‘College!’ he shouts, breaking into a run. ‘Slack running!’

College makes a leap toward safety.

In the moonlight the big coat billows out. For a moment he’s suspended there, mid-air. But the coat is too big: it’s a parachute of a coat: its direction is down, not up, and it will snag on anything. He falls back. The cars move lazily together. ‘Had a hole in his chest you could throw a frying pan through’: that’s what Mother O’Neill said about the brakeman whose clothes Jonathan had worn on his first day in Denver, and so it was with College. His left arm dangled above his head, the wide fisherman’s sleeve hooked to a bolt that stuck out above the coupling.

There are always standard signals and standard shoutings for standard accidents:

‘Ease her back.’

‘Coupling won’t give.’

‘That’s it – slow – slow now – slow—’

A thousand tons of stibnite creeps back half an inch. More signals. The cars part. College collapses into Jonathan’s arms, and in the red light of the lantern – a trick of the spectrum that in another mood gives us rainbows – the blood that pumped out of him was black. They carried him to the nearby caboose. A tired little doctor from Mogul peered down through a lorgnette.

‘Morphine,’ the doctor said and slipped a needle under College’s skin. (‘I’ll bet you didn’t know we could inject morphine all those years ago,’ Atlas said.) ‘Take this bottle,’ the doctor went on to Jonathan. ‘If it gets bad, pour a little on your bandana and place it over his mouth and nose.’ The doctor’s lorgnette was made of shell with gold trim. The conductor wired for right of way to Cheyenne.

The train bumped and jiggled as gently as possible at only fifteen miles an hour: this, too, was standard procedure. In the caboose, his body wrapped in Jonathan’s frock coat, College breathed in and out, in and out, then a pause; in and out, in and out, then a pause. Jonathan counted: ‘One – and – two – and—’ He listened intently. ‘Three – and – four – and—’ Twice during the trip College broke into a high-pitched scream. Terrified by what such an inhuman sound had to mean, Jonathan pressed his dampened bandana over College’s nose and mouth. As they neared Cheyenne station, College opened his eyes, coughed and made a snatch at Jonathan’s sleeve. ‘Johnny,’ he cried. ‘Is that you?’

Jonathan reached for the doctor’s bottle again.

College held tight to the sleeve. ‘No, not that – Talk to me. Don’t leave me. Is there something wrong with me? For Christ’s sake, speak! I hate silence. It scares the – Oh, shit. Speak to me. It’s too quiet, Johnny.’

‘You’re going to – to be all right – just fine,’ Jonathan began, now as terrified by the lack of pain as he had been before by the intensity of it. ‘Everything will be – all right. We’re taking you to the best doctor in Cheyenne, where there’s a bed waiting for you, a bed with linen sheets on it, no, not linen, silk—’ He listened in agony to this babble of his, this nonsense out of his own mouth, learned from College, meaningless as ever, helpless now, useless, a waste, but whenever he paused, College begged him to keep on. So he kept on.