He saw the girl’s flaxen-yellow hair darken to her mother’s gold as it lengthened into curls and ringlets until finally it became two thick long braids. From striving not to see these many pictures he came even to dwelling upon them in the effort so to fill his consciousness as to keep out the one picture he did not want to see.
He remembered his work, the wrecking car, and the wrecking crew that had toiled under him, and he wondered what had become of Clancey, his right-hand man. Came the long day, when, routed from bed at three in the morning to dig a surface car out of the wrecked show windows of a drug store and get it back on the track, they had laboured all day clearing up a half-dozen smash-ups and arrived at the car house at nine at night just as another call came in.
“Glory be!” said Clancey, who lived in the next block from him. He could see him saying it and wiping the sweat from his grimy face. “Glory be, ’tis a small matter at most, an’ right in our neighbourhood—not a dozen blocks away. Soon as it’s done we can beat it for home an’ let the down-town boys take the car back to the shop.”
“We’ve only to jack her up for a moment,” he had answered.
“What is it?” Billy Jaffers, another of the crew, asked.
“Somebody run over—can’t get them out,” he said, as they swung on board the wrecking-car and started.
He saw again all the incidents of the long run, not omitting the delay caused by hose-carts and a hook-and-ladder running to a cross-town fire, during which time he and Clancey had joked Jaffers over the dates with various fictitious damsels out of which he had been cheated by the night’s extra work.
Came the long line of stalled street-cars, the crowd, the police holding it back, the two ambulances drawn up and waiting their freight, and the young policeman, whose beat it was, white and shaken, greeting him with: “It’s horrible, man. It’s fair sickening. Two of them. We can’t get them out. I tried. One was still living, I think.”
But he, strong man and hearty, used to such work, weary with the hard day and with a pleasant picture of the bright little flat waiting him a dozen blocks away when the job was done, spoke cheerfully, confidently, saying that he’d have them out in a jiffy, as he stooped and crawled under the car on hands and knees.
Again he saw himself as he pressed the switch of his electric torch and looked. Again he saw the twin braids of heavy golden hair ere his thumb relaxed from the switch, leaving him in darkness.