with interest.

"There were four," returned his father.

"And Stephenson drove one of them?"