The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-02-21
ONLY A CAR CONDUCTOR
BY WALTER BROWNE.


 1convright. 1904, by Daily Story Pub
 fishing Col
 "Accident on the elevated railroad. Conductor crushed to death by his own train."
 That was all the bulletin said. It did not strike the editorial mind as big story. Why should 1t? There was no mystery about 1t. The meager oe- tails to hand did not even contai@ sus- gestions of blood-curdlins incidents and the man who was killed was only a conductor, anyway. If he had been A messenger there might have been some chance of writing a good roast on the company, but only a conductor! We'll. things were dull, news scarce and Phil Space, one of our bright re- porters, was sent out to see If ne could not get a story of some sort out of 1t, He did. He wrote about quarter or @ column of bare facts Whlcn hooooy would care to read.
 If he had written the story for what it was worth-but then. How could he?
 He told it to me afterwards and here 1t is, As am using fictitious names ana not injuring Phil, who by the bye have since ceased to regard as friend, no harm can be done by relating few facts, perhaps as strange as hction' which go to prove that even conductors of elevated trains are sometimes just as heroic and worthy of admiration as newspaper men.
 Tt was a little more than year ago." said Phil, "that I was working on an evening newspaper down town' and travelled regularly by the same train to business, returning at about the same time each night.
 Although buried in the /perusal Of my morning papers, on the down town tourney, I began gradually to notice that seated in the same corner of the car, always nearest the rear door, was A singularly beautiful girl. She was little more than a child. but in her per- son were developed all the ripe and mature attractions of womanhood to such a ravishing extent that to look at her once was to find a magnet which the eyes of man could not afterwards resist.
 But she was entirely unconscious of her power. The arimor of her inno- cence was proof against the batteries of admiration and her broadsides of almost brutal ogling with which she was assaulted from all classes and ages of city men as she journeyed to her work each morning. have seen jost- ling and struggling, almost fights to secure the corner seat immediately op- pOS1te her. m SplIe OI tuS SNiuSaG A1Sb that she sat there merely to be near the conductor. who found time for a hurried word to the beautiful girl be- fore closing the door after calling out the name of each station. -
 'T discovered that she worked at a store in Fourteenth Street and, al- though she left bushes fully half an hour before the train which carried the insignificant little conductor ar rived at that depot, she always waited on the platform until his train came along.
 These things worried me. At first it was a mere matter of interest, but soon it became a mania with me to win that lovely creature away from that uneducated, and as I believed un- appreciative boor of an elevated rail- road conductor who seemed to have strangely fascinated her.
 'I obtained an~. introduction to the girl, no matter by what means. and it is useless to tell the wiles I worked 10 win her love- Suffice it is to say that after a little while we rode to- gether on surface care when our work was done. and 1t was I who waited for her at the corner of Fourteenth Street.