and over again.

And there was no answer.

It had turned cold that night and there was a fire in the little
heater. Donkin had opened the draft a little while before, and the
sheet-iron sides now began to pur red-hot. Nobody noticed it. Regan's
kindly, good-humored face had the stamp of horror in it, and he pulled
at his scraggly brown mustache, his eyes seemingly fascinated by
Donkin's fingers. Everybody's eyes, the three of them, were on
Donkin's fingers and the key. Carleton was like a man of stone,
motionless, his face set harder than face was ever carved in marble.

It grew hot in the room; but Donkin's fingers were like ice on the key,
and, strong man though he was, he faltered.

"Oh, my God!" he whispered--and never a prayer rose more fervently from
lips than those three broken words.

Again he called, and again, and again. The minutes slipped away.
Still he called--with the life and death--the "seventeen"--called and
called. And there was no answer save that echo in the room that
brought the perspiration streaming now from Regan's face, a harder
light into Carleton's eyes, and a chill like death into Donkin's heart.

Suddenly Donkin pushed back his chair; and his fingers, from the key,
touched the crystal of his watch.

"The second section will have passed Cassil's now," he said in a
curious, unnatural, matter-of-fact tone. "It'll bring them together
about a mile east of there--in another minute."

And then Carleton spoke--master railroader, "Royal" Carleton, it was up
to him then, all the pity of it, the ruin, the disaster, the lives out,
all the bitterness to cope with as he could. And it was in his eyes,
all of it. But his voice was quiet. It rang quick, peremptory, his
voice--but quiet.

"Clear the line, Bob," he said. "Plug in the roundhouse for the
wrecker--and tell them to send uptown for the crew."

Toddles? What did Toddles have to do with this? Well, a good deal, in
one way and another. We're coming to Toddles now. You see, Toddles,
since his fracas with Hawkeye, had been put on the Elk River local run
that left Big Cloud at 9.45 in the morning for the run west, and
scheduled Big Cloud again on the return trip at 10.10 in the evening.

It had turned cold that night, after a day of rain. Pretty cold--the
thermometer can drop on occasions in the late fall in the
mountains--and by eight o'clock, where there had been rain before,
there was now a thin sheeting of ice over every