Again Lee shrieked as he struggled to free himself, and then, as Perley fired, he burst out into a peal of wild, discordant laughter. His mind was giving way. He began to gibber like a madman—that’s the way they found him—with Perley’s body pitched full across his chest.
Don’t ask me. I told you Perley was a little, undersized, sawed-off man. I don’t know, do I? The halfbreed, physically, could have handled him like a baby, once he caught him unawares. That’s all I know.
They buried Perley down at Big Cloud; and they buried Clancy where the posse dropped him, drilled full of holes. That’s the story.
Lee? Charlie Lee? Why, he doesn’t count, does he? He had nothing to do with it. Well, if you’re interested in him I’ll tell you. His college diploma never did him any good. Once he got better and out of the hospital, he took to drinking periodically—hard. Between times straight as a string, you understand, for six weeks say, then off again. That was fifteen years ago, and he’s done it ever since. The doctors said that blow on the head unsettled him, skull splinter, or something like that; but medicine’s not an exact science. The doctors were wrong. The trouble was deeper than the skull—it was in his soul. Lee drank to save himself from the madhouse—I told you, didn’t I, that some men drink because they have to?
Carleton, the super, and the men before Carleton, understood what the doctors didn’t, so Lee’s working for the railroad yet. Not braking—he’s not fit for that, but he keeps the job they gave him—and it’s kept for him—when he gets back after his spells. I———there’s the foreman shouting for me. Sorry, but I’ll have to go. “If you’re going out on Number One she’s just coming down the gorge now. Good night, sir.”
I lost him in the shadows of the big mogul on the pit behind me. Then I turned and walked slowly out of the roundhouse, over the turntable, and across the tracks to the station platform. Number One’s mellow chime floated down from the gorge, then the flare of the electric headlight, and the rumble of the train. And in quick, fierce tempo, the beating, drumming trucks caught up the name I had heard the foreman shout, and rang it over and over again in my ears:
“Oh-you-Lee! Charlie-Lee! Lee! Charlie-Lee—Lee!”