eyes--and then, with a strange, inarticulate cry, he
moved toward the side of the room.

Sprawled in a huddled heap upon the floor beneath the eaves, collapsed,
out like the snuffing of a candle wick, as Doctor McTurk had said some
day he would go out, dead, lay Dan McGrew--the loose plank up, two
empty bottles beside him, as though the man had snatched first one and
then the other from their hiding place in the wild hope that there
might be something left of the supply drained to the last drop hours
before.

The Kid stooped over McGrew, straightened up, stared at the lifeless
form before him, and his hands went queerly to his temples and the
sides of his head--the room spun dizzily around and around, the lamp,
the dead man on the floor, the bunks, a red-and-black flashed
whirl--the Kid's hands reached grasping into nothingness for support,
and he slipped inertly to the floor.

From below came the sharp tattoo of the sounder making the Angel Forks
call, quick, imperative at first--then like a knell of doom, in frantic
appeal, the despatchers' life and death, the _seventeen_--and, "Hold
Circus Special." Over and over again the sounder spoke and cried and
babbled and sobbed like a human soul in agony; over and over again
while the minutes passed, and with heavy, resonant roar the long Circus
Special rumbled by--but the man on the night wire at Angel Forks was
dead; and the Kid was past the hearing--there were to come weeks, while
he raved in the furious delirium and lay in the heavy stupor of brain
fever, before a key meant anything to him again.

It's queer the way things happen! Call it luck, if you like--maybe it
is--maybe it's something more than luck. It wouldn't be sacrilege,
would it, to say that the hand of God had something to do with keeping
the Circus Special and the Limited from crashing head-on in the
rock-walled, twisting canyon, four miles west of Angel Forks, whatever
might be the direct means, ridiculous, before-unheard-of, funny, or
absurd, that saved a holocaust that night? That wouldn't be sacrilege,
would it? Well, call it luck, if you like--call it anything you like.
Queer things happen in railroading--but this stands alone, queerest of
all in the annals of fifty roads in a history of fifty years.

The Limited, thanks to a clean-swept track, had been making up time,
making up enough of it to throw meeting point with the Circus Special
at L'Aramie out--and the despatcher had tried to Hold t