Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 165: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

By SYLVESTER WILLIAMS of K Tower. Every time the West- ern Express went by the tower Matt Powers, the engineer, got an order on the fly which read something like this: [oo fixed the track that summer east Reduce speed to fifteen miles per hour at mile post 31. vt Gat s ‘““G. K. S.” was the superintendent. That was all very well. Many an ex- press train thunders by a signal tower out in Indiana, picks up an order fastened in a wooden hoop, and the world remarks not. When they put the Widow Hart in the tower the action began. “Hell of a swell lookin’ woman,” re- marked Matt to his fireman the first day the buxom form leaned out from, the small wooden platform at the foot of the tower, 635 and in the swirl of dust and smoke raised by the Limited faithfully hung the wooden hoop with the orders on Matt’s arm. “Yep,” replied Red Sharffin, his fire- man. ‘“ That’s the Widow Hart with four kids.”’ And the next day when the Limited passed, Matt made a tremendous effort to throw the hoop, minus the orders, back out of the window “so the widow wouldn’t have to walk so far to pick it up.” For a week the widow did her duty. Then one day before starting his run Matt Powers took a greasy piece of paper in his engine house terminal, and with the half remaining of that index finger of his wrote: I heered you are a widow with four kids. I am one to, but I got five. Matt THE ENGINEER. Gomichbooks.com