The door of the large anteroom was open and the room empty. Gertrude entered hesitatingly and looked toward Glover's office. His door also was ajar, but no one was within. The sound of voices came from a connecting room and she at once distinguished Glover's tones. It was justification: with her coin purse she tapped lightly on the door casing, and getting no response stepped inside the office and slipped into a chair beside his desk to await him. The voices came from a room leading to Callahan's apartments.
Glover was asking questions, and a man whose voice she could now hear breaking with sobs, was answering. "Are you sure your signals were right?" she heard Glover ask slowly and earnestly; and again, patiently, "how could you be doubled up without the flanger's leaving the track?" Then the man would repeat his story.
"You must have had too much behind you," Glover said once.
"Too much?" echoed the man, frantically. "Seven engines behind us all day yesterday. Paddy told him the minute he got in the cab she wouldn't never stand it. He told him it as plain as a man could tell a man. Then because we went through a thousand feet in the gap like cheese he ordered us up the hill. When we struck the big drift it was slicing rock, Mr. Glover. Paddy told him she wouldn't never stand it. The very first push we let go in a hundred feet with the engine churning her damned drivers off. We went into it twice that way. I could see it was shoving the tender up in the air every time and told Doubleday—oh, if you'd been there! The next time we sent the plough through the first crust and drove a wind-pocket maybe forty or fifty yards and hit the ice with the seven engines jamming into us. My God! she doubled up like a jack-knife—Pat, Pat, Pat."
"Can you recollect where Blood was standing when you buckled?"
"In the right gangway." There was a pause. "He must have dropped," she heard Glover say.
"Then he'll never drop again, Mr. Glover, for if he slipped off the ties he'd drop a thousand feet."
"The heaviest snow is right at the top of the hill?"
"Yes, sir."
"If we can cross the hill we can find him anyway."