his hand across his eyes.

"What the hell!" he growled to himself. "I had to lie to him, didn't
I?"

And so, on the Monday following, Owsley went up to the new Elk River
road work, and--But just a moment, we've over-run our holding orders a
bit, and we've got to back for the siding. The 1601 crosses us here.

Superstition is a queer thing, isn't it? Speaking generally, we look
on it somewhat from the viewpoint of the old adage that all men are
mortal save ourselves; that is, we can accept, with more or less
tolerant condescension, the existence of superstition in others, and,
with more or less tolerant condescension, put it down to ignorance--in
others. But we're not superstitious ourselves, so we've got to have
something better to go on than that, as far as the 1601 is concerned.
Well, the 1601 was pretty badly shaken up that night in the spill at
Elbow Bend, and when they overhauled her in the shops, while they made
her look like new, perhaps they missed something down deep in her
vitals in the doing of it; perhaps she was weakened and strained where
they didn't know she was; perhaps they didn't get clean to the bottom
of all her troubles; perhaps they made a bad job of a job that looked
all right under the fresh paint and the gold leaf. There's nothing
superstitious about that, is there? It's logical and reasonable enough
to satisfy even the most hypercritical crank amongst us
anti-superstitionists--isn't it?

But that doesn't go in the cabs, and the roundhouses, and the section
shanties on the Hill Division. You could talk and reason out there
along that line until you were blue in the face from shortness of
breath, and they'd listen to you while they wiped their hands on a hunk
of waste--they'd listen, but they've got their own notions.

It was the night at Elbow Bend that Owsley and the 1601 together first
went wrong; and both went into hospital together and came out together
to the day--the 1601 for her old run through the mountains, and Owsley
with no other idea in life possessing his sick brain than to make the
run with her. Owsley had a relapse that day--and that day, twenty
miles west of Big Cloud, the 1601 blew her cylinder head off. And from
then on, while Owsley lay in bed again at Mrs. McCann's, the 1601, when
she wasn't in the shops from an endless series of mishaps, was turning
the hair gray on a despatcher or two, and had got most of Paxley's
nerve.

But what's the use of going into al