To prove his freedom from rancor and his emancipation from love, but really because he could not resist the chance to have a last word with Irene, he went across lots to her father's back yard and came round to the porch. He forgot to draw the shells from his gun.
In the sunset, with his weapon a-shoulder, he must have looked a bit wild, for Irene jumped when he spoke to her. He sought an excuse for his visit and put at her feet the game he had bagged—a squirrel, a rabbit, and a few birds—the last he ever shot.
The moment the dead things were there he regretted the impulse. He was reminded of his previous quarry and its ill success. Irene was reminded, too, for she thanked him timidly and asked if he had left any wounded birds in the field. He laughed "No" with a poor grace.
She said: "I'd better get these out of sight before Drury comes. He doesn't like to see such things."
She lifted them distastefully and went into the house. She came out almost at once, for she heard a train. But it was not the passenger swooping south; it was the freight trudging north. There was only a single track then, and no block system of signals.
Irene no sooner recognized the lumbering, jostling drove of cattle-cars and flats going by than she gasped:
"That freight ought not to be on that track—now!"
She was frozen with dread. Crosson understood, too. Then from the distance came the whistle of the express, the long hurrah of its approach to the station. The freight engineer answered it with short, sharp blasts of his whistle. He kept jabbing the air with its noise.
There was the grind of the brakes on the wheels. The cars tried to stop, like a mob, but the rear cars bunted the front cars forward irresistibly. The cattle aboard lowed and bellowed. The brakemen, quaint silhouettes against the red sky, ran along the tops of the box-cars, twisting the brake-wheels.
Irene stumbled down the steps and dashed across the pastures toward the jutting hill that she had so often seen the express sweep round. Crosson followed.