Success. Samuel Hopkins Adams

      “I’m going to move these people into the cars,” he said to the man in charge. “The berths are being made up now.”

      The other nodded. Banneker gathered helpers and superintended the transfer. One of the passengers, an elderly lady who had shown no sign of grave injury, died smiling courageously as they were lifting her.

      It gave Banneker a momentary shock of helpless responsibility. Why should she have been the one to die? Only five minutes before she had spoken to him in self-possessed, even tones, saying that her traveling-bag contained camphor, ammonia, and iodine if he needed them. She had seemed a reliable, helpful kind of lady, and now she was dead. It struck Banneker as improbable and, in a queer sense, discriminatory. Remembering the slight, ready smile with which she had addressed him, he felt as if he had suffered a personal loss; he would have liked to stay and work over her, trying to discover if there might not be some spark of life remaining, to be cherished back into flame, but the burly old man’s decisive “Gone,” settled that. Besides, there were other things, official things to be looked to.

      A full report would be expected of him, as to the cause of the accident. The presence of the boulder in the wreckage explained that grimly. It was now his routine duty to collect the names of the dead and wounded, and such details as he could elicit. He went about it briskly, conscientiously, and with distaste. All this would go to the claim agent of the road eventually and might serve to mitigate the total of damages exacted of the company. Vaguely Banneker resented such probable penalties as unfair; the most unremitting watchfulness could not have detected the subtle undermining of that fatal boulder. But essentially he was not interested in claims and damages. His sensitive mind hovered around the mystery of death; that file of crumpled bodies, the woman of the stilled smile, the man fondling a limp hand, weeping quietly. Officially, he was a smooth-working bit of mechanism. As an individual he probed tragic depths to which he was alien otherwise than by a large and vague sympathy. Facts of the baldest were entered neatly; but in the back of his eager brain Banneker was storing details of a far different kind and of no earthly use to a railroad corporation.

      He became aware of some one waiting at his elbow. The lank young man had spoken to him twice.

      “Well?” said Banneker sharply. “Oh, it’s you! How did you get back so soon?”

      “Under the hour,” replied the other with pride. “Your message has gone. The operator’s a queer duck. Dealing faro. Made me play through a case before he’d quit. I stung him for twenty. Here’s some stuff I thought might be useful.”

      From a cotton bag he discharged a miscellaneous heap of patent preparations; salves, ointments, emollients, liniments, plasters.

      “All I could get,” he explained. “No drug-store in the funny burg.”

      “Thank you,” said Banneker. “You’re all right. Want another job?”

      “Certainly,” said the lily of the field with undiminished good-will.

      “Go and help the white-whiskered old boy in the Pullman yonder.”

      “Oh, he’d chase me,” returned the other calmly. “He’s my uncle. He thinks I’m no use.”

      “Does he? Well, suppose you get names and addresses of the slightly injured for me, then. Here’s your coat.”

      “Tha-anks,” drawled the young man. He was turning away to his new duties when a thought struck him. “Making a list?” he asked.

      “Yes. For my report.”

      “Got a name with the initials I. O. W.?”

      Banneker ran through the roster in the pocket-ledger. “Not yet. Some one that’s hurt?”

      “Don’t know what became of her. Peach of a girl. Black hair, big, sleepy, black eyes with a fire in ’em. Dressed right. Traveling alone, and minding her own business, too. Had a stateroom in that Pullman there in the ditch. Noticed her initials on her traveling-bag.”

      “Have you seen her since the smash?”

      “Don’t know. Got a kind of confused recklection of seeing her wobbling around at the side of the track. Can’t be sure, though. Might have been me.”

      “Might have been you? How could—”

      “Wobbly, myself. Mixed in my thinks. When I came to I was pretty busy putting my lunch,” explained the other with simple realism. “One of Mr. Pullman’s seats butted me in the stomach. They ain’t upholstered as soft as you’d think to look at ’em. I went reeling around, looking for Miss I. O. W., she being alone, you know, and I thought she might need some looking after. And I had that idea of having seen her with her hand to her head dazed and running—yes; that’s it, she was running. Wow!” said the young man fervently. “She was a pretty thing! You don’t suppose—” He turned hesitantly to the file of bodies, now decently covered with sheets.

      For a grisly instant Banneker thought of the one mangled monstrosity—that to have been so lately loveliness and charm, with deep fire in its eyes and perhaps deep tenderness and passion in its heart. He dismissed the thought as being against the evidence and entered the initials in his booklet.

      “I’ll look out for her,” said he. “Probably she’s forward somewhere.”

      Without respite he toiled until a long whistle gave notice of the return of the locomotive which had gone forward to meet the delayed special from Stanwood. Human beings were clinging about it in little clusters like bees; physicians, nurses, officials, and hospital attendants. The dispatcher from Stanwood listened to Banneker’s brief report, and sent him back to Manzanita, with a curt word of approval for his work.

      Banneker’s last sight of the wreck, as he paused at the curve, was the helpful young man perched on the rear heap of wreckage which had been the observation car, peering anxiously into its depths (“Looking for I. O. W. probably,” surmised the agent), and two commercial gentlemen from the smoker whiling away a commercially unproductive hiatus by playing pinochle on a suitcase held across their knees. Glancing at the vast, swollen, blue-black billows rolling up the sky, Banneker guessed that their game would be shortly interrupted.

      He hoped that the dead would not get wet.

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      Back in his office, Banneker sent out the necessary wires, and learned from westward that it might be twelve hours before the break in the track near Stanwood could be fixed up. Then he settled down to his report.

      Like his earlier telegram, the report was a little masterpiece of concise information. Not a word in it that was not dry, exact, meaningful. This was the more to the writer’s credit in that his brain was seething with impressions, luminous with pictures, aflash with odds and ends of minor but significant things heard and seen and felt. It was his first inner view of tragedy and of the reactions of the human creature, brave or stupid or merely absurd, to a crisis. For all of this he had an outlet of expression.

      Taking from the wall a file marked “Letters. Private"-it was 5 S 0027, and one of his most used purchases—he extracted some sheets of a special paper and, sitting at his desk, wrote and wrote and wrote, absorbedly, painstakingly, happily. Wind swept the outer world into a vortex of wild rain; the room boomed and trembled with the reverberations of thunder. Twice the telegraph instrument broke in on him; but these matters claimed only the outer shell; the soul of the man was concerned with committing its impressions of other souls to the secrecy of white paper, destined to personal and inviolable archives.

      Some one entered the waiting-room. There was a tap on his door. Raising his head impatiently, Banneker saw, through the window already dimming with the gathering dusk, a large roan horse, droopy and disconsolate in the downpour.