The Project Gutenberg eBook ofSimeon Tetlow's ShadowThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Simeon Tetlow's ShadowAuthor: Jennette LeeRelease date: May 3, 2016 [eBook #51982]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by David Widger from page images generouslyprovided by Google Books*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIMEON TETLOW'S SHADOW ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Simeon Tetlow's ShadowAuthor: Jennette LeeRelease date: May 3, 2016 [eBook #51982]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by David Widger from page images generouslyprovided by Google Books
Title: Simeon Tetlow's Shadow
Author: Jennette Lee
Author: Jennette Lee
Release date: May 3, 2016 [eBook #51982]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Widger from page images generouslyprovided by Google Books
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIMEON TETLOW'S SHADOW ***
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CONTENTS
SIMEON TETLOW’S SHADOW
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XXVIII
IT was turning dusk in the office, though it was scarcely three o’clock and outside the sun was still shining, beyond the busy streets. The two men sitting on opposite sides of the small room bent closer to their desks. The younger glanced up and got up to turn on the electric light. The little scowl that had begun to form itself on the face of the older man changed to a look of relief. His pen moved faster over the paper.
The older man was Simeon Tetlow, President of the “R. and Q.” Railroad. It might almost be said that hewasthe road. Its minute ramifications and its great divisions were hardly more than the nerves and arteries that threaded Simeon Tetlow’s thin frame. And the orders that went out from the tiny office, high up in the big block, were the play of his flitting finger-tips upon the keyboard of the whole clanking system. The tiny, shriveled figure gave no hint of the power that ticked carloads of live stock and human beings to their destination and laid its hand upon roads half dead, or dying, or alive and kicking, sweeping them gently into the system, with hardly a gulp.
Simeon Tetlow was an iron man, wiry and keen—an intellect without heart or soul or conscience, his co-workers would have told you. Each new road absorbed, each influx of power, seemed only to tighten a spring somewhere inside that shot the bolt. He conld work day and night without tiring; and that was the reason, in part, why at forty-two he was president of the “R. and Q.” road; and the reason why at forty-two his hand, when it reached out for its abstemious glass of water, trembled so that it was quickly withdrawn. No one knew the man. No one guessed the nervous horror that often racked the small frame driven relentlessly by its big brain.
He reached out for a slip of paper that lay at hand and ran his eye over it, jotting down a few figures. Then he pushed it to one side and went on writing. The younger man came across the office and laid another slip of paper on the desk. He took the one that had been pushed aside, made a memorandum on it, and filed it in a pigeon-hole at the right. He was a short, young man, with broad shoulders and a round face. The face as it bent above the slip of paper had a dull look. There was a kind of patience in it not usual in so young a man, and when he turned his eyes to his employer they glowed with a clear light, as if something were shining behind them.
“What is it, John?” The man reached out a nervous, groping hand. His gaze had not left the page before him.
“This one next, sir.” The young man touched the outstretched hand with the slip of paper.
“Yes, yes.” It was almost testy.
The other returned to his desk and the scratching pens raced with the minutes.
A call-boy entered with a handful of letters. The young man took them and ran them through his fingers. He arranged them in piles, reserving a part for himself. These he read, making notes and filing them rapidly. One letter, the one at the bottom of the pack, was not addressed to the great corporation, but—in a fine, small hand—to “John Bennett.” He read this one last, looking thoughtfully at the lines and folding it with slow fingers. The patient look was still in his face, but the light of the eyes was gone. It seemed to have sunk back, leaving the flesh dull and heavy.
His employer glanced up suddenly. His quick eye sought the electric bulb, with a flash of impatience, and returned to its work.
The young man rose and turned on more lights. He moved about the room, putting things away for the night.
Simeon Tetlow finished his letters and pushed them from him. The young man came across and began to gather them up. His dull face came in range of his employer’s eye.
“Give those I ’ve marked to Hanscom. Have the rest ready in the morning. I shall dictate.”
“Yes, sir.” The young man finished gathering them up.
The man glanced again, half-impatiently, at the heavy face. The room seemed suddenly gloomy, in spite of the red-hot wires looping the light about them.
