Central High School - Almanac Yearbook (Toledo, OH)

Page 142 text:

McLeod. BY NORMAN L. HANSON. HERE were days when their ears refused to communi- cate aught but the ceaseless hum of the wires overhead to their throbbing brains, when the interminable glint ot the steel rails was multiplied and duplicated by their seared and aching eyesg when the clank of bar and shovel seemed the riveting of torturing manacles about their wearied limbs, when the resin of the cracked and splintered poles, -silent, suffering sentinels over that infernal waste of livid, undulating brown,-started in sticky, boiling streams from yawning seams, tie by tie, laid by bending, toiling bodies Whose minds and souls Were in a sodden stupor, rail by rail, the great iron road crept at a taunting, maddening pace toward completion, toward Singhpa,-one hundred and twenty miles more of incarnate drouth and desolation, still, it moved on, leaving here and there along the way a dusty, unmarked grave,-the men courted this last relief from that nightmare. They finished their evening lunch under the shed of loosely-nailed, gleaming, yellow-pine boards,-wan, emaci- ated faces, eyes whose lustre had long ago iied away as the sun rolled back mile after mile of waving heat from blis- tered, warping rails, eyes in which there was no hope or future,-only the blind devotion of Irish gangmen upon whom depended the honor of Fraser, G. E., and the fulfill- ment of the hopes of the company, which held him to his bond. Silently they passed that meal,--a meal of biscuits so dried by the sun of those three weeks since last the supply

Page 141 text:

When Daphne Bets. HEY say that gambling, betting, too, And fortune's wheels, and kindred things Are dangerous, and gaming brings At last bankruptcy unto you. That this is true I'll take my oath Though pokerts quite unknown to me, And craps, and all my friends agree I'm ignorance itself in both. Now Daphne oft' for Lowney's yearns And When I say, unconscious quite, I'll bet the rink will freeze tonight, She, laughing at her smartness, turns, And quick replies, I'll take the betf' Now Lowney's are the stakes you know For she would always have it so: Then straight I go and Lowney's get. Perchance, despite the recent thaw Which floods the rink's smooth surface some That night it freezes like a drum And I have won my bet-Hurrah ! But though I am victorious I know her clever, well laid snare, And well she knows that I'm aware- Now, isntt it rediculous? Then I for consolation's sake, In sympathy for her, you know, For having lost her wager so, To her my box of Lowney's take. I-Iowever strange it may appear, Although I often bet with her, And always pay without demur, I haven7t got a thing this year ! -W

Page 143 text:

train had rolled into that God-forsaken land, that the cases were as light as air, as destitute of nourishment as the little grove of scrub, dying away where the level of the desert was broken by a ragged scar of clay and sand, biscuit only rivaled by the tinned meats and fruit, ready to burst their cerements with expanding heat. But the gang was used to such-the gang worked dog- gedly ahead, a machine running on poor fuel as well as on good. Fraser, G. E. Was the life of that little settlement of toilersg he shared their fearful labors,-his hands were as hard and calloused as big Doolan's, or the wiry, witty little Franey'sg he shared their food,-his cheeks were as blood- less as the thinnest and were furrowed by the care and unremitting worry attendant upon his office, poor fellow, his maiden enterprise was not a task for his few years of engineering. Fraser's right-hand man,-when he had been on his pins, as Franey said, he was both hands almost,-was a little, nervous Scotsman, McLeod, a mere boy, but a genius in calling out the energies of a despairing gang, and always, with a cheery word and helping hand, brightening the hardest dayg he had left Edinburgh just fourteen months before to follow his tutor, friend and idol into that weary, unending slavery upon the three hundred mile extension of the great Indian Peninsular Railway, Incorporated 1888g he had bravely said farewell to a Hbonnie, sousie lassie, who waited for him yet over the seas, and here he lay, among these rude but warm-hearted gangmen, prostrated at last by those weeks of burning sand and fever-heated air, tenderly watched and cared for by the sympathetic boys. The hazy glare in the western sky grew thicker, soft- ened, and as a ghost of a breeze,-a scorching breeze,- began to stalk slowly over the parched waste, the last crimson ribands tinged the grey cloud-banks with a hue