He fished sausages out of a skillet, he cut them carefully into small bits, he smeared oleomargarine on thick slabs of baker's bread and he stirred sugar into his tea, one spoonful after another, but he did not eat.
Henry was listening. His ears were listening, straining till he could almost see them standing out batlike from his knobby old head. His whole gaunt ridiculous body was listening, and his soul, such cramped and curious sort of soul as he owned, stood stock still in a cold tremor of mingled triumph and dread.
Henry was listening for the wreck of the Oriole Limited.
While he spooned sugar into his cup, staring off into the blackness with a sort of fascinated paralysis, he was waiting for the hideous crashing, the roar and rending, the sickening upheaval, the booming rush of steam when the proud steel train should go hurtling into the frozen muck of his turnip patch. Inch by inch past block after block, he followed the Oriole Limited in his mind through the black night to her doom. Now she would be streaking through Hodges Siding; a great whooping serpent with a thousand gleaming eyes and a tongue of flame.
He took out his old silver watch, calculated the difference between sun time and railroad time—speculated. Four minutes out of Hodges now—eight minutes more. Eight minutes, and he would be even with the B. & A.!
Nothing on earth could save the Oriole Limited. Henry had fixed everything himself. He had turned the abandoned old switch that in the past had served the guano factory and spiked it himself. To be certain that nothing could prevent the destruction he planned he had put two heavy plow beams on the rails near the switch frogs and had weighted them down with rocks and brickbats. All this after dark and so near to train time that there was small chance for a prowling section hand to discover his work.
It had taken Henry eighteen years to accumulate courage enough to spike that switch. Half his queer, isolated life had been devoted to a lonely vendetta against the B. & A.—a one-man war which no one beside himself suspected. Sixteen years since, when the spur to the guano plant was first laid, Henry had made a wedge of steel, long and sharp. Twelve years later, when the factory had yielded its malodorous ghost and its red tin roof began to sag and the old spur track to rust, he had begun a long series of abortive and secret attempts at train wrecking.
Every dark and rainy night for years he had crept out through his pie-plant row and past his humming beehives, slipped over the white fence and spiked the switch open with a few quick, practised strokes. But always about the time the Oriole Limited pulled out of Hodges Siding his courage had failed him, and he had rushed out with mallet and sledge to remove the menace he had created.
Whenever a work train pulled into Elsie, Henry always suffered a cold apprehension for fear the useless old spur would be torn up before he had screwed up enough nerve to do his work of sabotage. But for some reason the grass-grown length of abandoned spur remained. And now the switch was open, grimly spiked, waiting for the arrogant engine of the Limited to come crashing, amazed, to her tragedy.