Presley remembered. This must be the crack passenger engine
of which Dyke had told him, the one delayed by the accident on the
Bakersfield division and for whose passage the track had been opened all
the way to Fresno.

Before Presley could recover from the shock of the irruption, while the
earth was still vibrating, the rails still humming, the engine was far
away, flinging the echo of its frantic gallop over all the valley. For a
brief instant it roared with a hollow diapason on the Long Trestle over
Broderson Creek, then plunged into a cutting farther on, the quivering
glare of its fires losing itself in the night, its thunder abruptly
diminishing to a subdued and distant humming. All at once this ceased.
The engine was gone.

But the moment the noise of the engine lapsed, Presley--about to start
forward again--was conscious of a confusion of lamentable sounds that
rose into the night from out the engine's wake. Prolonged cries of
agony, sobbing wails of infinite pain, heart-rending, pitiful.

The noises came from a little distance. He ran down the track, crossing
the culvert, over the irrigating ditch, and at the head of the long
reach of track--between the culvert and the Long Trestle--paused
abruptly, held immovable at the sight of the ground and rails all about
him.

In some way, the herd of sheep--Vanamee's herd--had found a breach in
the wire fence by the right of way and had wandered out upon the tracks.
A band had been crossing just at the moment of the engine's passage. The
pathos of it was beyond expression. It was a slaughter, a massacre of
innocents. The iron monster had charged full into the midst, merciless,
inexorable. To the right and left, all the width of the right of way,
the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence
posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in,
the bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible. The black blood,
winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clinkers between the ties
with a prolonged sucking murmur.

Presley turned away, horror-struck, sick at heart, overwhelmed with a
quick burst of irresistible compassion for this brute agony he could not
relieve. The sweetness was gone from the evening, the sense of peace,
of security, and placid contentment was stricken from the landscape. The
hideous ruin in the engine's path drove all thought of his poem from his
mind. The inspiration vanished like a mist. The de Prof