The Engineer’s Fear
Henry Malone had spent half his life in the cab of a steam locomotive. The firebox roar was his lullaby, the hiss of steam his constant companion. But for all the pride of wearing the cap and the overalls, he carried a secret no one else suspected: fear.
It wasn’t the miles of track or the schedule that unnerved him—it was the maze of knobs and wheels staring back from the backhead of the boiler. Red handles, brass levers, steel gauges. To the passengers behind him, it was all mystery. To Henry, it was life or death.
“Turn the injector valve too far,” he thought, “and you starve the boiler. Pull the blower wrong and you snuff the fire. God help me if I twist the wrong wheel at speed—pressure builds, water drops, the engine jumps the rails.” In his mind’s eye, he saw it: a mountain curve taken too fast, the great locomotive leaping like a wounded beast, steel shrieking, cars tumbling, bodies broken. All because his hand had faltered.
Every run was a silent battle. His crew thought he was simply methodical, double-checking gauges and whispering to himself as he adjusted steam flow. They didn’t know that, in his imagination, each turn of a valve balanced the lives of everyone aboard.
One night, climbing a grade under a black Kansas sky, Henry’s worst fear nearly came true. A sudden drop in boiler pressure had him lunging for the controls. The cab glowed red in the firebox light as he reached for a valve—then froze. Two identical wheels sat side by side. His hand hovered, sweat dripping. Which one?
The whistle screamed. The train bucked. He heard passengers in the coaches behind, unaware that their fate hung on the tremble of his hand.
He closed his eyes, drew a long breath, and felt back through muscle memory—left is the injector, right is the blower. His hand found the left wheel and spun it open. The hiss of water meeting steam filled the cab, the boiler pressure steadied, and the locomotive surged forward like a living thing pulling itself back from the brink.
Henry Malone never told a soul what had happened. By the time they rolled into the depot, the passengers were already asleep or gossiping about business and family. They never knew how close they’d come.
But Henry knew. And from then on, when he rested his hand on those scarlet knobs, he no longer thought of them as wheels of steel. He thought of them as the beating hearts of every soul on board.
