Thereupon the three of us went after the crippled fireman, and when we got back to the "Y" with him it was all over. Collingwood had died with his head in Mrs. Sheila's lap, and the boss, fagged out and half dead as he must have been, was up and at work, getting the wreck victims into our day-coach, which had been backed up and taken around to the other leg of the "Y" to head for Portal City.
When it came time for us to move Collingwood, Mrs. Sheila pulled her veil down and walked behind the body, with the good old major locking his arm in hers, and that choking lump came again in my throat when I remembered what Collingwood had said to the boss the night he came to our office: "Sheila made her wedding journey with me once, when she was just eighteen. The next time she rides with me it will be at my funeral."
I guess there's no use stretching the agony out by telling about that mournful ride back to Portal City with the dead and wounded. We left the wreck blazing and roaring in the shut-in valley at the gulch mouth because there wasn't anything else to do; Kirgan and Jones and one of the firemen handled the engine and pulled out, while the rest of us rode in the day-coach and did what we could for the suffering.
At Banta we made a stop long enough to let the boss send a wire to Portal City, turning out the doctors and the ambulances—and the undertakers; and though it was after three o'clock in the morning when we pulled in, it seemed as if the whole town had got the word and was down at the station to meet us.
I couldn't see Mrs. Sheila's face when the major helped her off at the platform; her veil was still down. But I did hear her low-spoken word to the boss, whispered while they were carrying Collingwood and Hatch, and two of the others who were past help, out to the waiting string of dead-wagons.
"I shall go East with the body to-morrow—to-day, I mean—if the strikers will let you run a train, and Cousin Basil will go with me. We may never meet again, Graham, and for that reason I must say what I have to say now. Your opportunity has come. The man who could do the most to defeat you is dead, and the strike will do the rest. If I were you, I should neither eat nor sleep until I had thought of some way to take the railroad out of the hands of those who have proved that they are not worthy to own it."
I didn't know, just then, how much or little attention Mr. Norcross was paying to this mighty good, clear-headed bit of business advice. What he said went back to that saying of hers that they might never meet again.
"We must meet again—sometime and somewhere," he said. And then: "I did my best: God knows I did my best, Sheila. I would have given my own life gladly if the giving would have saved Collingwood's. Don't you believe that?"
"I shall always believe that you are one of God's own gentlemen, Graham," she said, soft and low; and then the major came to take her away.