done," Carleton answered
gravely. "Sentiment doesn't let us out--there's too many lives at
stake every time he takes out an engine. He'll have to try the color
test with a patch over the same eye he had it on that night. Perhaps,
after all, I'm wrong, and----"

"He's out!" said the master mechanic gruffly. "He's out--I don't need
any test to know that now. That's what's the matter, and no other
thing on earth. It's rough, damn rough, ain't it--after forty
years?"--and Regan, with a short laugh, strode to the window and stood
staring out at the choked railroad yards below him.

And Regan was right. Three weeks later, when he got out of bed, Owsley
took the color test under the queerest conditions that ever a railroad
man took it--with his right eye bandaged--and failed utterly.

But Owsley didn't quite seem to understand--and little Doctor McTurk,
the company surgeon, was badly worried, and had been all along. Owsley
was a long way from being the same Owsley he was before the accident.
Not physically--that way he was shaping up pretty well, but his head
seemed to bother him--he seemed to have lost his grip on a whole lot of
things. They gave him the test more to settle the point in their own
minds, but they knew before they gave it to him that it wasn't much use
as far as he was concerned one way or the other. There was more than a
mere matter of color wrong with Owsley now. And maybe that was the
kindest thing that could have happened to him, maybe it made it easier
for him since the colors barred him anyway from ever pulling a throttle
again--not to understand!

They tried to tell him he hadn't passed the color test--Regan tried to
tell him in a clumsy, big-hearted way, breaking it as easy as he
could--and Owsley laughed as though he were pleased--just laughed, and
with a glance at the clock and a jerky pull at his watch for
comparison, a way he had of doing, walked out of Riley's, the
trainmaster's office, and started across the tracks for the roundhouse.
Owsley's head wasn't working right--it was as though the mechanism was
running down--the memory kind of tapering off. But the 1601, his
engine--stuck. And it was train time when he walked out of Riley's
office that afternoon--the first afternoon he'd been out of bed and
Mrs. McCann's motherly hands since the night at Elbow Bend.

Perhaps you'll smile a little tolerantly at this, and perhaps you'll
say the story's "cooked." Well, perhaps! If you t