Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/534

518 It is a singular fact that the human mind can become habituated to any experience. Though I shall never forget the night when I first drove my engine out of Waterwey, not too familiar with the route, dreading the darkness and the responsibility, tremulous, indeed, with a thousand tremors, yet now, were it twice as many years since I laid hand on lever or signalled for a station, I could take her out to-night, over marsh and meadow and drawbridge, up the long mountain grade, across the terrible trestle-work, round that curving precipice, one side sheer rock up into the stars, the other nothing but black darkness and an empty gulf of dizzy depth, through the thick, reverberating tunnels, down the long incline, and whistle for the brakes at Babylon, with as much nonchalance as when I took the reins from my groom this morning and gave my brown beauties their head for a breezy bit of business down the Park.

She was a rusher, that engine of mine, the Black Bess—they had not begun calling them then for the successful candidates—and would do her mile a minute if you asked it; though I've known the time, of a rainy five o'clock morning, when, with all steam on, her wheels made their revolutions and she stood still; and, to get her along the slippery side of an up-grade, both fireman and myself, jumping off, had to walk by her panting side and sprinkle the wet rails with sand to toll her on. But, although I've owned since then as choice specimens as ever stepped the turf, I never cared for any thoroughbred of them all as I did for the Black Bess, and I stabled her as carefully, and, in early days, handled her as daintily, as though she were the expected winner of a handicap.

Perhaps I loved my iron steed all the better for the dangers through which she had passed, since there are few whose affections are not drawn to their companion in peril; and the Black Bess and I had had it out one night, just as, clearing the Watenwey suburbs, we put on all speed for the long run across the marshes. The train was full, the steam was up, the very wind whistled behind us while we cleft it; light as a feather, the Black Bess went as if she trod the air.

Suddenly, with a sharp turn of the course from the shelter of a young thicket, we came out on a low cross-country road—a kind of causeway raised upon the meadows, and cutting diagonally across the railway track. So unfrequented was this road that I could not remember ever having noticed a vehicle on all its long and winding sweep; but at this moment an enormous load of hay, tilting heavily down on one side, rested directly across the track and blocked the way, not only for an instant's time, but was fixed there. I can see it here, if I close my eyes, with such a weird distinctness in every line as might be if a grave-light had stamped it on the plate of some supernatural camera — the four great steaming oxen, in the glow of the head-light, rising like a projection from the darkness, with wild eyes and interlocked horns, and trampling and tugging at the arrested wheels, the tilting mountain of meadow hay, the drunken teamster, half hidden in its pillowy masses, asleep, and with his jug beside him. In vain my touch upon the bell-rope or the rod; in vain the short, sharp shrieks of Black Bess; while I reached my hand to reverse the engine we should scatter all to flinders. One second the face, the face of that sleeping man, branded in on my brain as if by a searing-iron; the next, a wild thought of Margaret, a great blow, and dumb darkness. The man and his load were dust together, the Black Bess was off the track and above her wheels in meadow mud, and I lay stunned and senseless.

When a person recovers from a concussion of the brain, it would sometimes be better if he had died. I learned this to my cost one day; but I did not think so on first getting about after my long illness, through which I had ever been