Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/194

 wouldn't be telling you this now, if he had, would I?"

"Sit down," said Carleton.

Dahleen took the chair beside the desk, and resting his feet on the window-sill stared out at the lights twinkling below him.

"Yes, I gave him the flask," he said slowly, as though picking up the thread of a story, "for a wedding present. The day he came back to his run after the little woman and the baby died he had it in his pocket, and he handed it to me. I'm afraid of it, Jimmy, he said. That was all, just that—only he looked at me. Then he got down out of the cab to oil round, me still holding it in my hand for the words kind of hit me—they meant a whole lot. Well, before he came back, I lifted up my seat and chucked it down in the box underneath. I don't want to make a long story of this. You know how he took to brooding. Sometimes he wouldn't say a word from one end of the run to the other. And once in a while he seemed to act a little queer. I didn't think much of it and I didn't say anything to anybody, figuring it would wear off. When we pulled out of Big Cloud the night of the wreck I didn't see anything out of the ordinary about him, I'd kind of got used to him by then and if there was any difference I didn't notice it. He never said a word all the way out until we hit the summit of the Devil's Slide and started down. I had the fire-box door open and was throwing coal when he says so sudden as almost to make me drop my shovel:

Jimmy, do you know what night this is?