It was in the afternoon of the day following the wreck that Ballard made the laboratory test for blame; the office room in the adobe shack serving as the "sweat-box."
First came the flagmen, one at a time, their stories agreeing well enough, and both corroborating Galliford's account. Next came Hoskins's fireman, a green boy from the Alta Vista mines, who had been making his first trip over the road. He knew nothing save that he had looked up between shovelfuls to see Hoskins fighting with his levers, and had judged the time to be ripe for the life-saving jump.
Last of all came Hoskins, hanging his head and looking as if he had been caught stealing sheep.
"Tell it straight," was Ballard's curt caution; and the engineman stumbled through a recital in which haziness and inconsistency struggled for first place. He had seen something on the track or he thought he had, and had tried to stop. Before he could bring the train under control he had heard the crashing of the wreck in the rear. He admitted that he had jumped while the engine was still in motion.
"Which way was she running when you jumped, John?—forward or backward?" asked Ballard, quietly.
Bromley, who was making pencil notes of the evidence, looked up quickly and saw the big engine-man's jaw drop.
"How could she be runnin' any way but forrards?" he returned, sullenly.
Ballard was smoking, and he shifted his cigar to say: "I didn't know." Then, with sudden heat:
"But I mean to know, Hoskins; I mean to go quite to the bottom of this, here and now! You've been garbling the facts; purposely, or because you are still too badly rattled to know what you are talking about. I can tell you what you did: for some reason you made an emergency stop; you did make it, either with the brakes or without them. Then you put your engine in the reverse motion and backed; you were backing when you jumped, and the engine was still backing when it left the rails."
Hoskins put his shoulders against the wall and passed from sullenness to deep dejection. "I've got a wife and two kids back in Alta Vista, and I'm all in," he said. "What is there about it that you don't know, Mr. Ballard?"