"That trainload of workers is arriving; there's trouble, rioting or something."
"Are you sure?" Excitement blazed in his face. "Tell John Dawson so."
He called him over at once.
"We got a phone message from a man on the ground. It's on the mineral line, halfway between Mr. Judson's house and the viaduct, if you know where that is. Our man said it was serious."
"I'm going." Dawson sliced his words off briskly.
"Use my car; it's quicker," snapped Pelham.
Jensen, McGue, Dawson, and the reporter got inside; two others of the committee hung to the running boards.
Pelham drove at top speed out the Thirty-Eighth Street road, and circled around the crest. "I know the place," he explained. "We'd better come up from behind, if anything's doing. They might stop us."
He turned from the county road to a cool country lane cutting through tall long-leaf pine, in the middle of Shadow Valley. The car's lights danced unreally on the crowding trunks ahead, the wheels slipped and skidded over the sprinkling of carpeting needles. He whisked to the right, and took the hill toward the mountain. They had heard no noise as yet.
Up a gravelly hogback to a level a hundred feet from the tracks,—and they were in the midst of it. The uncertain rumble from men massed blackly in front of and all around the stalled engine's headlight, broke over them; they saw the train, somber and illy lit, stopped midway of the deep cut through the next chert hill—an ideal place for an ambuscade.