“No!” snarled Caleb glowering back at him through the open window. “If there was, you wouldn’t be a measly thirty-dollar-a-month station roustabout.”
Settling into his place, Conover knit his red brows and peered forward through the downpour and mist, along the shining track. He could not afford the time he had lost. To make it up, every notch of speed must be crowded on. There was a fierce exhilaration in Caleb’s alert light eyes, as he set himself to his new task. The fireman, who had been crouching on the tender, now worked his way forward into the cab.
“Hello!” grunted Conover, crossly. “I’d forgot you. I s’pose I got to slow up while you jump.”
“If I was a jumper, sir,” replied the fireman, quietly, “I’d have gotten off at the station.”
With stolid unconcern the fellow set about stoking. Conover grinned.
“If we live past that bridge,” he remarked, “You’ll make your next trip as pass’nger engineer. Steady, now.”
The locomotive was at top speed once more. Around a curve it tore, listing far to one side. Straight ahead, through the gray murk, rose the trestled bridge—a blur of brownish-red, spanning a hundred foot drop; at whose bottom boiled a froth of white fretted water cut here and there by black lump-head boulders. “Slow to 10 miles an Hour!” read the patch of signboard at the bridge’s head. At either side of the railroad embankment stood knots of country folk, idly watching the condemned framework.
At sixty miles an hour the locomotive swept into the straightaway. A scattering chorus of cries rose from a dozen lips as the shadowy giant bulk leaped out of the mist.
Then, in the same instant, the dull rumble of wheels on a ground track was changed to the hollow roaring roll of wheels on a trestle. A jar of impact—a sickening sway of the whole wood-and-steel structure—a snapping, rending sound from somewhere far below—a wind-borne scream from the group of panic-stricken idlers now a furlong behind;—and once more the changed key of the driving-wheels’ song told that the flimsy bridgeway was succeeded by solid roadbed beneath the rails.
“Scared?” asked Conover, over his shoulder, to the fireman.