Saint Croix Union

NIGHT RIDE ON A LOCOMOTIVE.

You must remember, at least all of you that read the newspapers, that our last gubernatorial election was an unusually exciting one. I belonged to one of the State General Committees, and, as the returns on election day came in by express, we began to grow fairly wild.— We had before made all the "necessary arrangements to have the earliest authentic news of the result posted off to the New York papers, and I had agreed to see that a certain budget of returns which we expected to receive during the evening should be sent on to the town of B—, some thirty miles distance, by the railway, as soon as it arrived, and had chartered an engine, which was to be in readiness at eleven o'clock that night.

Well, the budget came promptly at the time, and the news was quite as favorable as we desired, and far more so than we expected. I suppose it was this fact that so suddenly determined me to carry the intelligence on myself.

At any rate, I hastily resolved to go on the locomotive, and, seizing the returns I ran down to the depot, where the engine was fired up and whistling its readiness for a start. It was but the work of a moment to persuade the engineer to take me with him, for the fireman who was to accompany him was nowhere to be found, and the engineer had resolved to run over the track alone. I volunteered at once to assist him as well as I could, and immediately mounted the engine.

It was thirty miles to B—.

"What time can you make it in," said I to the engineer, as I got upon the platform with him.

"I once ran over the road in three quarters of an hour with an engine," he replied.

"Make it half an hour this time," cried I. "and I will give you twenty dollars.— Every minute is a fortune." I must have been insane. The flush of victory, after so many weeks of enthusiastic struggle, had almost if not quite turned my brain.

Just at this moment the engineer discovered that the light in front of the engine was burning dimly, and threatened to expire. With an anathema upon the negligent fireman, he leaped down to examine it. The lamp had not been filled. "For God's sake," shrieked I, when I learned the fact, "don't stop for that trifle; I can travel in the dark if you can. You are not afraid?" I continued tauntingly, as the engineer still hesitated.

"I can ride to the devil as cooly as you can," he replied cheerily, and resuming his post, started the locomotive.

As we emerged from the station house, I remember thinking I had never seen a blacker night. The first motion of the engine had extinguished our light; not a star was to be seen in the heavens, and the few lighted windows, which dotted the landscape here and there, only added to the general gloom of the scene.—

Flushed and wild as I was, I experienced a thrill of horror as the engine dashed madly into the darkness. I strained my eyes until they ached; I held my breath, and contracted my muscles, as if falling so fearfully rapid seemed the rate at which we were flying

But a new and pleasanter sensation but those who have actually experienced it can imagine the maddening delight which excessively rapid motion produces

We were under full headway, and with no load to retard our speed. Now and then a lighted window by the side of the track flew past us like a meteor; while farther on in the deep gloom, a solitary taper would sometimes seem madly striving to emulate our pace, soon distanced however, and soon lost. In less time than I have been talking, we had arrived at a little village, where the street lamps were burning, and which I knew was just ten miles from W. I stopped down and examined my watch by the light of the engine fire. We had traveled the first ten miles in less than ten minutes. "Faster!" I shouted madly to the engineer, as I crammed another pine stick under the boiler. But it was hardly possible to accelerate our speed. The wheels actually leaped along the rails. The few drops of rain which occasionally fell, struck against my face like fine shot The steam-whistle kept up an endless shriek, as if the engine were some monstrous goblin, tortured beyond endurance by an inhuman fiend, while the deep bass of the increasing thunder mingled with the wild rattle of our wheels, and formed a chorus which the Furies might have envied. As my ears were gradually stunned by these complicated noises, and my eyes wearied by their unnatural exertion, I fancied that I heard other sounds. which could only have been the product of a bewildered brain. As we dashed into some gloomy gorge, I seemed to hear angry voices warning and upbraiding me; as we flew over some lofty embankment, I saw dark spirits in the air, who waved me on with wild gestures, or struck at me with airy blades. The lightning became more vivid and frequent. Now they showed us the threatening crags that over-hung our path, and now they lighted up a raging torrent far beneath us. My companion, however, was as calm and composed as though his cradle had been rocked by tempests.— The flashes by which I occasionally caught a glimpse of him gave. It is true an unnatural ghastliness to his face, but his manner was as cool and collected as I had always known it, I could feel him managing the engine as quietly and carefully as if it was a summer's day, and he had the lives of a hundred passengers to answer for besides his own.

A few minutes—ten or twelve, perhaps—had elapsed since I looked at my watch, and I had began to think our journey's end was near. We were passing, as near as I could judge by the sound and the wind, over a level country, when I fancied I felt a momentary jar, so slight, however, and unimportant. that it would have passed from my recollection at once, had it not been for what followed. Just at that moment, a longer and brighter flash of lightning than I had before seen, attended, not followed, by an awful clap of thunder, lit up again the surrounding scenery. But high above the deafening peal, above the lesser thunder of the wheels, above the raving of the wind, I heard a shriek, so wild, so awful, so like the utterances of a lost soul. that it vexes my dreams to this hour. It was a sound which no physical suffering could have elicited from a human being. which nothing but supernatural fear could have produced, and which no one who once heard could ever banish from his mind.

Involuntarily I felt for my companion. He was gone! I groped hastily about the confined space in which we had been standing, and at once realized the awful nature of my position. I was alone upon an engine which was tearing madly forward at the rate of sixty or seventy miles an hour, rapidly nearing my destination, about to dash headlong, at full speed, into an excited crowd, and with no more knowledge of the management or government of the crazy thing than an infant.

