It was not so much a question of who would go as who would consent to be left behind. However, it was settled in a very few minutes, and then the engine and the freight wagon slid away from the depot until it seemed to shoot through the darkness, a flare of red light which dashed like a lurid streak across the pale moon-lit spaces.
Sam Peters fired as if he had been used to that sort of thing for the last five or six years, doing it with a regularity that suggested clockwork; while the doctor stood hanging on to the levers, peering ahead into the night, with the corner of his eye always on the indicator, for he and Peters both knew that the engine was an old one, and not over safe for such a speed as they were making.
“Open her throttle; we’ve passed the half!” yelled Peters. With a nod the doctor pushed down another lever. A hideous screech sprang out, keeping up its terrifying blast as the remaining miles sped by. In the freight-car there was silence save for an occasional ejaculation as some unwary one was dashed from his place by the violent rocking and jerking of the flying engine.
Suddenly Sam Peters ceased his firing, and, peering over the side, seemed to be looking for landmarks.
“Shut her down, quick!” he yelled, and at the same moment, dashing open the furnace-door, began raking out the firing, which only a little while before he had been shovelling in with such painstaking energy.
The doctor dragged down the lever, applied the brakes, then hung on for dear life, expecting nothing less than an awful crash, for, in the absence of signals, and with but the scantiest knowledge of the track over which they had been travelling, what was more likely than that he had not pulled up in time? It was a space of awful suspense, measured by seconds, but in point of strain seeming like hours; then, with a grinding and groaning of brakes, the engine came to a stand a little distance from the depot.
“Shall I drive her right in?” the doctor asked, conscious that there was an odd sense of strain in his tone, while he panted for breath.
“Better leave well alone, I should say. My word! it was a near shave. If I hadn’t reckernized the Gulch brook shimmering in the moonlight a mile back, we should never have pulled up in time, and then there would have been an awful smash,” said Sam Peters, in a jerky tone, as he wiped his streaming face with a handkerchief which had been clean once, but was certainly not so now.
“Thank God we came safely through!” the doctor said reverently, thinking of the lives of the men in the freight-car.
Then they all tumbled off the train and ran towards the depot, which looked so quiet and deserted in the bright moonlight.