Owsley? Who knows what was in the poor, warped brain that night? He had heard her call to him, and they had brought him back the 1601, and she was standing there, alone, deserted--and she had called to him. Who knows what was in his mind, as, together, he and the 1601 went tearing through that black, storm-rent night, when the rivers, and the creeks, and the sluices were running full, and the Elk River, that paralleled the right of way for a mile or two to the crossing, was a raging torrent? Who knows if he ever heard the thundering crash with which the Elk River bridge went out? Who knows, as he swung the curve that opened the bridge approach, without time for any man, Owsley or another, to have stopped, if the headlight playing on the surge of maddened waters meant anything to him? Who knows? That was where they found them, beneath the waters, Owsley and the 1601--and Owsley was smiling, his hand tight-gripped upon the throttle that he loved. "I dunno," says Regan, when he speaks of Owsley, "if the mountains out here have anything to do with making a man think harder. I dunno--sometimes I think they do. You get to figuring that the Grand Master mabbe goes a long way back, years and years, to work things out--if it hadn't been for Owsley the Limited would have gone into the Elk that night with every soul on board. Owsley? That's the way he wanted to go out, wasn't it?--with the 1601. Mabbe the Grand Master thought of him, too." III THE APOTHEOSIS OF SAMMY DURGAN The only point the Hill Division, from Carleton, the super, to the last car tink, would admit it was at all hazy on as far as Sammy Durgan was concerned, was why in the everlasting name of everything the man stuck to railroading. When the Hill Division got up against that point it was floored and took the count. Sammy Durgan wore the belt. He held a record never equalled before or since. Tommy Regan, the master mechanic, who had a warped gift for metaphor, said the man was as migratory on jobs as a flock of crows in a poor year for corn, only a blamed sight harder to get rid of.