Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/178

 "I couldn't," he said in a husky voice. "My God, I couldn't," he repeated, and swept out his arms.

A bitter oath sprang from Carleton's lips, lips that were not often profane, and his teeth snapped through the amber of his briar. The others just looked out of the window.

Mac Vicar, a spare man, took the Limited out that night, and it was three days before Coogan reported again. Maybe it was the fit of the black store-clothes and perhaps the coat didn't hang just right, but as he entered the roundhouse he didn't look as straight as he used to look and there was a queer inward slope to his shoulders and he walked like a man who didn't see anything. The springy swing through the gangway was gone. He climbed to the cab as an old man climbs—painfully. The boys hung back and didn't say anything, just swore under their breaths with full hearts as men do. There wasn't anything to say—nothing that would do any good.

Coogan took 505 and the Limited out that night, took it out the night after and the nights that followed, only he didn't talk any more, and the slope of the shoulders got a little more pronounced, a little more noticeable, a little beyond the cut of any coat. And on the afternoons of the lay-overs at Big Cloud, Coogan walked out behind the town to where on the slope of the butte were two fresh mounds—one larger than the other. That was all.

Regan, short, paunchy, big-hearted Regan, tackled Jim Dahleen, Coogan's fireman.

"What's he say on the run, Jim, h'm?"