Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/75

 some one thing our soul, what's left of it, revolts at doing. Breen was a railroad man. Railroading was in his blood. I want you to get that. It was part of him. Any man that's worth his salt in this business is that way. It's in the blood or it isn't; you're a railroad man or you're not.

Breen disappeared from Big Cloud and I didn't see him from the day Kitty Mooney turned him from her door until the night—but I'm coming to that—that's the end. There's a word or two that goes before—so that you'll understand. He disappeared from Big Cloud, but he didn't leave the mountains. Maybe back of it all, an almost impossible theory if you like, but I can understand it, a something in him wouldn't let him run away. He did run away, you say. Yes, but there's the queer brain kink again. Perhaps he temporized. You temporize. I temporize. We try to fool and delude sometimes, snatch at loopholes, snatch at straws, to bolster up our self-respect, don't we? That's what I mean when I say it's possible he couldn't run away. He clung to the straw, the loophole, that running away was measured in miles. I don't say that was it, for I don't know. It's possible. We heard of him from time to time as the months went by, and the things we heard weren't pleasant things to hear. He drifted from bad to worse, until that something that he couldn't do brought him to a halt—brought the end.

Don't ask me when Breen threw in his lot with Black Dempsey and the band of fiends that called him leader—the ugliest, soul-blackened set of fiends that