The young man brought a hat and coat and laid them beside his employer. “May I speak to you a minute, sir?” he asked as he put them down.
The other glanced again, sharply, at his face. “Go ahead.” His hand was reaching for the hat.
“I shall have to hand in my resignation, sir.” The young man said it slowly, as if repeating something he had learned by heart.
The hand on the hat drew back. “What ’s that?” He laughed curtly and shot a look of suspicion at the impassive face. “More money?”
The face flushed. “No, sir.” He hesitated a little. “My mother is sick.”
“Umph!” The man’s face cleared. “You don’t need to resign forthat.” He did not ask what was the matter with the mother. He had not known that John had a mother. She seemed to be springing into existence very inconveniently. “Get a nurse,” he said.
“She has had a nurse. But she needs me, I think.” He did not offer more details.
The older man shrugged his shoulders a little—a quick shrug. He pushed forward a chair with his foot. “Sit down. Your father dead?” quickly.
“No, sir. But—father is—father.” He said it with a little smile. “She’s never had anybody but me,” he went on quickly. “She’s been sick ever since I was a little thing, and I’ve taken care of her. It frets her to have a woman around. She does n’t wash the dishes clean, and her cooking is n’t really very good.” He was smiling a little as he said it.
The man shot a quick look at him. “You ’re going home to wash dishes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Um-m.” The fingers played a little tune on the desk. “I ’ll raise you twenty-five a month. Get a better nurse.”
The boy shook his head. “I ’m afraid it would n’t do.” He was hesitating. “I think she misses me.”
“Umph! Very likely!” The man glanced at him over quick spectacles. “What ’s the matter with her? Sit down.” He touched the chair again with his foot.
The young man sat down. “We don’t know what it is. She cannot walk—cannot stand—a good deal of the time—and sometimes she suffers. But it is a kind of nervousness that is hardest to bear. She cannot lie quiet. Something seems to drive her.”
The man nodded. His fingers opened and closed. “What else?” he said brusquely.
“That ’s all—except that it quiets her to have me around. I can get work in Bridgewater and do the housework nights and mornings.”
The man was scowling at him intently.
“It ’s what I ’ve always done, till I came here,” he said quickly.
“Washed dishes and cooked and made beds?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s no work for aman.”
“I know.” The dull face smiled a little. “The boys always called me ’Sissie Johnny.’”
“Umph! I ’m glad they did!... ’Sissie Johnny’!” He smiled grimly and took a card from the desk before him, holding it a minute in his fingers, snapping it back and forth. “Has she ever seen a specialist?”
The young man shook his head. “No, sir.” The man wrote a few words on the card and blotted it quickly. “Take her to see Dr. Blake. He is the best nerve specialist in five hundred miles. If she is n’t well enough to go to him, have him come to her. I ’ll pay the bill.” He thrust himself into his hat and coat and got himself out of the room, shrugging nervously.
The young man stood with the card in his hand, looking at it, a little smile on his lips. Then he went about, turning out all the bulbs but one and putting away papers and arranging the room for the night.
It was a small, rough room—hardly more than a corner cut off from the top floor by board partitions. The rest of the floor, outside, was used only for storage. Simeon Tetlow had achieved here what he wanted—complete solitude. There was, on the first floor, a magnificent apartment with lordly mahogany chairs, a baize-covered table and oil paintings, where twice a year he met his directors; and on the floor above it was a spacious room bearing on its panel the bronze token, “President’s Office.” It was occupied at present by three young lady typewriters who clacked their machines and arranged their hair and adjusted the shades on the plate-glass windows to suit their convenience, while in the little room at the top of the building the president of the corporation hunched himself over a four-dollar desk and scowled at the dim light that came through the half-sized windows. For three days after it was finished, Simeon Tetlow occupied the spacious room below designed for the president of the corporation. Then he gathered together his few belongings and fled to the top. His gigantic brain could only work when free from distraction. The mere sense that some one might rap, even on the outer door of the stately office, paralyzed him, and his nervous frame, once set a-jangle, trembled, and palpitated for hours. The mere forbidding of intrusion was not sufficient. Some well-meaning idiot, laden with news of importance, would break over the command, and hours of careful thought would be whirled aloft in the smoke of Simeon’s wrath. He fled to the loft, dropping, as it were, a trapdoor behind him. No one was to follow—unless summoned. No literary man was ever more jealous of solitude. But no mere literary man could think a railroad into existence or quench a wheat crop with a nod. If Simeon Tetlow’s body had matched his brain, there would have been no limit to his power. As it was, he remained a mighty general without an army, a head without hands and feet. The details of life frustrated him at every point. He could meet his directors, serene in the knowledge that the road was prospering beyond all bounds. He could carry to them the facts and figures and proofs of prosperity—in his head. But the papers that recorded these facts, the proofs in black and white, were never forthcoming at the right moment. They took to themselves wings—of paper; they flitted and skulked and hid; they lay on the top of the pile before him and grinned at him, their very faces changed to a diabolic scorn that he should not know them.
