Just Around the Corner Part 32

Mr. Katzenstein woke with a start and jerked his head up.

"Mamma!" he cried, dazed with sleep. "Mamma! Birdie! Mamma!"

"Yes, papa," she replied, smiling at him and with her hand still beneath his; "I'm here."

BREAKERS AHEAD

In the ink-blue shrieking trail of the twenty-two-hour Imperial flyer, Slateville lay stark alongside the singing tracks as if hurtled there like a spark off a speed-hot emery wheel.

The Imperial flyer swooped through the dun-colored village like the glance of a lovely coquette shoots through her victim's heart and leaves it bare.

At eight-one the far-off Imperial voice hallooed through the darkness like a conquering hero whose vanguard is a waving sword which flashes in the sunlight before he and his steed come up out of the horizon.

At eight-four a steam yodel shook the panes and lamp-chimneys of Slateville, a semaph.o.r.e studded with a ruby stiffened out against the sky, and a white eye--the size of a bicycle-wheel--flashed down the tracks.

Then the howl of a fiend, and a mile-long checkerboard of lighted car-windows, and cinders rattling against them like hail.

A fire-boweled engine with a grimy-faced demon leaning out of his red-hot cab, and, on every alternate night, a green eye with a black pupil which winked a signal from that same heat-roaring cab and from a dirt-colored frame shanty in a dirt-brown yard, where a naked tree stretched its thin arms against the sky, an answering eye which gleamed through a bandana-bound lantern and outlined the Hebe-like silhouette of a woman in the window.

Then the flash of a mahogany-lined dining-car with nodding _vis-a-vis_, pink-shaded candles and white-coated, black-faded genii of the bowl and weal; an occasional vague figure peering through cupped hands out from an electric-lighted berth; a plate-gla.s.s observation-car with figures lounging in shallow leather chairs like oil-kings and merchant princes and only sons in a Fifth Avenue club, and a great trailing plume of smoke that lingered for a moment and died in the still tingling air.

For a full half-hour, even an hour, after the Imperial flyer had gouged through the village the yellow lights of Slateville burned on behind its unwashed windows, which were half opaque with train-dust and the grimy finger-prints of children. Then they began to flick out, here, there--here, there. In a slate-roofed shanty beside the quarry, in an out-of-balance bookkeeper's office in the Slateville Varnish Factory, in the Red Trunk general store and post-office, the parson's study, a maiden's bedroom, in the dirt-colored frame house, another slate-roofed shanty beside the quarry, another, and yet another. Here, there--here, there.

The clerk in the signal-tower slumped in his chair, the doctor's tin-tired buggy rattled up a hilly street that was shaped like a crooked finger, and away beyond the melancholy stretches of close-bitten grazing-land and runty corn-fields the flyer shrieked upward, and the miles scuttled the echoes back to Slateville.

On an alternate night that was as singingly still as the inside of a cup the flyer tore through the village with the cinders tattooing against its panes and the white eye searching like a near-sighted cylcopean monster.

But from the red fireman's cab the green lantern with the black bull's-eye painted on the outward side dangled unlit, and in the dirt-colored house, behind drawn shades, the Hebe-like figure was crouched in another woman's arms, and, in the room adjoining, John Blaney lay dead with a dent in his head.

Who-o-o-p! Who-o-o-p!

"Listen, Cottie, listen!"

"'Sh-h-h-h, darlin'."

The crouching women crouched closer together, a dove-note in the crooning voice of one like the coo of a mate. "'Sh-h-h, darlin'."

"There it goes, Cottie. Gawd, just like nothing had happened."

"'Sh-h-h, dearie; lay still!"

"Listen. The engine's playin' a different tune on the tracks; it's lighter and smoother."

"Yes--yes--'sh-h-h."

"Just hear, Cottie; they got the old diner on. I know her screech."

"I hear, dearie."

"And the Cleveland sleeper wasn't touched, neither. Hear her. They say she didn't even leave the tracks. He used to say she had a rattle like a dice-box. Just the same, it was the smooth-runnin' Washington sleeper lit on the engine. Listen, Cottie, oh, listen! Just like nothin' had happened."

"Don't tremble so, darlin'. That's life every time--it just rides over its dead."

"He hated the flyer, oh--oh--"

"Don't take on so, Della darlin'. He died on his job."

"He hated the flyer; he--"

"He could have jumped like Jim Dirkey did, and lived to face the shame of it, but he died on his job. You can always say your man died on his job, Della darlin'."

Della raised her crouching head and brushed the hair back from her eyes.

Helen's face that launched a thousand ships was no more fair.

"That he did--didn't he, Cottie? He died on his job."

"Sure he did, darlin'--sure he did."

"You remember--you remember, Cottie, the first night they put him on the flyer?"

"Try to forget it, Della, and don't go gettin' all excited--there--there."

"I was over home that night with you and maw, and--and he came in for supper with the news and--and he was like a funeral about bein'

promoted."

"Yes, I remember."

"Even with the extra pay he was for stickin' to the accommodation, because he loved her insides."

"And because it was a chance to spite you."

"But I--I was all for the flyer. I told him he was afraid of her speed, and he hauled off and nearly hit me for callin' him a coward before you and maw, and you up and--"

"He was rough with you, Della, but he wouldn't 'a' dared do it with me there. I had him bluffed, all righty; he wouldn't 'a' done it with me and maw there."

"Lots maw would 'a' cared. Poor maw! She never knew nothing else but abuse, herself."

"Paw wasn't so bad, Della--he always brought home the envelope."

"John--he made me eat the words when we got home that night; but, just the samey, he--he wouldn't 'a' took the Imperial, Cottie, if I hadn't nagged him to it--he wouldn't have!"

"Well, what if he wouldn't? You wouldn't 'a' married him, neither, if he hadn't nagged you to it when paw died, and he knew you had a stepmother that was devilin' and abusin' the life out of us--you."

"He used to say, when he came home with a face as black as a crazy devil's, that coaling the flyer was just like stoking h.e.l.l. She ate and ate and bellowed for more. He hated the flyer, he did. He stoked her with more hate than coal, and I drove him to it, Cottie. I put the hole in his head."