About that time our call came over the wire: “N-H, N-H, N-H.”
As Ben jumped in, I put down my paper to listen. I find it’s a good thing to pay pretty strict attention to anything on a night like that. It keeps you from seeing shadows that aren’t there, and hearing sounds which your common sense tells you must be the wind.
Presently came the professional dot and dash of Donaldson down at Hastings. Now Donaldson, next to Big Ben, was a star operator, and the two of ’em could talk better and with more satisfaction over a stretch of singing wire than if they were sitting together in a parlor.
Even I knew Donaldson’s style, although I wasn’t more than middling expert. There were tricks in his stuff such as shortening his o’s, but his Morse ran mighty smooth. I read off the message to myself.
“Freezing cold down here, Ben. Lonely, too. Damn lonely. What do you get on 77?”
The big man at the table cut in: “Brace up; 77 on time. Nothing to bother her to-night except the storm. All freight deadheaded.”
That seemed to satisfy Donaldson, for there was a long silence broken only by the whine of the wind and the thud, thud of driven snow. I had just picked up the paper again when “N-H, N-H, N-H,” snapped at us.
The crispness of dots and dashes suggested excitement. Ben acknowledged deliberately, but when he closed the wire I saw a narrowing of his eyes.
Donaldson was in a hurry. “Going to quit to-morrow,” he began. “Can’t stand this joint. Say, there’s two of you up there. You’re lucky. Old man will have to come across with an assistant or I quit. Do you know you’re the nearest white man to me? Just me alone here. No night for a man to be alone. Hold on, I think I hear somebody in the waiting-room. Maybe I’ll have company.”
But he opened up again the next moment with: “Good Lord, must be going off my nut. Nobody in the waiting-room. It’s the wind. I tell you this place is like the north pole. If I could only hear a fire crackling. Say, there it goes again. No, I’m way off; that’s a fact. I’ll have to look around. Do you notice anything funny in the wind? I seem to. Why the devil didn’t they put shades on these windows? What’s the matter with me anyhow?”