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.