The man by the corpse bent down again and covered it up slowly and quietly, then he sank down on the green slope and burst into tears.
"Micky and him's brothers, you know," said a man who stood beside me in a whisper. The tears came into my eyes, much though I tried to restrain them. The tragedy had now revealed itself in all its horrible intensity, and I almost wished to run away from the spot.
After a while the breakdown van came along; the corpse was lifted in, the brother tottered weakly into the carriage attached to the van, and the engine puffed back to Glasgow. A few men turned the slag in the sleeper beds and hid the dark red clotted blood for ever. The man had a wife and several children, and to these the company paid blood money, and the affair was in a little while forgotten by most men, for it was no man's business. Does it not give us an easy conscience that this wrong and that wrong is no business of ours?
When the train rumbled around the first curve on its return journey I went towards the ganger, for the work obsession still troubled me. Once out of work I long for a job, once having a job my mind dwells on the glories of the free-footed road again. But now I had an object in view, for if I obtained employment on the railway I could stop in Glasgow and continue my search for Norah Ryan during the spare hours. The ganger looked at me dubiously, and asked my age.
"Twenty-two years," I answered, for I was well aware that a man is never taken on as a platelayer until he has attained his majority.
There and then I was taken into the employ of the —— Railway Company, as Dermod Flynn, aged twenty-two years. Afterwards the ganger read me the rules which I had to observe while in the employment of the company. I did not take very much heed to his droning voice, my mind reverting continuously to the tragedy which I had just witnessed, and I do not think that the ganger took very much pleasure in the reading. While we were going through the rules a stranger scrambled up the railway slope and came towards us.
"I heard that a man was killed," he said in an eager voice. "Any chance of gettin' a start in his place?"
"This man's in his shoes," said the ganger, pointing at me.
"Lucky dog!" was all that the man said, as he turned away.