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The Night Operator
by
Spare time! Bob Donkin didn’t have any spare time those days! But that was Donkin’s way. Spence sick, and two men handling the dispatching where three had handled it before, didn’t leave Bob Donkin much spare time–not much. But a boost for the kid was worth a sacrifice. Donkin went at it as earnestly as Toddles did–and Toddles was in deadly earnest.
When Toddles left the dispatcher’s office that morning with Donkin’s promise to teach him the key, Toddles had a hazy idea that Donkin had wings concealed somewhere under his coat and was an angel in disguise; and at the end of two weeks he was sure of it. But at the end of a month Bob Donkin was a god! Throw Bob Donkin down! Toddles would have sold his soul for the dispatcher.
It wasn’t easy, though; and Bob Donkin wasn’t an easy-going taskmaster, not by long odds. Donkin had a tongue, and on occasions could use it. Short and quick in his explanations, he expected his pupil to get it short and quick; either that, or Donkin’s opinion of him. But Toddles stuck. He’d have crawled on his knees for Donkin anywhere, and he worked like a major–not only for his own advancement, but for what he came to prize quite as much, if not more, Donkin’s approval.
Toddles, mindful of Donkin’s words, didn’t fight so much as the days went by, though he found it difficult to swear off all at once; and on his runs he studied his Morse code, and he had the “calls” of every station on the division off by heart right from the start. Toddles mastered the “sending” by leaps and bounds; but the “taking” came slower, as it does for everybody–but even at that, at the end of six weeks, if it wasn’t thrown at him too fast and hard, Toddles could get it after a fashion.
Take it all around, Toddles felt like whistling most of the time; and, pleased with his own progress, looked forward to starting in presently as a full-fledged operator.
He mentioned the matter to Bob Donkin–once. Donkin picked his words and spoke fervently. Toddles never brought the subject up again.
And so things went on. Late summer turned to early fall, and early fall to still sharper weather, until there came the night that the operator at Blind River muddled his orders and gave No. 73, the westbound fast freight, her clearance against the second section of the eastbound Limited that doomed them to meet somewhere head-on in the Glacier canyon; the night that Toddles–but there’s just a word or two that comes before.
When it was all over, it was up to Sam Beale, the Blind River operator, straight enough. Beale blundered. That’s all there was to it; that covers it all–he blundered. It would have finished Beale’s railroad career forever and a day–only Beale played the man, and the instant he realized what he had done, even while the tail lights of the freight were disappearing down the track and he couldn’t stop her, he was stammering the tale of his mistake over the wire, the sweat beads dripping from his wrist, his face gray with horror, to Bob Donkin under the green-shaded lamp in the dispatchers’ room at Big Cloud, miles away.
Donkin got the miserable story over the chattering wire–got it before it was half told–cut Beale out and began to pound the Gap call. And as though it were before him in reality, that stretch of track, fifteen miles of it, from Blind River to the Gap, unfolded itself like a grisly panorama before his mind. There wasn’t a half mile of tangent at a single stretch in the whole of it. It swung like the writhings of a snake, through cuts and tunnels, hugging the canyon walls, twisting this way and that. Anywhere else there might be a chance, one in a thousand even, that they would see each other’s headlights in time–here it was disaster quick and absolute.