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, train-master, was putting in every man
he could pick up, without reference to age or color.

Porter--he died at Julesburg afterwards--was a great jollier, and he
wasn't afraid of anybody on earth.

One day a war-party of Sioux clattered into town. They tore around like
a storm, and threatened to scalp everything, even to the local tickets.
The head braves dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the dispatcher's
office up-stairs. The dispatcher was hiding under a loose plank in the
baggage-room floor; Tom, being bald as a sand-hill, considered himself
exempt from scalping-parties. He was working a game of solitaire when
they bore down on him, and interested them at once. That led to a
parley, which ended in Porter's hiring the whole band to brake on
freight-trains. Old man Sankey is 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 drifting 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. It
was as hard to catch as an Indian cur, and that name made more trouble
on the pay-rolls 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."

They took Tom at his word. They actually did make it Sankey; and that's
how our oldest conductor came to bear the name of the famous singer. And
more I may say: good name as it was--and is--the Sioux never disgraced
it.

Probably