“Then why should it fail here?”
The man's big grimy face wrinkled into a sort of smile.
“Now, Miss Warfield,” he said, “if we knew why an accident was likely to happen at one place more than another we wouldn't have any wrecks.”
“Precisely,” replied Marion, “but isn't it peculiar that the track should spread at the synclinal of this grade with the train running at a reduced speed, when it holds on the synclinal of other grades with the train running at full speed?”
The man's big face continued to smile.
“All accidents are peculiar, Miss Warfield; that's what makes them accidents.”
“But,” said Marion, “is not the aspect of these peculiarities indicatory of either a natural event or one designed by a human intelligence?”
The man fingered his torch.
“Mighty strange things happen, Miss Warfield. I've seen a train go over into a canal and one coach lodge against a tree that was standing exactly in the right place to save it. And I've seen a passenger engine run by a signal and through a block and knock a single car out of a passing freight-train, at a crossing, and that car be the very one that the freight train's brakeman had just reached on his way to the caboose; just like somebody had timed it all, to the second, to kill him. And I've seen a whole wreck piled up, as high as a house, on top of a man, and the man not scratched.”
“I do not mean the coincidence of accident,” said Marion, “that is a mystery beyond us; what I mean is that there must be an organic difference in the indicatory signs of a thing as it happens in the course of nature, and as it happens by human arrangement.”