On the Iron at Big CloudPackard, Frank L. (Frank Lucius)
General
On the Iron at Big Cloud
Packard, Frank L. (Frank Lucius)
Canadian fiction -- 20th century; Railroad stories; Short stories, Canadian
Whatever holds them for good, or whatever holds them for bad, it holds
them all, either way, all, body, mind and spirit, all. And that is true
in spite of the fact that, often enough, there’s some one thing, it may
be a little thing, it may be a big thing, but some one thing that the
worst of us balk at, can’t do. It’s not morality, it’s not conscience,
a man gets way beyond all that; it’s a memory of the past perhaps, a
something bred in him from babyhood. I don’t know. You can’t treat
human nature like a specimen on the glass slide under a microscope.
There is no specimen. As there are millions of people, so is each one
in some way different from the other. You can’t classify, you can’t
tabulate the different kinks into a list and learn it by heart, can you?
The man who says he knows human nature says he is as wise as the God who
made him, and that man is a poor fool. That’s right, isn’t it? And so I
say that, strange as it may seem, in the worst of us, fall as low as
we will, there’s generally some one thing our soul, what’s left of
it, revolts at doing. Breen was a railroad man. Railroading was in his
blood. I want you to get that. It was part of him. Any man that’s worth
his salt in this business is that way. It’s in the blood or it isn’t;
you’re a railroad man or you’re not.
Breen disappeared from Big Cloud and I didn’t see him from the day
Kitty Mooney turned him from her door until the night--but I’m coming
to that--that’s the end. There’s a word or two that goes before--so that
you’ll understand. He disappeared from Big Cloud, but he didn’t leave
the mountains. Maybe back of it all, an almost impossible theory if you
like, but I can understand it, a something in him wouldn’t let him run
away. He did run away, you say. Yes, but there’s the queer brain kink
again. Perhaps he temporized. You temporize. I temporize. We try to fool
and delude sometimes, snatch at loopholes, snatch at straws, to bolster
up our self-respect, don’t we? That’s what I mean when I say it’s
possible he couldn’t run away. He clung to the straw, the loophole, that
running away was measured in _miles_. I don’t say that was it, for I
don’t know. It’s possible. We heard of him from time to time as the
months went by, and the things we heard weren’t pleasant things to hear.
He drifted from bad to worse, until that something that he couldn’t do
brought him to a halt--brought the end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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