This was the Simeon Tetlow of three years ago. Then there entered, one morning, in response to his summons for a call-boy, a short, square youth with a dull face. Simeon did not note him as he came in. He forgot that he had called for a boy. His mind was busy with projects of import. When it came back, with a start, he recognized that some one had been with him, for ten minutes or more, who had not worried and irritated him by merely being alive. He shot a keen glance at the dull face. The light of the eyes was turned to him, waiting to serve him.
After that Simeon summoned the boy again and again, on one pretext or another. He made excuses to see him. He advanced him from post to post.
At last, about a year ago, he nodded at a desk that had been installed, overnight, across the room: “You are to work there and your pay will be raised a hundred.”
The boy took possession of the desk with as little stir as if he had received some casual order. He did not ask what his work was to be, and Simeon Tetlow did not tell him. The big brain had found hands and feet—almost, it might seem, lungs and a few other useful, vital organs—and it used them, as it had used the nervous, shaking body before—relentlessly. For the first time in his life Simeon found his papers ready to his hand. He attended his first directors’ meeting, sitting at the head of the green baize table, like a man in a dream. The right paper slipped to his finger-tips and lingered there; the figures formed themselves in seemly ranks and marched up and down the green baize parade in orderly file. The effect upon the directors was, at first, a little startling. They had become wonted to Simeon hurried, gasping, and impatient—and to dividends. They were almost afraid of these cold facts and figures. They looked at them cautiously, through gold-rimmed glasses, received their dividends—and took heart.
Each day some new comfort found its way to Simeon’s desk. The morning that the box of elastic bands appeared there was a holocaust of joy among the papers. He used nearly the whole box the first day. He had never owned an elastic band before. He was president of the great corporation, but it had not occurred to him that he had a right to elastic bands. He slid them up and down his nervous fingers in sheer energy of delight. But he did not mention them to John, nor John to him. It was John who provided the new letter-file that cut the work in half, and had the grimy windows washed till they shone like plate, and arranged the desk ’phone so that Simeon could dictate to the stenographer three floors below, without knowing, or caring, who sat at the other end taking his crisp words with harried, compliant fingers. Hitherto, dictating had burdened Simeon’s life. He had written dozens of letters himself rather than endure the presence of a stenographer for even half an hour; and the sound of a girl clacking drove him wild.
The letters that were not dictated into the telephone were written in John’s round, conscientious-looking hand. If there were anything that one human being could do for another that was not done in the office, Simeon did not know what it was—nor did John. A clothes-brush that brushed them twice a day hung by Simeon’s hat and coat; and if Simeon’s neckties were still shabby and his collars a little frayed, it was because John had not yet discovered the remedy. Some days a luncheon appeared on Simeon’s desk, and some days he went out to luncheon; and he could not have told which, except that it was always the thing that he would have done had he devoted hours of thought to it all.
He did not give thanks to John, and John did not expect them. The lamps in his eyes had not been lighted for that—nor for money....
