Mr. Billpen was reading late… a mail order catalog, a first edition no one could read until he had finished it… when he heard, in his own words, “the sky come down.” There was a scream of tormented iron, angry steel, the grind of earth being pulled up, the clatter of force and brute power; and when he got up and went to the door, he saw six heavy shapes spilling cast-iron stoves across the right-of-way, and the main lines covered with uprooted freight cars, and the rails bent, the heavy steel rails bent like Mrs. Billpen's hairpins…
Then Mr. Billpen shivered, and he had reason to, for far down the line the Big Express whistled, and the great orange eye began to glow over the rim of the earth. Going sixty miles an hour, the train would never stop in time… not by the time the great eye picked up the twisted wrecks of the stove cars and the rails that were no longer in place…
Mr. Billpen tucked in his shirt tail… he always took it out to read—it helped him spell out the big words… and he ran against the great wire fence and saw there was no hope of getting on the line and warning the Big Express.
Mr. Billpen was always a man of action and a man of simple, honest emotions. He saw he had to stop the train, and he did it quickly. It was a wonderful thing he did. He went into the little house, howled the kids and Mrs. Billpen out of their beds, took the oil lamp out of its socket, pulled off the hot glass shade, ran out and set fire to his house, set the naked, leaping flame of the oil lamp to his straw roof in a dozen places.
In twenty seconds it was leaping high, and when the train was three miles away, the house was a heavy torch, turning red, angry, hissing fists to the sky. The Billpens stood there watching their house burn, and the babies yawned or wept, and the older Billpens got into their pants or skirts; and when the train was a mile-and-a-half away, the house was burning like a ship at sea and the surroundings were bright as day, and the names and numbers on the stove cars could be read without glasses at twenty feet. The Big Express saw the horizon burning, saw the dark shapes across the right of way, saw the twisted rails turn to silver in the light of the burning house, and the Big Express shook as the air brakes gripped, shook as it skidded and moaned in rage to be stopped so suddenly in the middle of its run, and the locked driving wheels gave off sparks and the speed seemed never to lose any of its drive… but the great, panting engine, the long glowing tail of the train stopped moving, shook, and stopped twenty-two feet from the first little hill of scattered cast-iron stoves. Men dropped from the Big Express to see this thing that had almost killed them… and Mr. Billpen looked at his house, the rafters, like the ribs of a slaughtered animal, falling away, stopping in their job of giving shape and form to a thing.
The railroad would never have to move Mr. Billpen's house now.
Two weeks later Mr. Billpen was busy on an old coal barge half dragged up on the river bank. It had been there for years, but was solid and could be pumped out, and Mr. Billpen was building his house on it. He had the walls up and was working on the roof when I came up and admired it. It was a wonderful idea. He stopped hammering and looked down at me and invited me to come on up. I climbed up, and he pointed to the roof. It was covered with heavy beer signs… sheet-iron signs that once were hammered on to poles to advertise malt drinks. Mr. Billpen smiled. “Well, this time I'm sure the flood can't wash me out… not on this barge—she'd stand up against icebergs. And this roof can't burn, no matter how I try and set it on fire…” And he winked at me and went back to hammering beer signs together with broad, heavy nails.
And that was the last time he ever mentioned how the Big Express was saved. He didn't even mention it when the railroad sent him a letter saying he had better remove the burned timbers from their land.
Pinterest
