No one present was ever able to say precisely how long they worked at Carstairs, probably not many minutes before his chest began to heave in a natural breathing motion. They carried him out into the yard, and the fresh air so revived him that in half an hour he walked through the engine room unaided, and lay down on the floor of the drawing office, made comfortable with coats and newspapers, and dozed off into a sleep. When he woke up, and had had a wash, he seemed quite normal again.
Smith was profuse in his apologies. "I'm beastly sorry. I never dreamt of anything of that sort, etc."
"Oh, it's alright," Carstairs answered, with a sincere desire to let the matter drop. "I ought to have stood still, went shoving my hands out, knew I was somewhere near the machine switch, too. Got right past the guards and touched the bare metal first go off, wouldn't happen once in a thousand times. Not your fault at all."
So the incident passed, and remained a secret in the bosoms of those five men till years later, when, Carstairs and Darwen were dim and distant memories at those works, a driver or a stoker would sometimes tell wondering pupils a tale of how a man was nearly killed on the night run through the Shift Engineer "skylarking."
Things went very smoothly for a bit. Darwen and Carstairs got more chummy than ever. They were leaning over the switchboard rail together, it was not quite a week since Carstairs had got the shock. "I rather wanted to see a chap get a shock, not killed, you know," Darwen was saying.
"I was rather curious on the point myself, too."
"What was it like? Just a two hundred shock magnified?"
"Very much magnified. It was devilish."
They drifted off. "I've never seen an alternator burn out yet, have you?"
"No! Wish number three would go now."