“Why don’t some o’ you ijits open that there switch back there,” demanded Higgins, “so’s I kin back out? Or do you want t’ stay here the rest o’ your natural lives?”
“Why don’t you pull straight out?” asked the brakeman. “What’s th’ use o’ backin’ up?”
“Why, that there switch has been out o’ fix fer three months,” answered Higgins, savagely. “I’ve reported it a dozen times, but much good it does. Burns knows it. He knows we’ve got t’ back out. Why don’t he wake up? Is he deef?” and he jerked the whistle fiercely again.
Conductor and brakeman in the caboose were having a discussion of much the same tenor. Then Burns remembered about the broken switch.
“We’ve got t’ back out,” he said. “Higgins ’s right. Git her open,” and as the brakeman threw the switch, he signalled the engineer to back up.
The front brakeman, meanwhile, being of an inquiring disposition, had dropped off the engine and walked forward to the other switch, to see just what the matter was with it. To his surprise, he found it in perfect working order, for the section gang had repaired it the afternoon before. Chuckling to himself, he opened and closed it two or three times, thinking what a good joke he had on Burns and Higgins. Then, looking back, he saw that his train had passed out upon the main track and was steaming toward him.
“THE NEXT INSTANT IT FLASHED INTO VIEW AROUND THE CURVE.”
He closed the switch and was just about to lock it, when he heard another sound that made his heart stand still—the roar of a train approaching from the west. The next instant it flashed into view around the curve, running, as the brakeman afterwards expressed it, about three hundred miles a minute.
Without conscious thought, but seizing the one chance in a thousand to avoid a terrible accident, he threw the switch open again and then sprang aside as the special swept in upon the siding. He heard the screaming of the brakes and saw the train fairly buckling upon itself in an almost human effort to stop. But stop it could not, and out upon the main track again it swept, through the switch at the farther end of the siding, which the brakeman there had sense enough to open, and on toward Wadsworth.