THE oldest man in the train service didn't pretend to say how long Sankey had worked for the company. Pat Francis was a very old conductor; but old man Sankey was a veteran when Pat Francis began braking. Sankey ran a passenger train when Jimmie Brady was running--and Jimmie afterward enlisted and was killed in the Custer fight.
There was an odd tradition about Sankey's name. He was a tall, swarthy fellow, and carried the blood of a Sioux chief in his veins. It was in the time of the Black Hills excitement, when railroad men, struck by the gold fever, were abandoning their trains even at way-stations and striking across the divide for Clark's Crossing. Men to run the trains were hard to get, and Tom Porter, trainmaster, was putting in every man he could pick up without reference to age or color. Porter (he died at Julesburg afterward) was a great "jollier," and he wasn't afraid of anybody on earth. One day a war party of Sioux clattered into town and tore around like a storm. They threatened to scalp everything, even to the local tickets. They dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the despatcher's office upstairs, while the despatcher was hiding below, under a loose plank in the baggage-room floor. Tom, being bald as a sand-hill, considered himself exempt from scalping parties anyway. He was working a game of solitaire when they bore down on him, and got them interested in it. That led to a parley, which ended by Porter's hiring the whole band to brake on freight trains. Old man Sankey was said to have been one of that original war party.
Now this is merely a caboose story, told on winter nights when trainmen get stalled in the snow that drifts down from the Sioux country. But what follows is better attested.
Sankey, to start with, had a peculiar name--an unpronounceable, unspellable, unmanageable name. I never heard it, so I can't give it to you; but it was as hard to catch as an Indian pony, and that name made more trouble on the payrolls than all the other names put together. Nobody at headquarters could handle it; it was never turned in twice alike, and they were always writing Tom Porter about the thing. Tom explained several times that it was Sitting Bull's ambassador who was drawing that money, and that he usually signed the pay-roll with a tomahawk. But nobody at Omaha ever knew how to take a joke. The first time Tom went down, he was called in very solemnly to explain again about the name, and being in a hurry and very tired of the whole business, Tom spluttered: "Hang it, don't bother me any more about that name! If you can't read it make it Sankey, and be done with it."