forgotten at his waist. From the east room, operators,
their instruments silenced, were tiptoeing into the archway. Above the
little group at the table the clock ticked. O'Neill, in a frenzy, half
rose out of his chair, but Morris Blood, putting his hand on the
despatcher's shoulder, forced him back.

"They're gone," cried the frantic man; "let me out of here."

"No, Garry."

"They're gone."

"Not yet, Garry. Try Fort Rucker for the Special."

"There's no night man at Fort Rucker."

"But Burling, the day man, sleeps upstairs----"

"He goes up to Bear Dance to lodge."

"This isn't lodge night," said Blood.

"For God's sake, how can you get him upstairs, anyway?" trembled
O'Neill.

"On cold nights he sleeps downstairs by the ticket-office stove. I
spent a night with him once and slept on his cot. If he is in the
ticket-office you may be able to wake him--he may be awake. The
Special can't pass there for ten minutes yet. Don't stare at me. Call
Rucker, hard."

O'Neill seized the key and tried to sound the Rucker call. Again and
again he attempted it and sent wild. The man that could hold a hundred
trains in his head without a slip for eight hours at a stretch sat
distracted.

"Let me help you, Garry," suggested Blood, in an undertone. The
despatcher turned shaking from his chair and his superintendent slipped
behind him into it. His crippled right hand glided instantly over the
key, and the Rucker call, even, sharp, and compelling, followed by the
quick, clear nineteen--the call that gags and binds the whole
division--the despatchers' call--clicked from his fingers.

Persistently, and with unfailing patience, the men hovering at his
back, Blood drummed at the key for the slender chance that remained of
stopping the passenger train. The trial became one of endurance. Like
an incantation, the call rang through the silence of the room until it
wracked the listeners, but the man at the key, quietly wiping his face
and head, and with the towel in his left hand mopping out his collar,
never faltered, never broke, minute after minute, until after a score
of fruitless waits an answer broke his sending with the "I, I, Ru!"

As the reply flew from his fingers Morris Blood's eyes darted to the
clock; it was 3.17. "Stop Special 833, east, quick."

"You've got them?" asked Glover, from the counter.

"If they're not by," muttered Blood.

"Red light out," reported Rucker; then three dreadful minutes