"I've cleared the line," said Spence. "The Limited is holding at Elk River till Brook's Cut reports Owsley through—then she's to trail along."
Carleton nodded, and took a chair beside the despatcher's table. Regan, as ever with him in times of stress, tugged at his mustache, and paced up and down the room.
He stepped once in front of Carleton and laughed shortly—and there was more in his words, a whole lot more, than he realized then.
"The Lord knows where he'll stop now with the bit in his teeth, but suppose he'd been heading the other way into the Limited—h'm! Head-on—instead of just tying up all the blamed traffic between here and the Elk—what? We can thank God for that!"
Carleton didn't answer, except by another nod. He was listening to Spence at the key, asking Brook's Cut why they didn't report Owsley through.
The rain rattled at the window panes, and the sashes shook under the gusts of wind; out in the yards below the switch lights showed blurred and indistinct. Regan paced the room more and more impatiently. Carleton's face began to go hard. Spence hung tensely over the table, his fingers on the key, waiting for the sounder to break, waiting for the Brook's Cut call.
It was only seven miles from Elk River, where the stalled passengers of the Limited—will you remember this?—grumbled and complained, pettish in their discontent at the delay, only seven miles from there to Brook's Cut, the first station east—only seven miles, but the minutes passed, and still Brook's Cut answered: "No." And Carleton's face grew harder still, and Regan swore deep down under his breath from a full heart, and Spence grew white and rigid in his chair. And so they waited there, waited with the sense of disaster growing cold upon them—waited—but Brook's Cut never reported Owsley "in" or "out" that night.
Owsley? Who knows what was in the poor, warped brain that night? He had heard her call to him, and they had brought him back the 1601, and she was standing there, alone, deserted—and she had called to him. Who knows what was in his mind, as, together, he and the 1601 went tearing through that black, storm-rent night, when the rivers, and the creeks, and the sluices were running full, and the Elk River, that paralleled the right of way for a mile or two to the crossing, was a raging torrent? Who knows if he ever heard the thundering crash with which the Elk River bridge went out? Who knows, as he swung the curve that opened the bridge approach, without time for any man, Owsley or another, to have stopped, if the headlight playing on the surge of maddened waters meant anything to him? Who knows? That was where they found them, beneath the waters, Owsley and the 1601—and Owsley was smiling, his hand tight-gripped upon the throttle that he loved.
"I dunno," says Regan, when he speaks of Owsley, "if the mountains out here have anything to do with making a man think harder. I dunno—sometimes I think they do. You get to figuring that the Grand Master mabbe goes a long way back, years and years, to work things out—if it hadn't been for Owsley the Limited would have gone into the Elk that night with every soul on board. Owsley? That's the way he wanted to go out, wasn't it?—with the 1601. Mabbe the Grand Master thought of him, too."