| OCR Text |
Show THE SPECTRAL DOG. Strange Story Told by a Railroad Rail-road Man. RUNNING SIDE BY SIDE WITHIN EitCIHE. he Train Saved Trom What VML-ln j Have Been an Awful V.'reck. A Tribune reporter was eitting on one of the seats on the lottery ppjtue-nade ppjtue-nade r ce n 1 1 y when a vv ell dress.-d 1 woman pased leading ly a strap a snovr ' white Spitz d"g. A man dressed iu the rough garb ot a lalxjrer bilt on the seat nest to the reporter, emukuig a thori stcmiued cob piie. I "Talking uhout stninge things,'' said I the laUjrer. nudging the news gatherer, "I never sec a u'!ue dvig but what it i:alls up a strange expi'rience 1 had while firing on the Pennsylvania railroad ten years ago. I was iu the cab with Tummy i turns, one of the U'st engineer in the I company's service, and our run was be- tween Jersey City und Philadelphia. We left Jersey ( "ity at 0 o'clock one Saturday Sat-urday evening, pulling a long train of passenger coaches and three Pullmans. , The cam were all lull and we had the ' right oT way, making no stops except at Market street, Newark, and Trenton. We rolled along all right over the Uacken-Gack Uacken-Gack meadows and al ter we left Newark we struck a sixty miles an hour pace, and watched the telegraph pules Hush by till they looked like the teeth of a hue tooth comb, 1 BlTtN'S 6KE9 THE SPOOK DOQ. 'We had struck the plain at Princeton ' Junction when Hums, who was looking out of the cab window, savs to me: " 'LtoU-a-hcro Jack! There is a white dog runnin' alongside what's been fo!- j lowin' us for five minutes and blamed if he ain't kecpin' up to the injine. Look at him.' "1 vraB shoveling coal In the furnace at the time and the heat was blistering my eye balls in their sockets. It took me some time after gazing out of tho window before I could make out tho dog. Finally I saw him skimming along like a swallow. Now in tho glare from tho window he could bo plainly seen, -then he would get out in tho line of the darkness dark-ness aud wo would lose sight of him. Put ho would ho sure to show up ngain in a few minutes. Ditches, cuts and sharp bends, it was all the same, that white dog stuck beside tho cab as steady as its shadow. Burns and 1 couldn't make it out. First wo thought our eye-eight eye-eight was deceiving us, for tho awful heat from the furnace, tho sharp wind or something else, or all of t hese things put together, is terribly trying on one's eyes who has to use them in an engine cab. Tho sight gets blurred and cloudy, and sometimes you see double, and sometimes you don't see h;ilf. Well, Burns and 1 thought at first we were fooled by our eyes und there couldn't he any dog. Hut iiulo al ter mile that white dog was alongside. " 'Jack,' says Burns nil at onco, thi3 is more'n I kin stand. If our eyes ain't mussed up there's something wrong somewhere. 1 am agoin' to stop liai-t' THE HEAVY STON12 ON THE TRACK. "Sure enough ho stopped and we both got olf the cab. The conductor came running up and wanted to know what i in the blue blazes was the matter. Wo I told him about the white dog running alongside tho engine, and we looked about to show him tho blamed animal. But.toour surprise there was no dog to be seen, nnd hunt high and hunt low we could not rind him. The conductor laughed at us, and Burns and I got aboard again thinking that alter all our eyes might have tooled us. Burns pulled back the throttle and we started on slowly. Thero was a curving cut just ahead of us. Fifty yards from it, before the wheels had fairly begun to revolve art-ore1 W WirHis' n ,,rocYlriaTmust havo weighed two tons on our track. We stopped the engine with tho cowcatcher cow-catcher not twelve inches from the stone, which, loosened by rains, had rolled down from the back. Had wq not stopped on account of that whito dog we would have struck it on full headway, head-way, and you can see what that would havo meant. I got shaky soon after that and resigned, and the very mention of a whito dog, much less tho sight of one, brings that strange rido back to me. New York Tribune. |
