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I came to I was pretty
busy putting my lunch," explained the other with simple realism. "One
of Mr. Pullman's seats butted me in the stomach. They ain't upholstered
as soft as you'd think to look at 'em. I went reeling around, looking for

Miss I. O. W., she being alone, you know, and I thought she might need
some looking after. And I had that idea of having seen her with her
hand to her head dazed and running--yes; that's it, she was running.
Wow!" said the young man fervently. "She was a pretty thing! You
don't suppose--" He turned hesitantly to the file of bodies, now decently
covered with sheets.
For a grisly instant Banneker thought of the one mangled
monstrosity--that to have been so lately loveliness and charm, with
deep fire in its eyes and perhaps deep tenderness and passion in its
heart. He dismissed the thought as being against the evidence and
entered the initials in his booklet.
"I'll look out for her," said he. "Probably she's forward somewhere."
Without respite he toiled until a long whistle gave notice of the return
of the locomotive which had gone forward to meet the delayed special
from Stanwood. Human beings were clinging about it in little clusters
like bees; physicians, nurses, officials, and hospital attendants. The
dispatcher from Stanwood listened to Banneker's brief report, and sent
him back to Manzanita, with a curt word of approval for his work.
Banneker's last sight of the wreck, as he paused at the curve, was the
helpful young man perched on the rear heap of wreckage which had
been the observation car, peering anxiously into its depths ("Looking
for I. O. W. probably," surmised the agent), and two commercial
gentlemen from the smoker whiling away a commercially unproductive
hiatus by playing pinochle on a suitcase held across their knees.
Glancing at the vast, swollen, blue-black billows rolling up the sky,
Banneker guessed that their game would be shortly interrupted.
He hoped that the dead would not get wet.

CHAPTER III
Back in his office, Banneker sent out the necessary wires, and learned

from westward that it might be twelve hours before the break in the
track near Stanwood could be fixed up. Then he settled down to his
report.
Like his earlier telegram, the report was a little masterpiece of concise
information. Not a word in it that was not dry, exact, meaningful. This
was the more to the writer's credit in that his brain was seething with
impressions, luminous with pictures, aflash with odds and ends of
minor but significant things heard and seen and felt. It was his first
inner view of tragedy and of the reactions of the human creature, brave
or stupid or merely absurd, to a crisis. For all of this he had an outlet of
expression.
Taking from the wall a file marked "Letters. Private"-it was 5 S 0027,
and one of his most used purchases--he extracted some sheets of a
special paper and, sitting at his desk, wrote and wrote and wrote,
absorbedly, painstakingly, happily. Wind swept the outer world into a
vortex of wild rain; the room boomed and trembled with the
reverberations of thunder. Twice the telegraph instrument broke in on
him; but these matters claimed only the outer shell; the soul of the man
was concerned with committing its impressions of other souls to the
secrecy of white paper, destined to personal and inviolable archives.
Some one entered the waiting-room. There was a tap on his door.
Raising his head impatiently, Banneker saw, through the window
already dimming with the gathering dusk, a large roan horse, droopy
and disconsolate in the downpour. He jumped up and threw open his
retreat. A tall woman, slipping out of a streaming poncho, entered. The
simplicity, verging upon coarseness, of her dress detracted nothing
from her distinction of bearing.
"Is there trouble on the line?" she asked in a voice of peculiar clarity.
"Bad trouble, Miss Camilla," answered Banneker. He pushed forward a
chair, but she shook her head. "A loosened rock smashed into Number
Three in the Cut. Eight dead, and a lot more in bad shape. They've got
doctors and nurses from Stanwood. But the track's out below. And from
what I get on the wire"--he nodded toward the east--"it'll be out above

before long."
"I'd better go up there," said she. Her lips grew bloodless as she spoke
and there was a look of effort and pain in her face.
"No; I don't think so. But if you'll go over to the town and see that
Torrey gets his place cleaned up a bit, I suppose some of the passengers
will be coming in pretty soon."
She made a quick gesture of repulsion. "Women can't go to Torrey's,"
she said. "It's too filthy. Besides--I'll