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Jonah's Tender Heart

By Will Lawson

When the sunset was painting miraculous colours on the Macquarie River, No. 56, which is the Coonamble Mail, east-bound, pulled into Dubbo, forty minutes late.

But Jonah, waiting for the train on engine No. 703, nicknamed “The Whale,” was not looking at the sunset. He was thinking of those forty minutes the other man had lost along the Castlereagh.

It would be hard to pick them up with only 138 miles to go between Dubbo and Bathurst. Of course, no traffic regulations compelled him to pick them up. It was just Jonah's passion for punctuality, and nothing else, that drove him to desperate efforts to arrive always on time. This was the biggest task he had ever tackled, and he meant to take it on.

Waiting for No. 56 had worked Jonah to a fever. And when he backed down to the train, he hit it rather hard—so hard that a stout old lady who got the brunt of the shock thought it was a real collision and screamed and fainted.

It took the night-officer and two porters all their time to carry her out, and by the time she had been fanned back to life and replaced in her carriage, the train was fifty minutes late. With anyone but Jonah driving, the night-officer would have given up all hope and sent word east for them to remodel the night's time-table. But everybody knew Jonah.

With steam blowing from her popvalve, “The Whale” laid her shoulders to the collar, and whipped No. 56 out of Dubbo so fast you almost expected to hear the tail-lights crack. Up the gradeto Eulomogo and Wongarbon she fled with her fireman working like a maniac Jonah was too old a hand to try to make up time downhill. He did it Uphill. And if his fireman looked like fainting or dying in his tracks, Jonah stepped across and did his share, while his mate leaned out and gasped like a fish from the driver's window.

Even to-day the night-officers tell how No. 56 tore through their sections that night. Like the very incarnation of speed she swept up the hills from Wellington, with her passengers full of hard-boiled eggs—all the refreshment rooms had had time to cook, when a surprised nightofficer sent word that “56” would be in seven minutes earlier than expected.

The hilltops threw back the glare of “The Whale's” furnace as she tackled the page 23 grades that lift and lift, winding and twisting, to rise 2000 feet in fifty-six miles to Orange, where the Canoblas loomed vaguely in the moonlight. The man at Warnecliffe thought the devil had got out again and was coming up the hill on a cyclone. Steam sang from her safety valves, and her exhaust hit the very stars. The spin of her wheels made him dizzy. He reeled into his office and timed her out on the Morse:

“Fifty-six passed 9.28, thirty late.”

And Jonah hadn't really warmed up!

It was said of this driver that he carried a pinch bar behind his ear and a spanner in his teeth. At any rate, his “ditty-box” was an armoury of tools. And when they swooped into Orange and the passengers, who had all been sitting up and taking notice, rushed to the bar and refreshment room, Jonah worked on 703 as though he loved the old “fly-by-night.”

They took care to have everyone well inside the train, and the guard himself stood handy to his brake before they gave Jonah the starting signal. Men swear that Jonah left the shadow of his train wandering about the yards like a lost soul. They clocked her out twenty-five minutes late, and the night-officers on the western line found it fascinating, in the brief lulls of their hectic work, to trace the progress of No. 56.

The supply of hills for Jonah and his mate to make time on hadn't given out. Firing in turns, they kept the old kettle boiling her head off, thundering and roaring and racing—and she wasn't such an old kettle, either, but one of the fliers of the west. At Wombiana, at the crest of a climb, “The Whale” blew very boastfully, ere she tore through the station and split the darkness in her howling rush for Blayney, only thirty-one miles from Bathurst. “The Whale” was fighting for her head. Every bit of her was running as sweetly as 100 tons of pounding, leaping, whirling steel can run with 200lb. of steam to drive it. At Blayney she was ten minutes late. The old lady who had upset Jonah was sleeping peacefully. But if she had known how she was preying on Jonah's mind she would have sat up and tried to think about him. It seems almost like a missed romance.

The people in Bathurst heard “The Whale” whistling as she swept down the Tumullah Bank. They looked at their watches, and she was on time.

Next day the shed foreman sent for Jonah.

“What's wrong with you, Jonah?” he asked, roughly. “You shook fifty minutes off the time-table last night, didn't you?”

“I did,” Jonah agreed.

“And you were here on time?”

“I was; thanks to Billy Goode, the best boy I ever had.”

“Then what did you book in five minutes late for?” the foreman demanded.

Jonah hesitated, then blurted out: “Well, I hit the train a bit hard at Dubbo, and upset an old lady. And, man, I had to show her a certain amount of respect.”

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