“Answer?” asked the youth, unfurling his long legs.

“No,” returned Banneker, and the courier, tossing his coat off, took the road.

Banneker turned back to the improvised hospital.

“I’m going to move these people into the cars,” he said to the man in charge.  “The berths are being made up now.”

The other nodded.  Banneker gathered helpers and superintended the transfer.  One of the passengers, an elderly lady who had shown no sign of grave injury, died smiling courageously as they were lifting her.

It gave Banneker a momentary shock of helpless responsibility.  Why should she have been the one to die?  Only five minutes before she had spoken to him in self-possessed, even tones, saying that her traveling-bag contained camphor, ammonia, and iodine if he needed them.  She had seemed a reliable, helpful kind of lady, and now she was dead.  It struck Banneker as improbable and, in a queer sense, discriminatory.  Remembering the slight, ready smile with which she had addressed him, he felt as if he had suffered a personal loss; he would have liked to stay and work over her, trying to discover if there might not be some spark of life remaining, to be cherished back into flame, but the burly old man’s decisive “Gone,” settled that.  Besides, there were other things, official things to be looked to.

A full report would be expected of him, as to the cause of the accident.  The presence of the boulder in the wreckage explained that grimly.  It was now his routine duty to collect the names of the dead and wounded, and such details as he could elicit.  He went about it briskly, conscientiously, and with distaste.  All this would go to the claim agent of the road eventually and might serve to mitigate the total of damages exacted of the company.  Vaguely Banneker resented such probable penalties as unfair; the most unremitting watchfulness could not have detected the subtle undermining of that fatal boulder.  But essentially he was not interested in claims and damages.  His sensitive mind hovered around the mystery of death; that file of crumpled bodies, the woman of the stilled smile, the man fondling a limp hand, weeping quietly.  Officially, he was a smooth-working bit of mechanism.  As an individual he probed tragic depths to which he was alien otherwise than by a large and vague sympathy.  Facts of the baldest were entered neatly; but in the back of his eager brain Banneker was storing details of a far different kind and of no earthly use to a railroad corporation.

He became aware of some one waiting at his elbow.  The lank young man had spoken to him twice.

“Well?” said Banneker sharply.  “Oh, it’s you!  How did you get back so soon?”

“Under the hour,” replied the other with pride.  “Your message has gone.  The operator’s a queer duck.  Dealing faro.  Made me play through a case before he’d quit.  I stung him for twenty.  Here’s some stuff I thought might be useful.”