The Signal Code

Ever since Benny Ellis had been a little bit of a shaver he had played at “railroad.”  Not just now and again, as other boys do, but he rarely touched a game or a sport before he would ingeniously twist it into a “pretend” railroad.  Marbles were to him merely things to be used to indicate telegraph poles, with glass and agate alleys as stations.  Sliding down hill on a bobsleigh, he invariably tooted and whistled like an engine, and trudging uphill he puffed and imitated a heavy freight climbing up grade.  The ball grounds were to him the “Y” at the Junction, the shunting yards, or the turn bridge at the roundhouse, for Benny’s father was an engineer, who ran the fast mail over the big western division of the new road, where mountains and forests were cut and levelled and tunnelled for the long, heavy transcontinental train to climb through, and in his own home the boy heard little but railroad talk, so he came by his preferences honestly.

“Well, Benny, been railroading to-day?” his father would often ask playfully, on one of the three nights in the week when he was home, with the grime of the engine coal-oiled from his big hands, and his blue over-jeans hanging out behind the kitchen door.

“Yes, daddy,” the youngster would begin excitedly, and climbing on to the arm of his father’s chair, he would beat his little heels together in his eagerness to get the story out in speech, and proceed to explain how he had built a “pretend” track in the yard with curves and grades, over which his little express cart ran “bully.”  “And ’round the curves we just signal to the other train and have whistles with real meanings to them, like a really big train.”

“Oho! getting up the signal system, are you, now?” his father would grin.  “Why, you’ll be big enough and wise enough soon to come on Number 27 and wipe the engine or ‘fire’ for daddy.  Won’t that be nice?” Then the big man would set the chubby child of six years down on the floor to play, as he winked knowingly at Benny’s mother, who nodded a smiling reply.

But it did not take many years to make Benny a pretty big boy, and one of the boy-kind who always start schemes and devices among their schoolfellows.  He seemed to be a born leader, with a crowd of other boys always at his heels ready to follow where he ventured, or to mimic what he did.  No one ever walked ahead of him, no one ever suggested things to do or places to go, when the engineer’s son was around.  He was always the vanguard, but fortunately was the kind of boy who rarely, if ever, led his followers into trouble.  Finally someone nicknamed him “the Con,” as short for “Conductor,” for he still played at railroading, and had long since decided that when school days were over he would go as a train hand, and perhaps be lucky enough to be sometimes in his father’s crew.  It was about this time, when Benny was twelve, that he invented