Glover was asking questions, and a man whose voice she could now hear
breaking with sobs, was answering. "Are you sure your signals were
right?" she heard Glover ask slowly and earnestly; and again,
patiently, "how could you be doubled up without the flanger's leaving
the track?" Then the man would repeat his story.
"You must have had too much behind you," Glover said once.
"Too much?" echoed the man, frantically. "Seven engines behind us all
day yesterday. Paddy told him the minute he got in the cab she
wouldn't never stand it. He told him it as plain as a man could tell a
man. Then because we went through a thousand feet in the gap like
cheese he ordered us up the hill. When we struck the big drift it was
slicing rock, Mr. Glover. Paddy told him she wouldn't never stand it.
The very first push we let go in a hundred feet with the engine
churning her damned drivers off. We went into it twice that way. I
could see it was shoving the tender up in the air every time and told
Doubleday--oh, if you'd been there! The next time we sent the plough
through the first crust and drove a wind-pocket maybe forty or fifty
yards and hit the ice with the seven engines jamming into us. My God!
she doubled up like a jack-knife--Pat, Pat, Pat."
"Can you recollect where Blood was standing when you buckled?"
"In the right gangway." There was a pause. "He must have dropped,"
she heard Glover say.
"Then he'll never drop again, Mr. Glover, for if he slipped off the
ties he'd drop a thousand feet."
"The heaviest snow is right at the top of the hill?"
"Yes, sir."
"If we can cross the hill we can find him anyway."
"Don't try to get across that hill till you put in five hundred
shovellers, Mr. Glover."
"That would take a week. If he's alive we must get him within
twenty-four hours. He may freeze to death to-night."
"Don't try to cross that hill with a plough, Mr. Glover. Mind my
words. It's no use. I've bucked with you many a time--you know that."
"Yes."
"You're going to your death when you try that."
"There's the doctor now, Foley," Glover answered. "Let him look you
over carefully. Come this way."
The voices receded. Listening to the talk, little of which she
understood, a growing fear had come over Gertrude. Her eyes had
pierced the gray light about her, and as she heard Glover walk away she
rose hurriedly and stepped to the doorway to detain him. Glover had
disappeared, but before her, stretched on the couch back of the table,
lay McGraw. She knew him instantly, and so strangely did the gloom
shroud his features that his steady eyes seemed looking straight at
her. She divined that he had been brought back hurt. A chill passed
over her, a horror. She hesitated a moment, and, fascinated, stepped
closer; then she knew she was staring at the dead.