He went about the room now in his slow, considerate way, attending to each detail of locking up, as carefully as if he were not to be first on the ground in the morning.... He would return to start the day. Later—perhaps at noon—he would slip away. That would make least trouble.... To come in the morning and find him gone!—John felt, through all his short, square figure, the shock to the nervous, quivering one. He did not need to reason it out. He did not even know that he thought it. It was an instinct—born the first day he came into Simeon Tetlow’s office and saw the thin figure seated before its chaotic desk wrestling its way through mighty things.... He had thought of his mother as he stood there waiting for orders. She had fairly driven him away. “Go and be aman!” she had said; “I shall ruin you.” And she had smiled at him courageously.... And he had come away, and had taken the first thing at hand—a call-boy, kicking his heels against a bench with a dozen others. And this was his employer.... So he had stood waiting when Simeon Tetlow had looked up and seen the lamps aglow.
That was three years ago. And tonight Simeon, plodding home through the foggy gloom, was swearing a little under his breath.
“It ’s the weak spot in the boy,” he said testily; “I believe he’s soft at the core.”
He inserted his latchkey, grumbling still. “Wash dishes—will he? Damn him!—Umph!—Damn him!” And yet it was as if he had said: “Bless him!” The great door swung noiselessly open, and he went in.
The woman was looking into the dusk. Her hair, short like a boy’s, curled a little about the ears. She pushed it back as she looked, her eyes deepening and widening. It was a gentle face, with a sharp line between the eyes, that broke its quiet. She sank back with a little sigh. Foolish to look.... He could not come. She must think of something.... The twilights were long and heavy.... What was it he had written?... Hollyhocks? yes; that was it!—in the garden. He had said she should have them—next summer. She leaned back with closed eyes and folded hands, watching them—pink and rose and crimson, white with flushing red, standing stiff and straight against the wall. They were so cool and sturdy, and they brought the sunshine.... The dark floated wide and lost itself in a sky of light. The smile crept back to her lips. She stirred a little. The door opened and closed.... His hands scarcely touched her as he bent and kissed her.
“It’s you—!” a little cry of doubt and delight.
“It’s me, mother.” The words laughed to her quietly.
She put out a hand. “How long can you stay?” She was stroking his coat.
“Always.”
“What—?” The hand pushed him from her. The eyes scanned his face.
“Always,” he repeated cheerfully, “if you want me.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want you. I wrote you I was—happy.”
“Yes. You wrote it too often—and too hard.” He was smiling at her. But the lamps were misty. “Did you think I would n’t see?”
“Oh, dear—oh, dear—dear, dear!” It was a little wail of reproach at his foolishness—and hers. “And you were doing so well!”
“I can do better here. What’s burning!” He sniffed a little.
She glanced anxiously toward the kitchen. “Your father put some crusts in the oven to brown. It can’t he—”
“It can’t be anything else,” said John.
When he came back he told her of the great Dr. Blake.
They sat in silence while the room drew dark about them.
Now and then she reached out and touched his coat softly.
“Tomorrow then—!” half-doubtfully, when he bade her good night.
“Tomorrow we shall see the great doctor,” he assented cheerfully. “Good night, mother.”
“Good night, my son.”
The great doctor looked her over keenly, with eyes that saw everything and saw nothing.
“A little trouble in walking!”
“Yes.”
“And nervous sometimes—a little!”
He might have been a neighbor, inquiring after her health. The little woman forgot herself and her fear of him. She told him, very simply, of the long nights—when the walls seemed closing in and there was no air except under the sky, and her feet refused to carry her. The line between her eyes grew deeper as she talked, but the hands in her lap were very quiet. She did not shrink while the doctor’s sensitive fingers traveled up and down her spine with almost roseleaf touch. Only once she gave a quick cry of pain.
“I see. I see. A little tender.”
“Yes.” It was almost a gasp, with a quick drawing in of the lip.
“I see.” He nodded. “Yes. That will do—very nicely.”
He led her away to another room—to rest a little before the journey. When he returned his glance met the boy’s absently.
He arranged trifles on his desk—paperweight and pens and blotter—as affairs of importance, before he spoke, casually:
“She will always be ill—Yes. It is a hopeless case—Yes.” He paused a little between the words, giving the boy time. “She will suffer—more than she has yet. But we can help a little.” He had drawn a paper toward him and was writing his hieroglyphics with slow care, not looking up. “We will ease it, all we can. Keep her mind at rest. Make her happy.” He turned his spectacles on the young man. “You can make her happy. That will do more for her than I can.... Will she live? Yes, yes. Longer than the rest, perhaps.... Shall you tell her?—not today, I think—some other time. She is a little tired. She is a brave woman.”
