Detective Bob Bridger — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

DETECTIVE BOB BRIDGER. — ‘9 that it was the brakeman—for, in those days, steam brakes were not in general use. He continued on to the end of the coach, when the news- boy, with pallid features, came running into the car from the front, and toward him. With trembling hands he clutched Bridger’s arm, and whispered in his ear that the tall man had sprung from the train. A moment later the raftsman’s companions came through from the front car excitedly looking for their missing friend, and it became evident that what the boy had said was true. When the train pulled up at Pittsville station Bridger bade the section men hasten back along the track on their hand-car. A mile from the station they found the unfortunate pas- senger. He lay in a crushed and bleeding mass where he had fallen, and only lived an hour. He was conscious; however, and said that he had been asleep, and dreaming, when he became suddenly possessed of the delusion that he was on a swift running raft, and must manage to jump from it to the river’s bank, and make a landing. The raft seemed borne along so rapidly that for a mo- ment he hesitated, when, glancing behind him, he thought he perceived an angry man rushing upon him with an up- lifted iron poker. In terror he ran from his seat to the platform and sprang toward the delusive bank, awaking to hear the train thun- der by, and to find himself, stunned and bleeding, at the edge of the track. On learning these facts, Bridger believed that Dan Col- gate’s story of the German’s fate, at the time so vividly pictured on his brain, had been in some mysterious way conveyed, by his touch, to the raftsman’s brain, so as to shape the man’s dream and cause his death. One week afterward on Bridger’s train, at the same spot and hour, a second passeger met his death under circum- stances exactly similar. The people along the line became alarmed. They did not understand that every human being’s brain is an electric battery, and the body’s nerves its communi- cating wires. They, therefore, would not believe that a man of Bob Bridger’s powerful frame and magnetic stature might in- Gomicbooks (ele)