“The light from the fire-box was full on his face, and he had the queerest look you ever saw on a man. He was white and his eyes were staring and he was pushing his hand through his hair and rocking in his seat. I was scart. I thought for a minute he was going to faint, then I remembered that whisky and jumped for my side of the cab, opened the seat and snatched it up. I went back to him with it in my hand. I don’t think he ever saw it--I know he didn’t. He was laughing that soft laugh again, kind of as though he was crooning, and he reached out his hand and pushed me away. “‘We’re going to celebrate, Jimmy,’ says he again. ‘We’re going to celebrate. It’s my wedding night.’ “I felt the speed quicken a bit, we were on the Slide then, you know, and I saw his fingers tightening on the throttle. Then it got me, and my heart went into my mouth--Chick was clean off his head. I slipped the flask into my pocket, and tried to coax his hands away from the throttle. “‘Let me take her a spell, Chick,’ says I, thinking my best chance was to humor him. “He threw me off like I was a plaything. Then I tried to pull him away and he smashed me one between the eyes and sent me to the floor. All the time we was going faster and faster. I tackled him again, but I might as well have been a baby, and then--then--well, that wound in his head came from a long-handled union-wrench I grabbed out of the tool box. He went down like a felled ox--but it was too late. Before I could reach a lever we were in splinters.” Dahleen stopped. Carleton never stirred, he was leaning forward, his elbows on his desk, his chin in his hands, his face strained, eyes intently fastened on the other. Dahleen fumbled a second with his watch chain, twisting it around his fingers, then he went on: “While I laid in the hospital I turned the thing over in my mind pretty often, long before the doctors thought I knew my own name again, and I figured that, if it was ever known, old Coogan was down and out for fair even if when he got better his head turned out all right again, because he wouldn’t be ever trusted in a cab under any circumstances, you understand? If he didn’t come out straight why that ended it, of course; but I had it in my mind that it was only what they call a temporary aberration. I couldn’t queer him if that was all, could I? So I said to myself, ‘Jimmy, all you know is that the “air” wouldn’t work.’ That’s what I told you that day; and then you sprang that flask on me. You were right, I _had_ forgotten it. Whisky in the cab on the night of an accident is pretty near an open and shut game. It was him or me, and I couldn’t tell you the story then without doing Coogan cold, but Coogan’s gone now and it can’t hurt him. That’s all.” The tick of the clock on the wall, the click of the sounder from the dispatcher’s room next door were the only sounds for a long minute, then Carleton’s chair scraped and he stood up and put out his hand.