The wire came in at eleven forty-one. I was the only operator on shift at the Steele’s Hollow siding and I had been awake because the creek had been loud all evening and the sound of it had kept me from sleeping in the back room the way I usually did on slow nights. I did not understand the message on the first pass. The sender was not a trained operator. The key work was rough, each letter punched out with the kind of effort that means someone learned the alphabet from a card and nothing else. I asked for a repeat. The repeat said: Bridge gone. Train in creek. Men in water.
I sent twelve messages before dawn. I do not remember all of them now but I remember the sequence of them — each one a different office, each one carrying the same information in slightly different arrangements because I was sixteen years old and I was trying to find the form that would make someone arrive faster. The Pueblo office responded in four minutes. The Missouri Pacific division dispatcher took nine. The county sheriff’s line was down and I routed through a farm exchange that I was not authorized to use. I have not been reprimanded for it. No one ever raised the subject.
I walked the quarter mile to the trestle with a lantern. The water was still running hard. The locomotive had gone through the near end of the bridge and the first three cars had followed it. The rear cars had not gone in but they had come off the track and listed at angles that did not look right. There were people standing in the field on the far side of the wash, some of them with lanterns, and I could see movement in the water but I could not see what the movement was. I stood at the bank for a moment and then I went back and sent three more messages and then I went back to the bank and stayed there.
I had the passenger manifest because the night agent at Pueblo had telegraphed it to me as a precaution, so that we would know who to look for. I counted against it through the night as bodies were brought up to the bank. By the time the light came I had counted against the manifest several times and the numbers did not match. The manifest listed ninety-one. My count reached ninety-four before anyone else had finished counting, and I kept finding names that I could not put to a body and bodies that I could not put to a name.
Three of the unmanifested dead were placed eventually, by the survivors who knew them: men who had ridden without tickets, which happened on that line more than the company cared to note. I placed them myself by the end of the second day and marked them in the margin. Two I could not place. Nobody asked me about the tally sheet directly. I kept it because I did not know what else to do with it. The numbers were what they were.
I sent my last message at six-seventeen in the morning. I was still at the siding at noon. I do not remember eating. I do not remember going home. I have been back to the trestle location twice in my life, once in 1911 and once last year, and both times the water was low and the rebuilt bridge looked like any other bridge on that stretch and there was nothing to see. I do not know why I went.