THE LOCOMOTIVE hung wheezing from the gnarled and ruptured rails just past the eastern bridgehead. Engineer and crew hours ago swept down river.
THE EVENT lurked sure as evil on a moonless night. The darkness, the storm, the lateness of the train’s arrival from Reno.
He’d been told the river was up – roadbed saturated from a week and a half of unseasonably warm rain. He hadn’t known an ancient Douglas Fir uprooted itself, washed down the torrent and loosed the trestle from its footings.
Warned to go light on the throttle, the rookie charged himself, instead, to “make up time.”
© 2009
Church of the Open Road Press
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