SIMEON Tetlow glanced up sharply. The door had opened without a sound. “You ’ve come. Umph!” He shoved the pile of letters from him.
“Sit down.”
The air was full of sunshine. Even in the dingy office it glinted and shone.
Across its radiance Simeon studied the dull face. “Well!”
The eyes of the boy met his, half-wistfully, it seemed. “She needs me, sir,” he said. Simeon stirred uneasily. “Seen Dr. Blake?”
“Yes, sir. He says he cannot help her.”
“Umph!” Simeon shifted again in his chair. His eye dropped to the pile of papers beside him.
The boy’s hands had reached out to them. Almost instinctively the fingers were threading their way among them, sorting and arranging in neat piles.
Simeon watched the fingers jealously. It was as if he might spring upon them and fasten them there forever. The young man’s eyes traveled about the room, noting signs of disorder. “I can stay today,” he said slowly. He hesitated. “I can stay a week, sir, if you want me.”
“I don’t want you a week.” The man was looking at him savagely. “You must bring them here!” he said.
“Here!” in doubt.
The man nodded. “They can live here as well as anywhere!”
The boy pondered it a minute. He shook his head slowly.
“They would n’t be happy,” he said. “She has friends there, in Bridgewater—people she’s known ever since she was a little girl—and father has his work. He ’s an old man. It would n’t be easy for him to get work here. He has an easy job—”
“Work enough here,” growled Simeon. He was studying the boy’s face keenly. Was it possible the fellow was making capital of all this? He threw off the thought. “Work enough here,” he repeated.
John considered it again. He looked up. The lamps threw their clear light into the future. “I ’d thought of that, sir,” he said slowly, “and I ’ve talked about it—a little. But I saw it hurt them. So I dropped it.”
“You ’re missing the chance of a lifetime,” said Simeon. “There are men working below that’d give ten years off their life to get what you’ve got without trying.”
The boy’s quiet eye met his.
“Oh, you ’ve tried—you’ve tried. I don’t mean that,” he said testily. “But it’s a case of fitness—the chance of a lifetime,” he repeated significantly.
The boy looked at him. “I know it, sir. I’ve thought about it a long time. It ’s hard to do. But, you see, we never have but one father and mother.”
The other met it, blinking. “Umph!”
“I shall try to get something at the Bridgewater office. I thought perhaps you would recommend me if there was a vacancy.”
“There is n’t any,” said Simeon shortly—almost with relief.
“The second shipping-clerk left week before last.”
“You don’t want that?”
“I think I do.”
Simeon turned vaguely toward the pigeonholes. The boy’s quick eye was before him. “This is the one, sir.”
Simeon smiled grimly. He drew out a blank from its place and filled it in. “You won’t like it,” he said, holding the pen in his teeth while he reached for the blotter. “It ’s heavy lifting, and Simpson ’s no angel to work under. No chance to rise, either.” He was glaring at the boy, a kind of desperate affection growing in his eyes..
The boy returned the look mistily. “You make it a little hard, sir. I wish I could stay.” He half held out his hand and drew it back.
Simeon ignored it. He had taken down a ledger and picked a letter from the pile before him. The interview was over. The President of the “R. and Q.” Railroad was not hanging on anybody’s neck.
“It ’s the other ledger, sir,” said John quickly, “the farther one.” He reached over and laid it deftly before his employer.
Simeon pushed it from him savagely. “Go to the devil!” he said.
The boy went, shutting the door quietly behind him.
IT was six o’clock—the close of a perfect June day. Not even the freight engines, pulling and hauling up and down the yard, with their puffs of black smoke, could darken the sky. Over in the meadow, beyond the network of tracks, the bobolinks had been tumbling and bubbling all day. It was time to close shop now, and they had subsided into the long grass. In the office the assistant shipping-clerk was finishing the last bill of lading. He put it to one side and looked at his watch. A look of relief crossed his face as he replaced it and climbed down from the high stool. It had been a hard day in the Bridge-water freight-office. News had come, in the early morning, of a wreck, three miles down the track—a sleeper and a freight had collided where the road curves by the stonework of the long bridge, and John had been sent down to help in looking after the freight.
