D:L&L - Part 19 | Narrator: Cob on the Corn

By the time Oli Phant Cob, Chief Engineer of the Yellow Brick Express, saw the purple fog, it was too late to stop the train. Instinctively he reached for the hand-brake, but he knew that jerking on the brake lever could easily send the train off the tracks. They’d never gotten around to working on the braking system, even though both he and Smalls knew it was lacking the necessary maintenance.

“It’s all we can do to keep her runnin on time, Smalls,” Cob had said more than once. Smalls had just nodded. That’s all he ever did – nodded. If he ever did anything else, it was mutter that one simple syllable: “Right”. And that was that.

The problem, Cob had always remarked, with Munchkinland – well, he said, it wasn’t Munchkinland itself that was the problem. The little fellers were always kind, and they were kinda cute, especially the gals with their little squeaky voice and bouncy jugs and the way they only stood up about as high a normal fellas waist. The problem with Munchkinland was that the corn was taller than the people who sowed it, taller than a normal-size Ozlander, too. In fact, and he’d remarked on this, as well, the corn was right damn huge-like and taller than should be safe, and one day it would be a problem to them that operated the Yellow Brick Express.

“Right,” Smalls had said. He’d nodded and chucked another shovel-load of coal into the furnace and slammed the metal door shut with the end of the spade.

“I always gotta keep a sharp look out as we round these here bends in this blasted hu-mountainous size crop o’ corn, and I always gotta keep ma hands right near the whistle and the hand-brake. Ya neva know what fools gonna be pushing his cows cross the tracks, playin on the tracks, nor just up to some no-good devilishness.”

“Right,” Smalls had said as he polished the end of his spade. It was black as night, stained from the coal, but he polished it between each load.

Cob had seen the old moving pictures. The villain was always capturing the hero’s gal and tying her up to the tracks so’s the train would run her over. They never took the trainman’s view of the ordeal. Didn’t they know how much worse it was for the trainman in these circumstances? If they did, Cob was sure that the villain would find himself somewhere else full of peril, say a cliff or a bog, where a fella didn’t run his train full of people and goods.

“Defnitely,” he’d said, “not in a field full of ginormous damn corn.”

“Right.”

Luckily this wasn’t a case of a damsel in distress, or a Munchkin in distress – as it were, being tied to the tracks. Cob was pretty happy about that, but as they rounded the bend and he saw the thick purple fog creeping through the corn field ahead of him, his left hand slipped up to the whistle cord and his right hand to the brake. No little Munchkin girl was tied to the tracks, but there were dozens of little people standing on the tracks – just standing there, milling about!

“Oh, creepers, Smalls! Hang on!” said Cob, and he yanked on the cord.

“Right,” said Smalls, and he reached for a handhold with one hand and held his spade fast in the other.

The train’s whistle blasted out from the black and red engine car, once, twice, three times. The little people didn’t move. Again Cob yanked on the cord, shattering the silence of the cornfield with another blast, then looked down at his speedometer and shook his head. “Off the tracks, little fellers!” he yelled out and dialed down the speed dial. Immediately the engine car began to shudder, and he knew that back behind him – he was afraid to look – the rest of the train was a-shuddering, too.

There was no time though – no time to slow down, no time to worry about the cargo, no time to apologize to the one dining car full of travelling folk from Dragon Cupboard and Center Munch and points north. They were going to have make due now and excuse the fact that the Express might be a tad late for Old Pastoria/Bright Lettins Station.

“Damn hu-mountainous corn!” said Cob, and he yanked on the handbrake as hard as he could and closed his eyes. Poor little fellers, he thought. They’re so cute.