Chapter 34 cont. I may say here that I remember only two occasions on which Mr. Kimball could be said to have used a profane word, and on those occasions he was very much in earnest. The other time was down at the Davenport shops, when he fired Doc Gerbert for lying to him. Mr. Kimball was the finest man I ever knew in railroad service. He had been an engineer, and he knew what an engine man has to go through, and so he knew what to expect; what he ought to ask of the man, and what the man ought to ask of him. He was a good railroad man, and he was a good man with his men; fair and square, kind and considerate, and the soul of honor. A man could not lie to him and stay on the road five minutes. And there wasn't a man in the service that didn't think the world of him. I have had some narrow escapes but have never been hurt in a wreck in all the forty-eight years I have been firing and running. At the foot of Summit between Muscatine and Wilton, I went with my engine into a slough once, and seven or eight cars followed. I stepped out of my cab window to the ground, which was level with it. Among those ditched cars was one that was loaded with castiron stoves. There wasn't a wheel left under that car and there wasn't a stove broken. Out at Ainsworth, one time, I was pulling a mixed train, and just about crossing the 100-foot Howe truss bridge over a good sized creek. The fireman was outside oiling the valves. I thought I saw the forward end of the engine dropping, as it would if the bridge was settling under it. I jerked it wide open and she gave such a jump that she broke the pin behind her and fairly leaped across to the other side. The bridge went down and there was a first class wreck in that creek. The baggage car turned sidewise and the first coach went endwise into the middle of it. Three men were killed. In 1863 I was running the N. B. Judd, with George B. Swan, for years yardmaster here and in Rock Island, now of Des Moines, for fireman. We had left Stockton - then Fulton - coming east. We were carrying a lot of green wood, cut about the day before in LeClaire's pasture, but on the back end of the tender we had some dry wood that we carried to use when we had hills ahead of us. George was back after some of that dry wood and down where he couldn't see me or the engine. I got down on the deck and stood, with one foot on the front end of the tender and the other on the sill of the engine, deck, taking a look into the fire, when just at that instant the engine parted from the tender and shot away ahead. Of course I went down between engine and tender, clear to the ground, between the rails. I didn't think - I grabbed, and caught the safety chains at the front end of the tender. We were running about four or five miles an hour, but that was enough. I pulled myself up and climbed up into the tender, and just then George looked forward from the rear end over th pile of wood he had been heaving up. "What's the matter? Is she slipping?" he asked. "Yes, she's slipping," I said. "There she goes!" Her smoke was a mile ahead of us. She ran clear to "the Irishman's farm," a good seven miles, and there we found her, without fire, water or steam. after she was on the pit in the roundhouse here he put a plank across the pit in front of the tender and cut her loose from it, and there wasn't a man in the house that could start off that plank, holding to the house, I couldn't do it either. George Swan told the incident to a man the other day in Des Moines, and the man turned his back on him and walked away without a word; but George and I both know that the thing happened. Debbie Clough Gerischer Iowa Gen Web, Assistant CC, Scott County http://www.celticcousins.net/scott/ IAGENWEB: Special History Project: http://iagenweb.org/history/index.htm Gerischer Family Web Site: http://gerischer.rootsweb.com/