It was one of the worst wrecks the road had known. No one placed the blame. Those on the ground were too busy to have theories; and those at a distance had to change their theories a dozen times during the day. At noon word came that the president of the road was on his way to the scene of the accident. The news reached John as he was getting into the wrecking-car to return to the office. He paused for a flying minute, one foot on the step of the car. Then he swung off, and the car moved on without him. He spent the next half hour going over the ground. He made careful notes of every detail, recalling points from memory, taking measurements, jotting down facts and figures with his swift, short fingers. When he had finished he took the next wrecking-car back, making up for lost time by lunching at his desk while he worked.
All the afternoon he had been doing the work of three men.... Six o’clock. He got down from the high stool, stretching himself and rubbing his arms. In ten minutes the special would pass. He glanced out through the office window at the back of the building. High at the top of the sandy bank a bunch of clover bloomed against the sky, huge heads, with pink-and-white hearts—a kind of alfalfa—perhaps a seed from some passing freight. He had seen them, flaunting there, between hurried snatches of work, all the afternoon. He would pick them and carry them to her. But not now.... He looked again at his watch. He wanted to see the special when it passed. It would not stop, probably, but he might catch a glimpse of Simeon Tetlow. He had often wished he might see him, and he had often thought of his face the morning he said good-by. Beneath the anger in it had been something the boy could not fathom—a kind of entreaty.... He must find some way to give him the notes he had made of the wreck. He stepped out on the platform, looking up and down the shine on the tracks. The sun, coming low across the meadow beyond the tracks, made everything beautiful. A whistle sounded. The special—at the upper bridge. In five minutes it would pass. A smile curved his lips. The sound of quick bells and puffs and wheels came pleasantly to him from the engines at work in the yard down beyond the freight-house. A long train at the left was backing in slowly. John watched it and jingled some pennies in his pockets. He was thinking of Simeon Tetlow, the smile still on his lips.... Suddenly the smile stopped. The fingers gripped the pennies and held them fast.. .. His eye flashed along the top of the slow-moving train.—No one in sight—level tracks—the special two minutes off—the freight taking her track.... The switch, if he could make it—It was not a thought, but a swift turn of the short legs. Never had they seemed to him so fat and heavy beneath him. Yet they were flying over the ties as the wind sweeps a field. The short, strong body dropped itself upon the switch and hung there, gripping—a whirl of cinders and blast and roar. ... Had he come fast enough?... Ages passed. He lifted his head and looked back up the long tracks. The freight was still backing in slowly. The special—like an old lady who has taken the wrong crossing—was emitting a sound of dismay, a quick, high note. The wheels reversed and she came back, puffing and complaining, in little jerks.
When the train halted Simeon Tetlow stepped down from the platform. His hand, as it left the iron rail, trembled a little. He thrust it into the pocket of his light coat, looking up and down the tracks with stern glance. The glance fell upon John mopping his brow.
0011
The president of the road moved toward him slowly. “What ’s up?” It was short and sharp.
John waited a minute while he mopped his brow again and replaced the handkerchief. He was thinking fast—for two. “I—I wanted to see you, sir.” One glance at the man had told him everything—the shaking hand clinched in the pocket, the quivering nerves, the dusty journey, the anxiety and fierce need of help. One more shock and the tension would give way. “I wanted to see you, sir,” he repeated quietly.
Simeon was looking at him keenly, up and down. “So you stopped my special?”
John nodded. “Yes, I stopped it—I guess I stopped it.” His voice almost laughed at the words. He was tugging at something in his pocket. “I wanted to give you these, sir.” He had fished out the handful of papers—old envelopes, scraps, bits of newspaper margins—covered with writing and figures. “I was down there this morning—to the wreck,” he said quickly. “Things were pretty well mixed up—I thought you might like to see how they lay. I made some notes.”
