Success | Page 6

"I fancy so."
"Will you take an urgent message to be wired from Manzanita?"
"Certainly," said the youth with good-will.
Tearing a leaf from his pocket-ledger, Banneker scribbled a dispatch
which is still preserved in the road's archives as giving more vital
information in fewer words than any other railroad document extant.
He instructed the messenger where to find a substitute telegrapher.
"Answer?" asked the youth, unfurling his long legs.
"No," returned Banneker, and the courier, tossing his coat off, took the
road.
Banneker turned back to the improvised hospital.
"I'm going to move these people into the cars," he said to the man in
charge. "The berths are being made up now."
The other nodded. Banneker gathered helpers and superintended the
transfer. One of the passengers, an elderly lady who had shown no sign
of grave injury, died smiling courageously as they were lifting her.
It gave Banneker a momentary shock of helpless responsibility. Why
should she have been the one to die? Only five minutes before she had
spoken to him in self-possessed, even tones, saying that her
traveling-bag contained camphor, ammonia, and iodine if he needed
them. She had seemed a reliable, helpful kind of lady, and now she was
dead. It struck Banneker as improbable and, in a queer sense,
discriminatory. Remembering the slight, ready smile with which she
had addressed him, he felt as if he had suffered a personal loss; he

would have liked to stay and work over her, trying to discover if there
might not be some spark of life remaining, to be cherished back into
flame, but the burly old man's decisive "Gone," settled that. Besides,
there were other things, official things to be looked to.
A full report would be expected of him, as to the cause of the accident.
The presence of the boulder in the wreckage explained that grimly. It
was now his routine duty to collect the names of the dead and wounded,
and such details as he could elicit. He went about it briskly,
conscientiously, and with distaste. All this would go to the claim agent
of the road eventually and might serve to mitigate the total of damages
exacted of the company. Vaguely Banneker resented such probable
penalties as unfair; the most unremitting watchfulness could not have
detected the subtle undermining of that fatal boulder. But essentially he
was not interested in claims and damages. His sensitive mind hovered
around the mystery of death; that file of crumpled bodies, the woman
of the stilled smile, the man fondling a limp hand, weeping quietly.
Officially, he was a smooth-working bit of mechanism. As an
individual he probed tragic depths to which he was alien otherwise than
by a large and vague sympathy. Facts of the baldest were entered neatly;
but in the back of his eager brain Banneker was storing details of a far
different kind and of no earthly use to a railroad corporation.
He became aware of some one waiting at his elbow. The lank young
man had spoken to him twice.
"Well?" said Banneker sharply. "Oh, it's you! How did you get back so
soon?"
"Under the hour," replied the other with pride. "Your message has gone.
The operator's a queer duck. Dealing faro. Made me play through a
case before he'd quit. I stung him for twenty. Here's some stuff I
thought might be useful."
From a cotton bag he discharged a miscellaneous heap of patent
preparations; salves, ointments, emollients, liniments, plasters.
"All I could get," he explained. "No drug-store in the funny burg."

"Thank you," said Banneker. "You're all right. Want another job?"
"Certainly," said the lily of the field with undiminished good-will.
"Go and help the white-whiskered old boy in the Pullman yonder."
"Oh, he'd chase me," returned the other calmly. "He's my uncle. He
thinks I'm no use."
"Does he? Well, suppose you get names and addresses of the slightly
injured for me, then. Here's your coat."
"Tha-anks," drawled the young man. He was turning away to his new
duties when a thought struck him. "Making a list?" he asked.
"Yes. For my report."
"Got a name with the initials I. O. W.?"
Banneker ran through the roster in the pocket-ledger. "Not yet. Some
one that's hurt?"
"Don't know what became of her. Peach of a girl. Black hair, big,
sleepy, black eyes with a fire in 'em. Dressed right. Traveling alone,
and minding her own business, too. Had a stateroom in that Pullman
there in the ditch. Noticed her initials on her traveling-bag."
"Have you seen her since the smash?"
"Don't know. Got a kind of confused recklection of seeing her
wobbling around at the side of the track. Can't be sure, though. Might
have been me."
"Might have been you? How could--"
"Wobbly, myself. Mixed in my thinks. When