"There's no night man at Fort Rucker."
"But Burling, the day man, sleeps upstairs——"
"He goes up to Bear Dance to lodge."
"This isn't lodge night," said Blood.
"For God's sake, how can you get him upstairs, anyway?" trembled O'Neill.
"On cold nights he sleeps downstairs by the ticket-office stove. I spent a night with him once and slept on his cot. If he is in the ticket-office you may be able to wake him—he may be awake. The Special can't pass there for ten minutes yet. Don't stare at me. Call Rucker, hard."
O'Neill seized the key and tried to sound the Rucker call. Again and again he attempted it and sent wild. The man that could hold a hundred trains in his head without a slip for eight hours at a stretch sat distracted.
"Let me help you, Garry," suggested Blood, in an undertone. The despatcher turned shaking from his chair and his superintendent slipped behind him into it. His crippled right hand glided instantly over the key, and the Rucker call, even, sharp, and compelling, followed by the quick, clear nineteen—the call that gags and binds the whole division—the despatchers' call—clicked from his fingers.
Persistently, and with unfailing patience, the men hovering at his back, Blood drummed at the key for the slender chance that remained of stopping the passenger train. The trial became one of endurance. Like an incantation, the call rang through the silence of the room until it wracked the listeners, but the man at the key, quietly wiping his face and head, and with the towel in his left hand mopping out his collar, never faltered, never broke, minute after minute, until after a score of fruitless waits an answer broke his sending with the "I, I, Ru!"
As the reply flew from his fingers Morris Blood's eyes darted to the clock; it was 3.17. "Stop Special 833, east, quick."