Page:The Night Operator.djvu/69

Rh on his way downstairs he brushed the back of his hand across his eyes.

"What the hell!" he growled to himself. "I had to lie to him, didn't I?"

And so, on the Monday following, Owsley went tip to the new Elk River road work, and— But just a moment, we've over-run our holding orders a bit, and we've got to back for the siding. The 1601 crosses us here.

Superstition is a queer thing, isn't it? Speaking generally, we look on it somewhat from the viewpoint of the old adage that all men are mortal save ourselves; that is, we can accept, with more or less tolerant condescension, the existence of superstition in others, and, with more or less tolerant condescension, put it down to ignorance—in others. But we're not superstitious ourselves, so we've got to have something better to go on than that, as far as the 1601 is concerned. Well, the 1601 was pretty badly shaken up that night in the spill at Elbow Bend, and when they overhauled her in the shops, while they made her look like new, perhaps they missed some-thing down deep in her vitals in the doing of it; perhaps she was weakened and strained where they didn't know she was; perhaps they didn't get clean to the bottom of all her troubles; perhaps they made a bad job of a job that looked all right under the fresh paint and the gold leaf. There's nothing superstitious about that, is there? It's logical and reasonable enough to satisfy even the most hypercritical crank amongst us anti-superstitionists—isn't it?

But that doesn't go in the cabs, and the roundhouses, and the section shanties on the Hill Division. You could talk and reason out there along that line until you were blue in the face from shortness of breath, and they'd listen to you while they wiped their hands on a hunk