LITMIR.BIZ

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can wait until we get back. Now, will you go?"

      And Rafferty went—at the head of the wreckers—out into the yard where the switching crew were working like beavers making up the relief train. Two passenger coaches to serve as ambulances, behind them a flat, then the wrecking crane, the tool car, and a caboose. As Rafferty was piling his men into the train, Holman raced across the tracks to the station. On the platform the doctors, hastily summoned, were crowded around Carleton. Holman stopped beside them. "We're all ready, Carleton," he announced; then to the others: "You fellows had better get aboard; we'll be off as soon as we get the track."

      "Spence will have the line clear in a minute," said Carleton, as the doctors started for the coaches. "I'm sending a dispatcher up with you; he can tap in on the wires. How many men did you scrape up?"

      "The regular crew."

      "And Rafferty?"

      "He's going along."

      "I don't know how you did it, and there's no time for explanations now; but I think, Holman, you'd better leave Rafferty behind."

      ​"And have the whole crew quit, too? It's no use, Carleton, he's got to go. That's all there is to it."

      Carleton shook his head doubtfully. "I don't like the idea of you two getting up there together. There's no need of you going, and you'd better not go. You don't know the man; if you think he'll forget——"

      "You're wrong, I do. I told you so before; anyway, it's too late now—we're off. Here's Spence with the orders."

      Before Carleton could reply, Holman had grabbed the tissue and was running for the train. As he swung himself into the cab of the engine and handed Hurley, the driver, his orders, Rafferty climbed in from the other side.

      At sight of Holman, Rafferty hesitated and half turned around in the gangway to go back to the caboose; but Holman reached out and caught his arm.

      "Stay where you are, Rafferty," he said quietly. And during the nerve-racking thirty-mile run to Eagle Pass no other words passed between them. Sometimes in the mad slur of the locomotive as she hit the tangents their bodies touched; that was all.

      Holman, by virtue of railroad etiquette, had climbed to the fireman's seat and once or twice he had glanced around at the great bulk of the man behind him, at the grim, set features, at the eyes that would not meet his, and wondered at his own temerity in inviting a physical encounter. And what good had it done? Was Carleton right after all? Perhaps. And yet behind the stubbornness, the self-will, the purely physical, ​there must be the other side of the man. If he could only reach—it only touch it. He had touched it. His appeal for the injured.

      Hurley was eating up the miles as only a man at the throttle of a wrecker with clear rights could do it. A long scream from the whistle that echoed through the mountains above the pounding, deafening rush of the train brought Holman back to his immediate surroundings. Another minute and they had swung round the curve and thundered over the trestle that made the approach to the Pass.

      Half a mile ahead of them up the track they saw the horror. Hurley latched in his throttle and began to check. As the brake-shoes bit into the tires, Holman slipped off his seat and faced Rafferty. There was a curious look in the other's eyes, and Holman understood. Understood that here Rafferty was his master—and knew it. So this was the meaning of it. This was how he had touched the other's better nature! Rafferty had cunningly seized the opportunity of placing him at an even greater disadvantage than before. For an instant he hesitated as he bit his lip, then he canceled the personal equation. "Go ahead, Rafferty," he said quietly, answering the unspoken challenge, "you're better up in this sort of thing than I am. You're in charge."

      And Rafferty without a word swung himself from the cab.

      To Holman the first five minutes was unnerving. It was his first bad wreck. Down East it had never been his province to go out with the crew—nor was it here, ​he reflected grimly, and at that moment was grateful for the veteran Rafferty. It was like some hideous nightmare to him. All along the line of burning wreckage lay the dead, their silence the more awful by contrast with the shrieks and cries of the wounded still imprisoned in the wreck. And then the feeling passed and he worked—worked like a madman.

      Once a woman had caught his arm and, sobbing, dragged him toward the stateroom end of one of the Pullmans. Through the smoke and scorching heat of the flames he had fought his way in, then back with the child. The woman had thrown her arms hysterically around his neck.

      It was all a mad, furious turmoil, and he gloried in it. The crunch of the ax through glass and woodwork, the wild rush into the heart of things to stagger back blinded and choked with his helpless burden. The fierce joy if life still lingered; the tender reverence if life were gone.

      Up the track toward the engine there was a crash and a chorus of excited cries. He rushed in that direction. A half-dozen of the wrecking crew were grouped around the forward baggage-car. As Holman reached them, disheveled, clothes torn and scorched, face blackened with smoke and daubed with blood where glass and splinters had cut him, the men drew back aghast, staring white-faced.

      "By God!" one cried. "It's him!"

      "Of course it's me! Are you crazy? What's the matter with you?"

      The man pointed to the blazing car. "Some one ​said you was in there, and he went in after you just before she crumpled up."

      "Who?" Holman shouted.

      "Rafferty."

      Holman made a dash for the car. The men held him back. "Don't try it, sir; it's too late to do any good."

      He shook them off, and with his arms crossed in front of his head to protect his face he half stumbled, half fell through the opening that had once been a door. The car was half over on its side. The trunks, dashed into a heap on top of each other when the car had left the track, were all that supported the burning roof timbers. Between the trunks and the edge of the car there was a little space with the floor at an angle of forty-five degrees, and along this, head down, Holman crawled blindly. The floor was already beginning to smolder, the metal-bound edges of the trunks blistered his hands as he touched them. His senses reeled, but on and on he crawled, and in his mind over and over again the one thought: "Rafferty! My God, Rafferty!"

      Then his hands touched something soft, and slowly, painfully, inch by inch, he struggled back dragging Rafferty after him. Somehow he reached the door, then a confused jumble of noises and nothing more until he returned to consciousness, and to the knowledge that he was back in his room at Big Cloud with the almond-eyed factotum in attendance.

      "Belly much better? Likee eat?" inquired that individual solicitously.

      Holman grinned in spite of the pain. "No," he ​answered; then as he closed his eyes again he muttered: "Tell Carleton I was right."

      And he was, for two days afterward Rafferty publicly abdicated. He gathered the men in the fitting-shop and mounted to the cab of an engine jacked halfway up to the ceiling as before, only on this occasion it was at noon hour and not in the company's time. His words were few and to the point, delivered with a force and eloquence that was all his own:

      "I sed he was a damned pink-faced dude, so I did. Well, I take ut back, d'ye moind? An' fwhat's more, I'll flatten the face av any man fwhat sez I iver sed ut!"

      The Little Super

       Table of Contents

      Layout 2

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      II

      THE LITTLE SUPER

      Tommy Regan backed the big compound mogul down past the string of dark-green coaches that he had pulled for a hundred and fifty miles, took the table with a slight jolt, and came to a stop in the roundhouse. As he swung himself from the cab, Healy, the turner, came up to him.

      "He's a great lad, that av yours," Healy

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