“Ah-h!” It was a long-drawn breath-something between a snarl and a laugh. “Come inside.”
They went into the special, with her hideous decorations of plush and imitation leather. The president nodded to the seat beside a table covered with telegrams and newspapers and memoranda: “Sit down.”
He seated himself opposite the boy, his elbow on the table and his head resting on the hand. Beneath its shelter his swift eyes looked out, scanning the boy’s face. “Well!” It was sharp and quick.
The boy smiled at the familiar note. He ran over the papers in his fingers, selecting one near the bottom. “This is the way things lay when we got there. We were first on the ground. I had a good chance to see,” he said simply.
“I ’ll warrant.” Simeon growled a little, leaning toward it.
The boy moved nearer to him. “These are the sleepers—the freight lay this way, over to the left. They must have struck just as the last car left the bridge.”
“I see.” Simeon reached out a hand for the paper. It trembled mistily as he bent above it. “I see.” The tone held a note of satisfaction. “What else?” He looked up quickly.
John was sorting the papers, a half-smile on his slow lips. A sense of happiness held his stubby fingers.
The president’s eyes rested on the dull face for a long minute. His hand, holding the paper, had ceased to tremble. He was resting in the strength of this body, short and sturdy and full of willing life. No one knew what that stubby-fingered boy had meant to him—what plans for the future had been cut off. The boy was to have been closer than a partner for him, closer than his own body, through the years. He was to have lived with him—shared his fortune, good and bad.... No one had guessed. He himself had not quite known—until, one day, the door closed behind the boy and he found himself sitting before a desk, trying with trembling fingers to make an entry in the ledger.... He had worried along since then as best he could.... And now he was sitting in the quiet car with the boy opposite him. The freight outside was pulling away with slow, disturbed puffs. The low sun shone through the car, and a glow of red plush lifted itself about them and filled the car with clear, rosy light.
The boy looked up. His eyes met the watching ones, and a quick light flashed into them, touching the lamps of service to flame. “This is the next one, sir.” He looked down again at the papers and held one out.
The president pushed it aside with a touch. His eyes searched the boy’s face. “Tell me what happened—just now!”
“Just now—!” The boy looked up, waiting, his lips half apart.
The president nodded. “You know—When we stopped—What was wrong!”
The boy waited a minute. “No. 39 had your track,” he said at last, quietly. “She’s gone now. That’s her whistle—up the yard.” He turned his head a little.
The president’s eyes still scanned the dull face. “And you changed the switch!”
“Yes, sir.”
The president pushed the papers farther from him, making a place for both arms on the table. He leaned forward a little. “So that’s what you left me for?”
The boy looked up, startled. “What, sir!”
The president nodded slowly. “To turn a switch, I suppose—” The thin hand lifted to his lips was trembling now as a leaf quivers at a sudden wind.
“Some one else would have seen,” said the boy quickly.
“Nobody sees—but you.” He crunched out the words. “When are you coming back?”
“Back!”
“To the office—I need you.” He gulped a little over the words. He had never said as much to any one.
The lamps, with their still glow, were turned toward him. “I want to come, sir.”
“Well?”
“We talked it over last night—She wants me to do it—She will come with me—But—”
The president of the road was looking down now—waiting.
The boy’s eyes studied the worn face with its wrinkles, the thin, hard lips and stern lines. Something in it made his heart suddenly go from him. “I think I’m coming, sir,” he said simply.
The face did not look up. It worked strangely for a moment.
Then it dropped in the folded arms on the table and rested there.
The boy fell to sorting the telegrams.
When the man looked up the face was quiet. But something had gone from it—a kind of hard selfishness. The gentleness that touched the lines had left them free. He smiled a little wistfully as he held out his hand for the papers. “I’m ready now. Go ahead.”
In ten minutes the papers were all in his hands, and the special was on her way to the wreck. The boy watched it out of sight. Then he turned away and crossed the tracks to the sandy bank, whistling softly—little breaths of sound that broke into lightest bubbles of joy as he climbed the bank. He was going to gather the clover blossoms, with the pink-and-white hearts, to carry home to her.