It was Lem Wacker. A train of empty box freights blocked his way. He stooped, made a diving scurry under one of them, and was lost to view.
Bart ran as he had never run before. The train cleared the tracks as he reached the spot where Wacker had disappeared.
At that moment above the jangling, clumping activity of the yards there arose on the night air one frightful, piercing shriek.
Bart halted with a nameless shock, for the utterance was distinctly human and curdling. He glanced after the receding train, fancying that Wacker might have got caught under the cars and was being dragged along with them.
That roadbed was clear, however. Two hundred feet to the right was a second train. Its forward section was moving off, having just thrown some cars against others stationary on a siding.
Bart ran towards these. Wacker could not have so suddenly disappeared in any other direction. He crossed between bumpers, and glanced eagerly all around. There was no hiding-place nearer than the repair shops, and they were five hundred feet distant.
Wacker could not possibly have reached their precincts in the limited space of time afforded since Bart had last lost sight of him.
"He is hiding in some of those cars," decided Bart, "or he has swung onto the bumpers of the section pulling out—hark!"
Bart pricked up his ears. A strange sound floated on the air—a low, even, musical tinkle.
Its source could not be far distant. Bart ran along the side of the stationary freights.