“Breen!” I shouted. “What are you doing? Are you crazy! What are you doing here? Speak, man, what----” He had straightened in his chair, and a sort of low, catchy gasp came from his lips. It seemed as though it took all his power, all his strength, to lift his eyes to mine. I sprang for the key, but he jerked himself suddenly forward and pushed me desperately away. And then he called me by the old name, not much above a whisper, I could hardly catch the words, and I didn’t understand, didn’t know, that the man before me was a wounded, _dying man_. My brain was whirling, full of that other night, full of the days and months that had followed. I couldn’t think. I---- “Charlie--boy, it’s all right. Black Dempsey in the Cut. I was afraid I was too late--too late. They shot--me--here”--he was tearing with his fingers at his waistcoat. And then I understood--too late. As I reached for him, he swayed forward and toppled over, a huddled heap, over the key, over the order book, over the train sheet that once had taken his life and now had given it back to him--dead. What is there to say? Whatever he may have done, however far he may have fallen, back of it all, through it all, bigger than himself, stronger than any other bond was the railroading that was in his blood. Breen was a railroad man. I don’t know why, do I? You don’t know why, after Number Two had run to schedule all that night, it happened just when it did. It might have happened at some other time--but it didn’t. Luck or chance if you like, more than that if you’d rather think of it in another way, but just a few miles west of Coyote Bend something went wrong in the cab of Number Two. Nothing much, I don’t remember now what it was, don’t know that I ever knew, nothing much. Just enough to hold her back a few minutes, the few minutes that let Breen sit in again on the night dispatcher’s trick, sit in again at the key, hold down his old job once more before he quit railroading forever with the order that he gave his life to send, to keep Number Two from rushing to death and destruction against the rocks and boulders Black Dempsey and his gang had piled across the track in the Cut five miles east of Coyote Bend. I don’t know. “If a man die, shall he live again?” I leave it to you. I only know that they think a lot of him out here, think a lot of Breen, “Angel” Breen--now. IV--SPITZER Spitzer was just naturally born diffident. Sometimes that sort of thing wears off as one grows older, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it is worse than the most virulent disease--it had been virulent with Spitzer for all of his twenty-two years.