Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/182

 with it, it's just coincidence, mabbe, and mabbe it's not. It's a year ago to-night Coogan was married."

For a moment Carleton did not speak; like Regan, he stared at the wall.

"You think that"

"No, I don't"—Regan caught him up roughly—" I don't think anything at all. I only know it's queer, ghastly queer."

Carleton nodded his head slowly. Steps were coming up the stairs. The voice of Flannagan, the wrecking boss, reached them, other voices excited and loud joined in. He slapped the master mechanic on the back.

"I don't wonder it caught you, Tommy," he said. "It's almost creepy. But there's no time for that now. Come on."

Regan laughed, the same hard laugh, as he followed the chief into the dispatcher's room.

"East of number two switch-back, eh?" he swore. "If there's any choice for hellishness anywhere on that cursed stretch of track, that's it. My God, it's come, and it's come good and hard—good and hard."

It had. It was a bad mess, a nasty mess—but, like everything else, it might have been worse. Instead of plunging to the right and dropping to the canon eighteen hundred feet below, 505 chose the inward side and rammed her nose into the gray mass of rock that made the mountain wall. The wreckers from Dreamer Butte and the wreckers from Big Cloud tell of it to this day. For twenty-four hours they worked and then they dropped—and fresh men took their places. There was