"I wish to blazes you hadn't read that!" he muttered fiercely. "What's to be done now?"
"I'm afraid there's only one thing to be 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—
