CHAPTER III


Back in his office, Banneker sent out the necessary wires, and learned
from westward that it might be twelve hours before the break in the
track near Stanwood could be fixed up. Then he settled down to his
report.

Like his earlier telegram, the report was a little masterpiece of
concise information. Not a word in it that was not dry, exact,
meaningful. This was the more to the writer's credit in that his brain
was seething with impressions, luminous with pictures, aflash with odds
and ends of minor but significant things heard and seen and felt. It was
his first inner view of tragedy and of the reactions of the human
creature, brave or stupid or merely absurd, to a crisis. For all of this
he had an outlet of expression.

Taking from the wall a file marked "Letters. Private"-it was 5 S 0027,
and one of his most used purchases--he extracted some sheets of a
special paper and, sitting at his desk, wrote and wrote and wrote,
absorbedly, painstakingly, happily. Wind swept the outer world into a
vortex of wild rain; the room boomed and trembled with the
reverberations of thunder. Twice the telegraph instrument broke in on
him; but these matters claimed only the outer shell; the soul of the man
was concerned with committing its impressions of other souls to the
secrecy of white paper, destined to personal and inviolable archives.

Some one entered the waiting-room. There was a tap on his door. Raising
his head impatiently, Banneker saw, through the window already dimming