Part 7 (2/2)

Neighbor and I sat with the dispatchers, up in their office, smoking.

The wheat-train was now due from the west, and, looking at my watch, I stepped to the western window. Almost immediately I heard the long peculiarly hollow blast of the Sky-Sc.r.a.per whistling for the upper yard.

”She's coming,” I exclaimed.

The boys crowded to the window; but Neighbor happened to glance to the east.

”What's that coming in from the junction, Bailey?” he exclaimed, turning to the local dispatcher. We looked and saw a headlight in the east.

”That's 55.”

”Where do they meet?”

”55 takes the long siding in from the junction”--which was two miles east--”and she ought to be on it right now,” added the dispatcher, anxiously, looking over the master-mechanic's shoulder.

Neighbor jumped as if a bullet had struck him. ”She'll never take a siding to-night. She's coming down the main track. What's her orders?”

he demanded, furiously.

”Meeting orders for first 4 at Redbud, second 4 here, 78 at Glencoe.

Great Jupiter!” cried the dispatcher, and his face went sick and scared, ”they've forgotten second 4.”

”They'll think of her a long time dead,” roared the master-mechanic, savagely, jumping to the west window. ”Throw your red lights! There's the Sky-Sc.r.a.per now!”

Her head shot that instant around the coal chutes, less than a mile away, and 55 going dead against her. I stood like one palsied, my eyes glued on the burning eye of the big engine. As she whipped past a street arc-light I caught a glimpse of Georgie McNeal's head out of the cab window. He always rode bare-headed if the night was warm, and I knew it was he; but suddenly, like a flash, his head went in. I knew why as well as if my eyes were his eyes and my thoughts his thoughts. He had seen red signals where he had every right to look for white.

But red signals now--to stop _her_--to pull her flat on her haunches like a bronco? Shake a weather flag at a cyclone!

I saw the fire stream from her drivers; I knew they were churning in the sand; I knew he had twenty air cars behind him sliding. What of it?

Two thousand tons were sweeping forward like an avalanche. What did brains or pluck count for now with 55 dancing along like a school-girl right into the teeth of it?

I don't know how the other men felt. As for me, my breath choked in my throat, my knees shook, and a deadly nausea seized me. Unable to avert the horrible blunder, I saw its hideous results.

Darkness hid the worst of the sight; it was the sound that appalled.

Children asleep in sod shanties miles from where the two engines reared in awful shock jumped in their cribs at that crash. 55's little engine barely checked the Sky-Sc.r.a.per. She split it like a banana. She bucked like a frantic horse, and leaped fearfully ahead. There was a blinding explosion, a sudden awful burst of steam; the windows crashed about our ears, and we were dashed to the wall and floor like lead-pencils. A baggage-truck, whipped up from the platform below, came through the heavy sash and down on the dispatcher's table like a brickbat, and as we scrambled to our feet a shower of wheat suffocated us. The floor heaved; freight-cars slid into the depot like battering-rams. In the height of the confusion an oil-tank in the yard took fire and threw a yellow glare on the ghastly scene.

I saw men get up and fall again to their knees; I was s.h.i.+vering, and wet with sweat. The stairway was crushed into kindling-wood. I climbed out a back window, down on the roof of the freight platform, and so to the ground. There was a running to and fro, useless and aimless; men were beside themselves. They plunged through wheat up to their knees at every step. All at once, above the frantic hissing of the buried Sky-Sc.r.a.per and the wild calling of the car tinks, I heard the stentorian tones of Neighbor, mounted on a twisted truck, organizing the men at hand into a wrecking-gang. Soon people began running up the yard to where the Sky-Sc.r.a.per lay, like another Samson, prostrate in the midst of the destruction it had wrought. Foremost among the excited men, covered with dirt and blood, staggered Dad Hamilton.

”Where's McNeal?” cried Neighbor.

Hamilton pointed to the wreck.

”Why didn't he jump?” yelled Neighbor.

Hamilton pointed at the twisted signal-tower; the red light still burned in it.

”You changed the signals on him,” he cried, savagely. ”What does it mean? We had rights against everything. What does it mean?” he raved, in a frenzy.

<script>