Page:Cy Warman--The express messenger and other tales of the rail.djvu/207

Rh in the matter. Such things were constantly occurring, they argued. Women had wept for their husbands hours before receiving news of their death. A mother, a thousand miles away, had seen her son killed in a wreck in the Black Cañon, giving not only the day and hour, but the exact moment in which it occurred, describing accurately his appearance after death. A clerk in the treasurer's office said it was simple. The train-master had so longed to send this very message,—doubtless, word for word,—but could not get the operator, that the force of his mind had, in some way (which was not quite clear, even to the clerk), transmitted the message to the wire, so that when the operator at Westcreek touched the key it came to him, not over the wire, perhaps, but direct from the brain of the sender to that of the receiver. It was the great effort, he argued, of transmitting his thought to the operator which caused the train-master to collapse, and not his alarm at the impending collision.

In time, the story of the "mysterious message" came to the ears of the President at Boston, and as his life had been saved by the