Sankey said all the time that he didn't want the lantern, but just the same he always carried that particular lantern, with his full name, Sylvester Sankey, ground into the glass just below the green mantle. Pretty soon, Neeta being then eighteen, it was rumored that Sinclair was engaged to Miss Sankey, and was going to marry her. And marry her he did; though that was not until after the wreck in the Blackwood gorge after the Big Snow.
It goes by just that name on the West End yet; for never were such a winter and such a snow known on the plains and in the mountains. One train on the northern division was stalled six weeks that winter, and one whole coach was chopped up for kindling wood. The great and desperate effort of the company was to hold open the main line, the artery which connected the two coasts. It was a hard winter on trainmen. Week after week the snow kept falling and blowing. The trick was not to clear the line; it was to keep it clear. Every day we sent out trains with the fear that we should not see them again for a week. Freight we didn't pretend to move; local passenger business had to be abandoned. Coal, to keep our engines and our towns supplied, we had to carry; and after that all the brains and muscle and motive power were centered on keeping One and Two, our through passenger trains, running.
Our trainmen worked like Americans; there were no cowards on our rolls. But after too long a strain men become exhausted, benumbed, indifferent; reckless, even. The nerves give out, and will-power seems to halt on indecision; but decision is the life of the fast train. None of our conductors stood the hopeless fight like Sankey. He was patient, taciturn, untiring; and in a conflict with the elements, ferocious. All the fighting blood of his ancestors seemed to course again in that struggle with the winter king. I can see him yet, on bitter days, standing alongside the track in a heavy pea-jacket and Napoleon boots, a sealskin cap drawn snugly over his straight black hair, watching, ordering, signaling, while Number One, with its frost-bitten sleepers behind a rotary, tried to buck through ten and twenty-foot cuts which lay bank-full of snow west of McCloud.