The wreck on the other side of the valley—the wreck of the train on which Cherry Hopkins had taken passage for Rockton—drew Ralph like a magnet. The news of the terrible disaster had shaken even the detectives riding on the locomotive.
The express took the curve. The track was clear to the next easy turn, right at the beginning of the trestle where the pillar had been blown out. A gang had been at work here putting in new masonry to take the place of the impermanent pillar which now held up the trestle, but the forest fire to the north had called them off the job.
Every railroad employee who could possibly be spared, had been sent to aid the State fire guard. One man was here to watch the dangerous spot, and with his lantern he signaled the Midnight Flyer to come on.
Ralph ran on easily to the end of the trestle, and so over it and onto the firm ground beyond. He speeded up again. But now the heat of the flaming forest began to be felt even in the locomotive cab.
“Hey, Fairbanks!” shouted Frank Haley, the detective, in the engineer’s ear. “Hey, you going to take the chance? I believe there is a back-draught. The fire is coming this way.”
Ralph nodded, with grimly set lips. He had noted the cloud of flame-streaked smoke lying across the tracks not half a mile ahead. How wide was that cloud? Were the trees directly beside the right of way on fire now? What, indeed, was he driving the express into?
He gripped the reverse lever. A flashlike picture of his own train wrecked and in the midst of the flaming forest rose before Ralph’s mental vision. Ought he to risk the unknown peril masked by the rose-hued cloud of drifting smoke?
But the thought of the wreck ahead called him on. Cherry in peril! Perhaps dying of her injuries. The thought was so enthralling that the young engineer could not bring himself to the reversal of the locomotive’s mechanism and the pulling down of the heavy train. He did shut off some speed. They rolled into the cloud of smoke at less than thirty miles an hour. At that rate, he could have stopped the heavy train within a hundred yards.
The suspense, if not the heat from the fire, brought the perspiration out on Ralph Fairbanks’ face as he leaned from the window. He shaded his eyes with his hand, trying to spy through the smother of smoke. The headlight’s beam was dimmed by the cloud. Now and then tongues of flame seemed to leap through it, as though reaching to lap the locomotive.
Above and higher than the rumble of the train he now distinguished the roar of the conflagration. With it came the loud snapping of falling trees and explosions when dead timber burst from the heat of the fire that consumed it at the heart.