All this time, this moment, he had been standing utterly motionless staring at the telephone pole down the track, the one that his eye had picked out as being different from the others. The moon was so bright now that near the top he could see a white bar set crosswise on the pole and as he looked the pole and the bar seemed to have become isolated as if the other poles had shrunk back and away.
Suddenly a mile down the track he heard the click and clamor of the electric train when it left the station, and as if the sound had startled him into life he gave a short cry and set off at a swaying run down the road, in the direction of the pole with the crossed bar.
The train whistled again. Click—click—click—it was nearer now, six hundred, five hundred yards away and as it came under the bridge he was running in the bright beam of its searchlight. There was no emotion in his mind but terror—he knew only that he must reach that pole before the train, and it was fifty yards away, struck out sharp as a star against the sky.
There was no path on the other side of the tracks under the poles but the train was so close now that he dared wait no longer or he would be unable to cross at all. He darted from the road, cleared the tracks in two strides and with the sound of the engine at his heels raced along the rough earth. Twenty feet, thirty feet—as the sound of the electric train swelled to a roar in his ears he reached the pole and threw himself bodily on a man who stood there close to the tracks, carrying him heavily to the ground with the impact of his body.
There was the thunder of steel in his ear, the heavy clump of the wheels on the rails, a swift roaring of air, and the nine-thirty train had gone past.
“Charley,” he gasped incoherently, “Charley.”
A white face looked up at him in a daze. Michael rolled over on his back and lay panting. The hot night was quiet now—there was no sound but the far-away murmur of the receding train.
“Oh, God!”
Michael opened his eyes to see that Charley was sitting up, his face in his hands.
“S’all right,” gasped Michael, “s’all right, Charley. You can have the money. I don’t know what I was thinking about. Why—why, you’re one of my oldest friends.”
Charley shook his head.
“I don’t understand,” he said brokenly. “Where did you come from—how did you get here?”
“I’ve been following you. I was just behind.”
“I’ve been here for half an hour.”
“Well, it’s good you chose this pole to—to wait under. I’ve been looking at it from down by the bridge. I picked it out on account of the crossbar.”
Charley had risen unsteadily to his feet and now he walked a few steps and looked up the pole in the full moonlight.
“What did you say?” he asked after a minute, in a puzzled voice. “Did you say this pole had a crossbar?”
“Why, yes. I was looking at it a long time. That’s how——”
Charley looked up again and hesitated curiously before he spoke.
“There isn’t any crossbar,” he said.
The story was written in Great Neck in March 1924. When Fitzgerald sent it to Ober he noted, “Here’s the revised story. I don’t know what to think of it but I’d rather not offer it to the Post. The ending is effective but a little sensational.” It was published in Woman’s Home Companion, September 1925. The story was included in The World’s Best Short Stories of 1926 and was probably syndicated in newspapers, as short stories often were at that time.
