"Blamed if I know what to make of it!" he growled. "Ordinary, six men's words would be the end of it, but Owsley's the best man that ever latched a throttle in our cabs, and for twenty years his record's cleaner than a baby's. What he says now don't count, because he ain't right again yet; but what you can't get away from is the fact that Owsley's not the man to have slipped a signal. Either the six of them are doing him cold to save their own skins, or there's something queer about it."
Carleton, "Royal" Carleton, in his grave, quiet way, shook his head.
"We've been trying hard enough to get to the bottom of it, Tommy," he said. "I wish to the Lord we could. I don't think the men are lying—they tell a pretty straight story. I've been wondering about that patch Owsley had on his eye, and——"
"What's that got to do with it?" cut in the blunt little master mechanic, who made no bones about his fondness for the engineer. "He isn't blind in the other, is he?"
Carleton stared at the master mechanic for a moment, pulling ruminatively at his brier; then—they were in the super's office at the time—his fist came down with a sudden bang upon the desk.
"I believe you've got it, Tommy!" he exclaimed.
"Believe I've got it!" echoed Regan, and his hand half-way to his mouth with his plug of chewing stopped in mid-air. "Got what? I said he wasn't blind in the other, and neither he is—you know that as well as I do."
"Wait!" said Carleton. "It's very rare, I know, but it seems to me I've heard of it. Wait a minute, Tommy." He was leaning over from his chair and twirling the little revolving bookcase beside the desk, as he spoke—not a large library was Carleton's, just a few technical books, and his cherished Britannica. He pulled out a volume of the encyclopedia, laid it upon his desk, and began to turn the leaves. "Yes, here it is," he said, after a moment. "Listen"—and he commenced to read rapidly:
"'The most common form of Daltonism'—that's color-blindness you know, Tommy—'depends on the absence of the red sense. Great additions to our knowledge of this subject, if only in confirmation of results already deduced from theory, have been obtained in the last few years by Holmgren, who has experimented on two persons, each of whom was found to have one color-blind eye, the other being nearly normal."
"Color-blind!" spluttered the master mechanic.