LITMIR.BIZ

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      If they had known, or taken the trouble to know, as much about him as they could have known before passing judgment on him, perhaps things might have been a little different; perhaps not, I won't say, for it's pretty generally accepted in railroad law that a dispatcher's slip is a capital offense, and there's no court of appeal, no stay of execution, no anything, and to all intents and purposes he's dead from the moment that slip is made. There have been lots of cases like that, lots of them, and there's no class of men I pity more—a slip, and damned for the rest of their lives! I don't say that because I'm a dispatcher myself. We're only human, aren't we? Mistakes like that, God knows, aren't made intentionally. Sometimes a man is overworked, sometimes queer brain kinks happen to him just as they do to every other man. We're ranked as human in everything but our work. I'm not saying it's not right. In the last analysis I suppose it has to be that way. It's part of the game, and we know the rules when we "sit in." We've no reason to complain, ​only I get a shiver every time I read a newspaper headline that I know, besides being a death-warrant, is tearing the heart out of some poor devil. You've seen the kind I mean, read scores of them—"Dispatcher's Blunder Costs Many Lives"—or something to the same effect. Maybe you'll think it queer, but for days afterward I can't handle an order book or a train sheet when I'm on duty without my heart being in my mouth half the time.

      What's this got to do with Breen? Well, in one way, it hasn't anything to do with him; and, then again, in another way, it has. I want you to know that a blunder means something to a dispatcher besides the loss of his job. Do you think they're a cold-blooded, calloused lot? I want you to know that they care. Oh, yes, they're human. They've got a heart and they've got a soul; the one to break, the other to sear. My God! think of it—a slip. That's the ghastly horror of it all—a slip! Don't you think they can feel? Don't you think their own agony of mind is punishment enough without the added reproach, and worse, of their fellows? But let it go, it's the Law of the Game.

      I said they didn't know much about Breen out here then except that he was a pretty good dispatcher, but as far as that goes it didn't help him any, rather the reverse, when the smash came. The better the man the harder the fall, what? It's generally that way, isn't it? Perhaps you're wondering what I know about him. I'll tell you. If any one knew Breen, I knew him. I was only a kid then, I'm a man now. I ​hadn't even a coat—Breen gave me one. I'm a dispatcher—Breen taught me, and no better man on the "key" than Breen ever lived, a better man than I could ever hope to be, yet he slipped. Do you wonder I shiver when I read those things? I'm not a religious man, but I've asked God on my bended knees, over and over again, to keep me from the horror, the suffering, the blasted life that came to Breen and many another man—through a slip. Yes, if any one knew Breen, I did. All I know, all I've got, everything in this whole wide world, I owe to Breen—"Angel" Breen.

      You probably read of the Elktail wreck at the time it happened, but you've forgotten about it by now. Those things don't live long in the mind unless they come pretty close home to you; there's too many other things happening every hour in this big pulsing world to make it anything more than the sensation of the moment. But out here the details have cause enough to be fixed in the minds of most of us, not only of the wreck itself, but of what happened afterward as well—and I don't know which of the two was the worse. You can judge for yourself.

      I'm not going into technicalities. You'll understand better if I don't. You'll remember I said that the Hill Division is only single-tracked. That means, I don't need to tell you, that it's up to the dispatcher every second, and all that stands between the trains and eternity is the bit of tissue tucked in the engineer's blouse and its duplicate crammed in the conductor's side pocket. Orders, meeting points, single track, ​you understand? The dispatcher holds them all, every last one of them, for life or death, men, women and children, train crews and company property, all—and Breen slipped!

      No one knows to this day how it happened. I daresay some eminent authority on psychology might explain it, but the explanation would be too high-browed and too far over my head to understand it even if he did. I only know the facts and the result. Breen sent out a lap order on Number One, the Imperial Limited, westbound, and Number Eighty-Two, a fast freight, perishable, streaking east. Both were off schedule, and he was nursing them along for every second he could squeeze. Back through the mountains, both ways, all through the night, he'd given them the best of everything—the Imperial clear rights, and Eighty-Two pretty nearly, if not quite, as good. Then he fixed the meeting point for the two trains.

      I read a story once where the dispatcher sent out a lap order on two trains and his mistake was staring at him all the time from his order book. I guess that was a slip of the pen, and he never noticed it. That was queer enough, but what Breen did was queerer still. His order book showed straight as a string. The freight was to hold at Muddy Lake, ten miles west of Elktail, for Number One. Number One, of course, as I told you, running free. Somehow, I don't know how, it's one of those things you can't explain, a subconscious break between the mind and the mechanical, physical action, you've noticed it in little things you've done yourself, Breen wired the word "Elktail" ​instead of "Muddy Lake"—and never knew it—never had a hint that anything was wrong—never caught it on the repeat, and gave back his O. K. The order, the written order in the book, was exactly as it should be. It read Muddy Lake—that was right, Muddy Lake. You see what happened? There wasn't time for the freight to make Elktail, but she got within three miles of it—and that's as far as she ever got! In a nasty piece of track, full of trestles and gorges, where the right of way bends worse than the letter S, they met, the two of them, head on—Number One and Number Eighty-Two!

      And Breen didn't know what he had done even after the details began to pour in. How could he know? What was Eighty-Two doing east of Muddy Lake? She should have been waiting there for Number One to pass her. The order book showed that plain enough. And all through the rest of that night, while he worked like a madman clearing the line, getting up hospital relief, and wrecking trains—with Carleton, he was super then, gray-faced and haggard, like the master of a storm-tossed liner on his bridge giving orders, pacing the room, cursing at times at his own impotency—Breen didn't know, neither of them knew, where the blame lay. But the horror of the thing had Breen in its grip even then. I was there that night, and I can see him now bent over under the green-shaded lamp—I can see Carleton's face, and it wasn't a pleasant face to see. One thing I remember Breen said. Once, as the sounder pitilessly clicked a message more ghastly than any that had gone before, adding ​to the number of those whose lives had gone out forever, adding to the tale of the wounded, to the wild, mad story of chaos and ruin, Breen lifted his head from the key for a moment, pushed his hair out of his eyes with a nervous, shaky sweep of his hand, and looked at Carleton.

      "It's horrible, horrible," he whispered; "but think of the man who did it. Death would be easy compared to what he must feel. It makes me as weak as a kitten to think of it, Carleton. My God, man, don't you see! I, or any other dispatcher, might do this same thing to-morrow, the next day, or the day after. Tell me again, Carleton, tell me again, that order's straight."

      "Don't lose your nerve," Carleton answered sharply. "Whoever has blundered, it's not you."

      Irony? No. It's beyond all that, isn't it? It's getting about as near to the tragedy of a man's life as you can get. It's getting as deep and tapping as near bed-rock as we'll ever do this side of the Great Divide. Think of it! Think of Breen that night—it's too big to get, isn't it? God pity him! Those words of his have rung in my ears all these years, and that scene I can see over again in every detail every time I close my eyes.

      In the few hours left before dawn that morning, there wasn't time to give much attention to the cause. There was enough else to think of, enough to give every last man on the division from car tink to superintendent all, and more, than they could handle—the investigation could come later. But it never came. ​There was no need for one. How did they find out? It came like the crack of doom, and Breen got it—got it—and it seemed to burst the floodgates of his memory open, seemed to touch that dormant chord, and he knew, knew as he knew that he had a God, what he had done.

      They found the order that made the meeting point Elktail tucked in Mooney's jumper when, after they got the crane at work, they hauled him out from under his engine. Who was Mooney? Engineer of the freight. They found him before they

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