Page:George Collins - A Strange Railroad Wreck.pdf/47

Rh light is always used as an extra precaution after a train order has been received.

Returning to the office, she sat down at the telegraph table, opened her book and tried to read, while waiting for Forty-nine. After ten minutes she called "WB" office and asked if they had left there. "D 2:35, and no work to LC," came the reply—meaning the train had departed at the time mentioned, and had a through run to Lewistown. Mercedes began to look anxiously at the clock, as the hands pointed to three-thirty, then three forty-five, and finally to four o'clock; yet she did not hear a sound of Forty-nine. It was not unusual for the train to be so late, as it was often six or seven in the morning before it reached Lewistown; but knowing they had left the office south of "her an hour and a half before, with no work to do along the road, it should have passed right on time—3:04. Her nerves were at the highest possible tension; the telegraph instruments were quiet for perhaps five minutes, and everything about the place was still as death. Mercedes stood in a listening attitude in the center of the office; she had ceased to look up the track for the lost train—something seemed to tell her it would not come.

Suddenly, the "train wire" instrument began to click; it sounded almost like the report of a rifle to the excited girl, breaking as it did the deep silence of the night. She hurried to the table and sank in a