Page:Cy Warman--The express messenger and other tales of the rail.djvu/200

188 and when her light locomotive came up against the heavy mogul which was helping No. 8, and making twenty, it would be as though she had gone against the side of the canon at sixty miles an hour. It was awful even to think of it. Now there came a message from the general manager, urging the superintendent to get the new President over the road as rapidly as possible, as he was anxious to spend Christmas with his family at Boston. The superintendent read the message, and smiling sadly, as men sometimes do to keep from crying, shook his head slowly and laid the paper down.

"Poor devil!" he said, after a pause,—"just got a good job and now he gets killed," and then the operator at Eastcreek touched the key and said: "No. 8 twenty minutes late;" and fresh color came to the white faces in the despatched office.

When the operator at Westcreek, with the pen behind his ear and ink on his shirt sleeve, quitted the platform and re-entered the office, he heard a hurry-up call for him which came in a quick, nervous way and told him that he was