p. 12 | GOOD FOR EVIL by James Buckham

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 20, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 42.

CALIFORNIA SCENERY. No. 29.—General view of Yosemite Valley. At the right of the picture is Bridal Veil Fall, 900 feet high. At the left is seen El Capitan, the guardian of the lower end of the valley, above which he towers 3,300 feet. In the background are the cliffs that inclose this wonderful vale, ending with Half Dome, dimly seen in the distance. The valley at its lower end is about three-fourths of a mile wide.

GOOD FOR EVIL.

By James Buckham

[By James Buckham, in Christian Work.]

DURING the days of wood-burning locomotives and wooden bridges, the managers of our principal railroads in the Eastern States strove to protect their bridges against fire by appointing watchmen who lived near these structures and kept a vigilant eye upon them day and night. Usually, the watchman with his family occupied a small house built by the railroad company near one end of the bridge. The different members of the family, including the older children, often took turns watching the bridge, and after the passage of each train some one of them was required to cross the bridge and return, looking carefully for any spark that might have fallen from the locomotive and kindled the dry, tar-soaked wood of the bridge.

Martin Lee was one of these bridge watchmen on the Central Vermont Railroad, and his little home stood in a most romantic spot, at the gorge of the Winooski River, near the manufacturing town of Winooski, where the river ran with great speed between two precipitous limestone cliffs, roaring over sharp rocks and twisting its current into angry whirlpools. The gorge was spanned by an old-fashioned wooden, “deck-bridge,” having scuttles at each end, with ladders leading down to the stringers below, on which were laid two narrow lines of plank, one on each side of the bridge, so that a person might walk the length of the bridge and inspect it from the inside.

Martin Lee’s family consisted of himself and wife and two children, Barty, a boy of thirteen, and his baby sister, Fannie. Barty was old enough to assist his parents in watching the bridge, and he was usually given a “spell” of four or five hours during the daytime. It was on one of these watches, while his father had gone to town to make some purchases, and his mother was up at the “lime-kilns” calling on a neighbor, that Barty saw the track walker for that section enter the railroad cut toward Winooski and approach the bridge. Now the track walker was no friend of Barty’s. He loved to tease the boy, sometimes even maliciously, and seldom passed the house at the gorge, when Barty was on watch, without catching hold of him and playing some of those rude tricks with which certain men seem to delight in bullying boys. So persistently and almost vindictively did he keep up this practise that Barty had come to dread his visits more than anything else, and if it were not for being on duty, he would have run away and hidden every time he saw the man approaching.

On this particular day the track walker seemed to be in an especially teasing mood, and, finding that both of Barty’s parents were away, he tormented the boy until he got him to crying. Then, with a coarse laugh, he tweaked Barty’s nose, tripped him on his back, and walked off. Reaching the bridge, he removed the scuttle and prepared to make the usual inspection.

Barty, sobbing and indignant, followed him to replace the cover of the scuttle, as usual, for the track walker would leave the bridge through the scuttle at the other end. Just as he was about to drop the scuttle cover in place, the boy heard a crash, followed by a terrified scream, and, thrusting his head inside the bridge, saw a sight that made the blood run cold in his veins. One of the half-rotten boards laid over the stringer had snapped beneath the track walker’s feet, and as he fell, the man had convulsively grasped one of the stringers, and now hung suspended over the boiling, rapids fifty feet below. There he swung, hanging by both arms, helpless and horror-stricken. Being a heavy man, with rather slight muscular development, he was unable to pull himself up to the level of the stringer, much less to climb upon it. His condition was desperate, for certainly he could not hang long in that position, and to fall among the rocks and whirlpools below would be sure death.

The man’s only hope lay in Barty, and what could such a small boy do to save him? The lad thought fast as he gazed down through the scuttle. Lift the man he could not, even if he succeeded in reaching him. There was but one thing to do, to run for help as fast as his legs could carry him. All vindictive or hateful thoughts were driven out of the boy’s mind, and his only desire was to rescue the man who had been his tormentor.

“Hang on, Mr. Mosely!” he cried shrilly. “Hang hard; I’ll bring help!”

Away sprang the boy across the bridge toward the lime-kilns, and the agonized man hanging to the stringer heard the patter of bare feet pass over his head and die rapidly away. If he could only hang on till the boy brought help! Already the current of his blood seemed scorching his veins, and his senses were swimming. There was a terrible roaring in his head, and the power of speech and sight was gone. Then the roaring in his ears died away, and a white mist began to fall about him in piles and heaps. He longed to let go his hold on the stringer and sink into the mist and rest.

Meanwhile Barty was flying through the cut and up the track toward the lime-kilns. Coatless and helpless he ran, as swiftly as if there were wings on his feet. As soon as he came in sight of the storehouse below the valley, he began to shout: “Help! quick! Bridge—Mr. Mosely!”

By good luck one of the workmen, Frank Merritt by name, a muscular young fellow, who had been on several voyages as a sailor, and was both brave and expert in such an emergency, happened to be down-at the storehouse with two other men unloading lime. He at once flung his shovel away and ran toward the bridge, calling on his companions to follow him. Reaching the first scuttle, he tore it off and dropped down into the bridge as if his feet had never touched the ladder. Taking in the situation at once, he ran along the plank walk opposite to Mosely, got astride the stringer, tore up a plank, and hitched along with it till he reached the now exhausted and almost unconscious man.

Then, whirling himself on top of the plank, he grasped Mosely by the collar of the coat and held him firmly until the other men arrived and helped lift the rigid body onto the plank. The rescuers then drew the plank, with the swooning Mosely on it, to the nearest scuttle, and lifted and pulled him up the ladder. He was more dead than alive, with rigid muscles, set face, and protruding tongue and eyes. It was more than an hour, after being carried into the watchman’s house, before the poor man recovered his senses or realized where he was. But when he did fully come to himself, he called for Barty, and with tears in his eyes thanked the lad and begged his forgiveness.

“You saved my life, Barty,” he cried. “You did good for evil. May God bless your kind, forgiving heart. I’ll be a better man and a true friend to you after this, God helping me.”

And Thomas Mosely kept his word, for to this day there is not a kinder, more considerate man in the railroad’s employ than he; and not even Barty’s parents are prouder of the young engineer of the Flying Express than the old track walker, who remembers that awful day in the ’70’s and the patter of the flying feet of his little rescuer over the bridge.