Maje turned to the master mechanic from where Delaroo lay. "Neighbor, you might as well know it now as any time. Don't you say so, Martie? Martie, what do you say?" Martie burst into tears; but through them Neighbor caught the engineer's broken confession. "Neighbor--I'm color blind." The master mechanic sat stunned.
"True as God's word. You might as well know it now. There's the man that stood between me and the loss of my job. It's been coming on me for two year. He knew it, that's why he stayed in my cab. He stayed because I was color blind. He knowed I'd git ketched the minute a new fireman come in, Neighbor. He watched the signals--Delaroo. I'm color blind, God help me." Maje Sampson sat down by the coffin. Martie hushed her crying; the three sat in the darkness.
"It wouldn't worry me so much if it wasn't f'r the family, Neighbor. The woman--and the boys. I ain't much a-savin'; you know that. If you can gi' me a job I can get bread an' butter out of, give it to me. I can't pull a train; my eyes went out with this man here. I wish to God it was me, and him standing over. A man that's color blind, and don't know a thing on God's earth but runnin' an engine, is worse 'n' a dead man."
They buried Delaroo. But even then they were not through with him. Delaroo had insurance in every order in the Bend, which meant almost every one on earth. There was no end to his benefit certificates, and no known beneficiaries. But when they overhauled his trunk they found every last certificate filed away up to the last paid assessment and the last quarter's dues. Then came a shock. People found out there was a beneficiary. While the fraters were busy making their passes Delaroo had quietly been directing the right honorable recording secretaries to make the benefits run to Neighbor, and so every dollar of his insurance ran. Nobody was more thunderstruck at the discovery than the master mechanic himself.
Yet Delaroo meant something by it. After Neighbor had studied over it nights the best of a month; after Maje Sampson had tried to take the color test and failed, as he persistently said he would; after he had gone to tinkering in the roundhouse, and from tinkering respectably, and by degrees down the hill to wiping at a dollar and forty cents a day with time and a half for overtime--Neighbor bethought himself all of a sudden one day of a paper Delaroo had once given him and asked him to keep.