On the Iron at Big Cloud

by Frank L. Packard

I don’t know how I let him go like that. I was too stunned to move I guess, but I reached him at the foot of the stairs as he stepped out onto the platform. There wasn’t anything I could say, was there? What would you have said?

No man knew better than Breen himself what this would mean to him. He was wrecked, wrecked worse than that other wreck, for his was a living death. There weren’t any grand jurys or things of that kind out here then, not that it would have made any difference to Breen if there had been. You can’t put any more water in a pail when it’s already full, can you? You can’t add to the maximum, can you? don’t you think Breen’s punishment was beyond the reach of man or men to add to, or, for that matter, to abate by so much as the smallest fraction? It was, God knows it was—all except one final twinge, that I believe now settled him, though I’ll say here that whatever it did to Breen it’s not for me to judge her. Who am I, that I should? It is between her and her Maker. I’ll come to that in a minute.

Yes, Breen knew well enough what it meant to him, but his thoughts that morning as we walked up the street weren’t, I know right well, on himself—he was thinking of those others. And I, well, I was thinking of Breen. Wouldn’t you? I told you I owed Breen everything I had in the world. Neither of us said a word all the way up to his boarding-house. It was almost as though I wasn’t with him for all the attention he paid to me. But he knew I was there just the same. I like to think of that. I wasn’t very old then—I’m not offering that as an excuse, for I’m not ashamed to admit that I was near to tears—if I’d been older perhaps I could have said or done something to help. As it was, all I could do was to turn that one black thought over and over and over again in my mind. Breen’s living death, death, death, death. That’s the way it hit me, the way it caught me, and the word clung and repeated itself as I kept step beside him.

He was dead, dead to hope, ambition, future, everything, as dead as though he lay outstretched before me in his coffin. It seemed as if I could see him that way. And then, don’t ask me why, I don’t know, I only know such things happen, come upon you unconsciously, suddenly, there flashed into my mind that bit of verse from the Bible, you know it—“if a man die, shall he live again?” I must have said it out loud without knowing it, for he whirled upon me quick as lightning, placed his two hands upon my shoulders, and stared with a startled gaze into my eyes. I say startled. It was, but there was more. There seemed for a second a gleam of hope awakened, hungry, oh, how hungry, pitiful in its yearning, and then the uselessness, the futility of that hope crushed it back, stamped it out, and the light in his eyes grew dull and died away.

We had halted at the door of his boarding-house and I made as though to go upstairs with him to his room, but he stopped me.

“Not now, Charlie, boy,” he said, shaking his head and trying to smile; “not now. I want to be alone.”

And so I left him.

Alone! He wanted to be alone. Were ever words more full of cruel mockery! It seems hard to understand sometimes, doesn’t it? And we get to questioning things we’d far better leave alone. I know at first I used to wonder why Almighty God ever let Breen make that slip. He could have stopped it, couldn’t He? But that’s riot right. We’re running on train orders from the Great Dispatcher, and the finite can’t span the infinite.

Maybe you’ll think it queer that I left Breen like that, let him go to his room alone. You’re thinking that in his condition he might do himself harm—end it all, to put it bluntly. Well, that thought didn’t come to me then, it did afterward, but not then. Why? It must have been just the innate consciousness that he wouldn’t do that sort of thing. Some men face things one way, some face them another. It’s a question of individuality and temperament. I don’t think Breen could have done anything like that, I know he seemed so far apart from it in my mind that, as I say, the thought didn’t come to me. He was too big a man, big enough to have faced what was before him, faced conditions, faced the men, though God knows they treated him like skulking coyote, if it had not been for her. I want to stand right on this. Breen would never have done what he did if she had $cted differently. That much I know. But, I want to say it again, I’ve no right to judge her.

Perhaps you’ve read that story of Kipling’s about the Black Tyrone Regiment that saw their dead? Well, Breen, as I told you, at the beginning, wasn’t popular, and the boys had seen their dead. Do you understand? Pariah, outcast, what you like, they made him, all except pity they gave him, and I say he would have taken it all, accepted it all, only there are some things too heavy for a man to bear, aren’t there? Load limit, the engineers call it when they build their bridge. Well, there’s a load limit on the heart and brain and soul of a man just as there is on a bridge; and while one, strained beyond the breaking point, goes crashing in a horrid mass of twisted wreckage to the bottom of the canon, to the bottom of the gorge, into the rushing, boiling waters of the river beneath, the other crashes, a damned soul, to the bottom of hell. Kitty Mooney had seen her dead. Kitty Mooney, the engineer’s sister! And Breen loved her, was going to marry her. That’s all.