"Missing."
At dawn hot coffee was passed among the wreckers, and shortly after sunrise the McCloud gang arrived with the second derrick. Then the men of the night took hold with a new grip to get into the heart of the pile; to find—if he was there—Delaroo.
None of the McCloud gang knew the man they were hunting for, but the men from the Bend were soon telling them about Maje Sampson's Indian. Not a mute nod he ever gave; not a piece of tobacco he ever passed; not a brief word he ever spoke to one of the battered old hulks who rode and cut and slashed and stormed and drank and cursed with Benedict Morgan, was forgotten then. Every slewed, twisted, weather-beaten, crippled-up, gin-shivered old wreck of a wrecker—they were hard men—had something to say about Delaroo. And with their hair matted and their faces streaked and their shirts daubed and their elbows in blood, they said it—whatever it was, much or little—of Delaroo.
The picks swung, the derricks creaked, and all day with the heaving and the calling they toiled; but the sun was sinking before they got to the middle of it. Then Benedict Morgan, crawling under the drivers of the hind mogul, partly uncovered, edged out with a set face; he swore he heard breathing. It was alcohol to the veins of the double gang. Neighbor himself went in and heard—and stayed to fasten a grapple to pull the engine truck off the roof of a box car that was jammed over and against the mogul stack.
The big derrick groaned as the slack drew and the truck crashed through a tier of stays and swung whirling into the clear. A giant wrecker dodged the suspended wheels and raising his axe bit a hole into the jammed roof. Through that they passed a second grapple, and presently it gave sullenly, toppled back with a crash, and the foremost axman, peering into the opening, saw the heart of the wreck. Bending forward, he picked up something struggling in his arms. They thought it was a man; but it was a sheep, alive and uninjured, under all the horror: that was the breathing they heard. Benedict Morgan threw the man and his burden aside and stepped himself into the gap and through. One started to follow, but the chief of the wreckers waved him back. Close by where the sheep had been freed stood Delaroo. He stood as if with ear alert, so closely did the counterfeit seem the real. So sure was the impression of life that not until Morgan, speaking to the fireman, put his hand on his shoulder did he realize that the Indian stood quite dead just where the shock had caught him in his cab.
Stumbling over the wreckage, they passed him in the silence of the sunset from hand to hand into the open. A big fellow, pallid and scared, tottered after them, and when they laid the dead man down, half fell at his side: it was Maje Sampson.
It surprised everybody the way Maje Sampson went to pieces after Delaroo was killed. The Indian was carried back to the Bend and up to Sampson's and laid out in the God-forsaken parlor; but Maje wasn't any good fixing things up that time. He usually shone on like occasions. He was the comforter of the afflicted to an extraordinary degree; he gave the usual mourner no chance to let up. But now his day was as one that is darkened. When Neighbor went up next night to see about some minor matters connected with the funeral and the precedence of the various dozen orders that were to march, he found Maje Sampson and Martie alone in the darkness of the parlor with the silent Delaroo.
Maje turned to the master mechanic from where Delaroo lay. "Neighbor, you might as well know it now as any time. Don't you say so, Martie? Martie, what do you say?" Martie burst into tears; but through them Neighbor caught the engineer's broken confession. "Neighbor—I'm color blind." The master mechanic sat stunned.
"True as God's word. You might as well know it now. There's the man that stood between me and the loss of my job. It's been coming on me for two year. He knew it, that's why he stayed in my cab. He stayed because I was color blind. He knowed I'd git ketched the minute a new fireman come in, Neighbor. He watched the signals—Delaroo. I'm color blind, God help me." Maje Sampson sat down by the coffin. Martie hushed her crying; the three sat in the darkness.
"It wouldn't worry me so much if it wasn't f'r the family, Neighbor. The woman—and the boys. I ain't much a-savin'; you know that. If you can gi' me a job I can get bread an' butter out of, give it to me. I can't pull a train; my eyes went out with this man here. I wish to God it was me, and him standing over. A man that's color blind, and don't know a thing on God's earth but runnin' an engine, is worse 'n' a dead man."