For an instant I was thoroughly paralyzed with fear. Cold drops of perspiration stood upon my brow, and I fairly screamed in impotent agony. But in a moment more I recovered myself I had some indistinct notion that the speed of an engine was accelerated or checked by operating the levers which stood by my side, and forthwith commenced a series of experiments with them. But my unskillfulness or agitation prevented my employing the proper means, and I fancied I had only increased the speed. Another resource flashed upon me. I might put out the blazing wood and coals and reduce the fire. It was a mad idea, for my ungloved hands were my only tools for the enterprise; but I chuckled wildly to myself as I thought how feasible it was, and how sure of success. Eagerly I stooped down and pulled a flaming stick from beneath the boiler. The seething pitch scalded my hands, and the live embers burnt them cruelly but I hardly felt the pain, as I hurled it frantic from the darkness.

But I did not stay as I turned to continue another flash, one of those lingering, wavy dancing flashes; which seem to tarry as if delighting to gaze upon the terror they cause, once more lit up the scene. I trust that death will efface its horror from my mind I know that I can never forget it on this side of the grave. The deck of my companion, which was still ringing in my ears, no longer surprised me. I no longer wondered at his mad leap from the engine. It was the excess of my terror alone which prevented my following his example. I no longer cared for the murderous speed of the locomotive; I no longer thought of my own danger. All misgivings, all fears for myself were swallowed up and merged in one vast shuddering indescribable horror. For there, just before me, upon the boiler with its lips parted into a fiendish grin with its eyes wide open, and staring up on me. and the glare imparting a life like glow to its stony features; there d within reach of my palsied hand, even as I shrunk back in craven fears to the farthest limits of my moving prison, sat a pale, gory, hideous, and mangled Human Head.

You smile, gentlemen," continued the ugly man, with a melancholy air, "and it seems to me that if I should hear the story told by another as you are now doing, in a quiet room, with a firm floor beneath my feet, a cheerful fire before me, and friends around, I should do the same thing; but, believe me," dropping his voice so low that I could hardly hear him, "it is a different thing in a wild night, alone, and with a sudden and awful death impending over you."

Keep moving, stranger," said the man in the red shirt, cracking a hickory-nut, "it is as good as a sermon. Pass on the second head."

"It could of course," pursued the ugly man without heeding the untimely jest, "be but a few minutes, or perhaps seconds, before this terrible drama must conclude; but no prisoner ever longed for freedom as I did for the final crash, which I knew would end my life and torment together. I made no farther efforts to stop the locomotive. I was hardly aware that it was still tearing madly on, as though frightened, like myself, at its ghastly burden. The lightning still flashed at intervals, and illuminated the clayey face; but I did not need its gleams to see the horrid thing. For through the pitchy darkness and the blinding rain it glared upon me as I had beheld it at first. Nor do I consider this imagination. I think that terror had so sharpened my vision, that though all else was wrapped in impenetrable gloom. I could see its glassy eye-balls, its pallid cheeks, and its bloody, grinning mouth.

I have since learned—I do not think that I knew it at the time—that all this while, the firewood in the tender behind me was blazing furiously. It had caught either by a spark from the engine or which is more probable, from the burning stick which I had so hastily tossed away. But, as I said, I do not know that I was aware of it, if I had been it couldn't have added another pang of terror to my heart; and I only mention it now as an incidental element in the horror of my situation. and also from the fact that the unusual light alarmed the watchers at the station, putting them upon their guard, prevented any destruction of me on my arrival.

I can never bring myself to believe that so short a time elapsed, as I know must have passed, before this awful vision ceased. It seems to me now, and always when I recall that dreadful night, as though I must have spent hours braced back against the tender, not daring to take my eyes from the spectral face, paralyzed and crazy with fright, my hair like reeds, and sweat bursting from every pore. During all this time I had, I know that I never regarded the incident as any other than supernatural. If it had occurred to me that it was nothing but what seemed a dead head, perhaps, possibly, I might have rallied. But there was something so hellish in that stony gaze, alone visible through the murky night, that earth and earthly accidents were alike forgotten by me. Heavens! thought I. is it to last forever? Am I dead, and are these the torments of the damned? Will this torture never have an end?

The end was even at hand. I shot past brilliantly-lighted streets, whose brightness made the corpse glare still more hideously upon me. I heard shouts of fear and warning, but they could not distract my attention. I caught glimpses at the station of groups of agonized and horror-stricken faces; what were they to the distorted features of the Heap before me? A crash, a feeling of death-like sickness, and when I awoke my midnight ride had been the rounds of all the newspapers, and been forgotten.

The ugly man arose and adjusted his crutch, as if to leave.

'Pray, Sir, said a little silent man from the corner, in an excited manner. and speaking for the first time, "was that the engineer's headay

"Oh! no," answered the narrator with an air of relief, as though I was glad his tale was ended, "I learned, when I got well enough to talk and ask questions, that the engineer crawled into town about dawn of the following day, weary, torn, and bleeding, but without any permanent injuries. The head belonged to a poor maniac, who had often attempted the strangest forms of suicide, and that evening, escaping from his confinement, had lowered himself down into a cattle ditch keeping his head above the surface of the road. The cow catcher. as he probably intended it should do, had cut his head cleanly and smoothly off, and had thrown it so high that it lodged and stuck where I first saw it. His body was afterwards found un mangled in the ditch beneath. And that, neighbors, is the way I came to be the wreck you see me.

"That's a right smart yarn, now stranger," said the man in the red shirt, "and I suppose likely enough: to happen on some of them 'Hio rails; but on the Little-River Road—I stop down to Little-River when I'm to home—they don't allow no deadheads.