Atlas Shrugged [435]
She ran through the train's only coach, where some passengers slept in contorted poses of exhaustion, while others, awake and still, sat hunched, like animals waiting for a blow, making no move to avert it In the vestibule of the coach, she stopped. She saw a man, who had unlocked the door and was leaning out, looking inquiringly ahead through the darkness, ready to step off. He turned at the sound of her approach. She recognized his face: it was Owen Kellogg, the man who had rejected the future she had once offered him.
"Kellogg!" she gasped, the sound of laughter in her voice like a cry of relief at the sudden sight of a man in a desert.
"Hello, Miss Taggart," he answered, with an astonished smile that held a touch of incredulous pleasure-and of wistfulness. "I didn't know you were aboard."
"Come on," she ordered, as if he were still an employee of the railroad. "I think we're on a frozen train."
"We are," he said, and followed her with prompt, disciplined obedience.
No explanations were necessary. It was as if, in unspoken understanding, they were answering a call to duty-and it seemed natural that of the hundreds aboard, it was the two of them who should be partners-in-danger.
"Any idea how long we've been standing?" she asked, as they hurried on through the next car.
"No," he said. "We were standing when I woke up."
They went the length of the train, finding no porters, no waiters in the diner, no brakemen, no conductor. They glanced at each other once in a while, but kept silent. They knew the stories of abandoned trains, of the crews that vanished in sudden bursts of rebellion against serfdom.
They got off at the head end of the train, with no motion around them save the wind on their faces, and they climbed swiftly aboard the engine. The engine's headlight was on, stretching like an accusing arm into the void of the night. The engine's cab was empty.
Her cry of desperate triumph broke out in answer to the shock of the sight: "Good for them! They're human beings!"
She stopped, aghast, as at the cry of a stranger. She noticed that Kellogg stood watching her curiously, with the faint hint of a smile.
It was an old steam engine, the best that the railroad had been able to provide for the Comet. The fire was banked in the grates, the steam gauge was low, and in the great windshield before them the headlight fell upon a band of ties that should have been running to meet them, but lay still instead, like a ladder's steps, counted, numbered and ended.
She reached for the logbook and looked at the names of the train's last crew. The engineer had been Pat Logan.
Her head dropped slowly, and she closed her eyes. She thought of the first run on a green-blue track, that must have been in Pat Logan's mind-as it was now in hers-through the silent hours of his last run on any rail.
"Miss Taggart?" said Owen Kellogg softly.
She jerked her head up. "Yes," she said, "yes . . . Well"-her voice had no color except the metallic tinge of decision-"we'll have to get to a phone and call for another crew." She glanced at her watch. "At the rate we were running, I think we must be about eighty miles from the Oklahoma state line. I believe Bradshaw is this road's nearest division point to call. We're somewhere within thirty miles of it."
"Are there any Taggart trains following us?"
"The next one is Number 253, the transcontinental freight, but it won't get here till about seven A.M., if it's running on time, which 1 doubt."
"Only one freight in seven hours?" He said it involuntarily, with a note of outraged loyalty to the great railroad