'A young girl with long blond hair?'
'Yes, yes, my daughter.'
Shields motioned toward the body of the girl. 'I'm afraid she's gone.
The bearded man feverishly forced a larger opening and crawled through. He approached the girl, his face numb with un comprehension and lifted the bloodstained head, smoothing back the hair. For several moments he did not utter a sound.
'She did not suffer,' Shields offered gently.
The stranger did not reply.
'I'm sorry,' Shields murmured. He could feel the ship listing sharply to starboard. The water was rising faster from below and there was little time left. He had to penetrate the father's grief and somehow persuade him to rescue the hand case.
'Do you know what happened?' he began.
'Collision,' the answer came vagbely. 'I was on deck. Another ship came out of the fog. Buried her bow in our side.' The father paused, took out a handkerchief and dabbed the blood from the dead girl's face. 'Martha begged me to take her to England. Her mother was reluctant, but I gave in. Oh God, if only I'd known…...' His voice trailed off.
'There is nothing you can do,' Shields said. 'You must save yourself.'
The father turned slowly and looked at him with unseeing eyes. 'I killed her,' he whispered hoarsely.
Shields was not getting through. Anger smoldered within him and ignited in a flame of desperation.
'Listen!' he cried. 'Lost in the wreckage is a travel case with a document that must reach the Foreign Office in London!' He was shouting now. 'Please find it!'
The water swirled in small eddies a few feet away. The flood that would engulf them was only seconds away. The rising tide was stained with the slime of oil and coal dust while the night air outside was torn by the screams of a thousand dying souls.
'Please listen to me while there is still time,' Shields begged. 'Your daughter is dead.' He was beating at the restricting steel with clenched fists, uncaring of the pain as his skin shredded away. 'Leave before it's too late. Find my travel case and take it with you. Give it to the captain, he'll know what to do.'
The father's mouth trembled open. 'I cannot leave Martha alone…... she fears the dark He muttered as though he were speaking at an altar.
It was the deathblow. There was no moving the grief-stunned father as his mind entered delirium. He bent over his daughter and kissed her on the forehead. Then he dissolved into a fit of uncontrolled sobbing.
Strangely, the fury of frustration fell away from Shields. With the acceptance of failure and death, fear and terror no longer held meaning. In the few short moments left he slipped beyond the boundaries of reality and saw things with abnormal clarity.
There came an explosion deep in the bowels of the ship as her boilers burst. She rolled over on her starboard side and slid stern first onto the waiting riverbed. From the moment of the collision in the darkness of early morning until she vanished from view of the mass of humanity struggling to stay afloat in the icy water, less than fifteen minutes had elapsed.
The time was 2:10 a.m.
Shields did not try to fight it, to hold his breath staving off the inevitable for a few more seconds. He opened his mouth and gulped in the foul-tasting water, gagging as it poured down his throat. Into the airless tomb he sank. The choking and the suffering passed quickly, and his conscious mind blinked out. And then there was nothing, nothing at all.
A night bred in hell, thought Sam Harding, ticket agent for the New York Quebec Northern Railroad, as he stood on the platform of his station and, watched the poplar trees bordering the track lean horizontal under the battering gusts of a violent windstorm.
He was experiencing the end of a heat wave that had baked the New England states; the hottest May since 1880, proclaimed Wacketshire's weekly newspaper in red-letter Bodoni typeface. Lightning hurtled through the predawn sky in jagged patterns, accompanied by a twenty-four-degree drop in temperature in one hour. Harding caught himself shivering at the sudden change as the breeze whipped at his cotton shirt, dampened by sweat from the oppressive humidity.
Down on the river he could see lights from a string of barges as they nosed their way against the downstream current. One by one their dim yellow glows blinked off and then on again as the barges passed under the foundation piers of the great bridge. Harding's station sat on the outer perimeter of the town, village really, where the tracks of the railroad bisected in a cross. The main trunk ran north to Albany while the branch line swung east over the Deauville-Hudson River bridge to Columbiaville before forking south to New York City.
Though no drops had fallen, there was a definite smell of rain in the air. He walked over to his Model T Ford depot hack, untied a number of small cords under the edge of the roof and rolled down the leatherette side curtains over the oak side panels. Then he fixed them into place with the Murphy fasteners and reentered the station.
Hiram Meechum, the Western Union night man, was hunched over a chessboard, engage ding his favorite pastime of playing another telegrapher down the line. The panes in the windows rattled from the wind, keeping cadence with the staccato of the telegraph key screwed to the table in front of Meechum. Harding picked up a coffeepot from a kerosene stove and poured himself a cup.
'Who's winning?'
Meechum looked up. 'I drew Standish down in Germantown. He's a damn tough customer.' The key danced and Meechum moved one of the chess pieces. 'Queen to knight four,' he grunted. 'It don't exactly look encouraging.'
Harding pulled a watch from a vest pocket and studied the dial, knitting his eyebrows thoughtfully. 'The Manhattan Limited is twelve minutes late.'
'Probably behind schedule because of the storm,' Meechum said. He tapped out his next move, placed his feet on the table and leaned his chair back on two legs awaiting his opponent's response.
Every clapboard on the station's walls creaked as a fire bolt scorched the sky and struck a tree in a nearby pasture. Harding sipped at the steaming coffee and unconsciously stared at the ceiling, wondering if the lightning rod atop the roof was in good order. A loud clang from the telephone bell above his rolltop desk broke his thoughts.
'Your dispatcher with news on the Limited,' Meechum predicted with unconcern.
Harding bent the swinging arm of the telephone upward to his standing position and pressed the small, circular receiver to his ear. 'Wacketshire,' he answered.
The dispatcher's voice from Albany was barely discernible through the storm-induced static on the circuit. 'The bridge can you see the bridge?'
Harding turned toward the east window. His vision carried no further than the end of the platform in the darkness. 'Can't see. Have to wait for the next lightning flash.'
'Is it still standing?'
'Why wouldn't it be standing?' Harding replied irritably.
'A tugboat captain just called from Catskill and raised hell,' the dispatcher's voice crackled back. 'Claims a girder dropped off the bridge and damaged one of his barges. Everyone here is in a panic. The agent in Columbiaville says the Limited is overdue.'
'Tell them to relax. She hasn't reached Wacketshire yet.'
'You sure?'
Harding shook his head in disbelief at the dispatcher's simpleminded question. 'Dammit! Don't you think I'd know if a train passed my station?'
'Thank heavens we're in time.' The relief in the dispatcher's tone came over the line despite the interference. 'The Limited has ninety passengers on board not counting the crew and a special government car carrying some big-shot official to Washington. Flag it down and inspect the bridge at first light.'
Harding acknowledged and hung up. He lifted a shuttered lantern with a red lens off a hook on the wall, shook it to see if the tank held kerosene and lit the wick. Meechum peered over his chess pieces questioningly.
'You flagging the Limited?'
Harding nodded. 'Albany says a girder fell off the bridge. They want it checked before a train crosses over.'
