“We're too late; she's onto us!”
Still we staggered mechanically forward, until suddenly, with a cry of warning, the agent sprang aside, and the express went thundering by.
“See here, young man,” my companion exclaimed angrily, “if this is a put-up job——”
“But it is not!” I interposed with indignant protest. “I don't understand it any better than you do. Certainly I left Ant—the roller sprawled across both tracks.”
“Well, I guess it ain't there now,” dryly remarked the agent, watching the rear lights of the fast-receding train, until they were swallowed up in the glare of the “local's” head-light. “I must run back,” he added, recalled to a sense of his duties. “You take this lantern and go and see if the outward track is clear. Stand between the rails and swing the lantern if it ain't. I'll tell the engineer to go slow and be on the lookout.”
In another minute I was at the crossing. I looked up and down the street for Antaeus, but neither he nor the young lady were to be seen. If that Hercules of a locomotive actually had lifted him into the air and carried him off his absence could not have been more conspicuous. But naturally such a feat>could not have been accomplished, nor had it been attempted.
The real explanation of the mysterious disappearance was this. During my absence the fire under the boiler had been getting up, until finally enough steam had made to start the machinery and so the roller had been enabled to roll itself away out of danger.
I was about to start toward town, under the supposition that Antaeus had taken that direction, when I chanced to recollect that with the levers as I had left them he naturally must go just the opposite way—that is, retrace the course over which he had lately come. Accordingly I set out on the run toward the hill. Near the foot of it I found him, diagonaled off the road-side with his nose against a tree, loudly hissing in impotent rage at the unwelcome bar to his progress.
I jumped into the engineer's place, reversed the machinery, and without very much trouble succeeded in getting him back into the road and started on the homeward way. I was putting to myself an uneasy question as to the whereabouts of my passenger, when, to my relief, I heard her voice close at hand.
“Is it all right?” she inquired anxiously; “I feared it was going to blow up or something, it made such a horribly distressing noise.”