Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/43

Rh the head of the dying fireman of the freight. She sent that fur piece to the cleaners three times later. It would return apparently spotless, but always a day's dust and sun would bring back telltale stains, until she discarded it.

We carried the body of the dead freight engineer into our sleeper and laid it in a berth. The mangled and scalded fireman was laid across two seats in the smoker. I had used up the vaseline in my make-up box rubbing it into the man's burns, and returned to the sleeper to borrow more. It was the first time I had been in the immediate presence of death, and returning, I tiptoed past the berth where the dead engineer lay. Just as I passed, the corpse seized me by the left wrist and pulled me down. My heart stopped and I sank, numb with shock, to the berth edge.

The engineer was not yet dead. He had recovered consciousness, coldly sober and self-accusing. He held me there by a vise-like grip and cursed himself as I never had heard a man revile himself, and never wish to again. He consigned himself to the farthest reaches of hell, and was dead in five minutes. There was not an external wound on his body, but the autopsy disclosed scarcely a whole bone.