On the earth they had left midnight was wearing toward morning—the morning of August the First, Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen!
MESSENGERS[16]
From The Saturday Evening Post
By CALVIN JOHNSTON
The group before the fire at the Engineers' Club were listening, every one—though nothing was being said; nor was it the crackle of apple logs or fluttering sails and drowning cries of the northeaster in the chimney that preoccupied them. Rather some still, distant undertone in their own breasts, arresting their conversation, gestures, thoughts—they glanced at one another surreptitiously, uneasily.
"But listen—I am telling you," said old Con O'Connel, the railroad builder, his voice rolling and sweet as the bells of Shandon: "To-night I hear a footfall in the rain—that of Tim Cannon, the messenger."
So that was the undertone which had arrested their thoughts; the rush of footfalls symbolizing to the group, every one, the pursuit of himself by a belated messenger. They settled themselves, relieved and smiling; after all the thing had been naturally suggested to them by the echo of rain on the broad plate windows. And they nodded their heads to Con, still listening.
The footfall of Tim Cannon, a name of ancient days on the P. D. Railroad; but as the story does not concern him except as Molly Regan's messenger I will leave him come into it in his own time and take up with the Regans themselves.
Two of them there were to begin with—young Michael, swinging a lusty pick in a construction gang of the Great Southwest Railway; and Molly, a pretty bride with solemn wondering gaze and air of listening to things which no one else could hear.