But Ben paid no heed. Throwing himself from the car, he floundered over to the track. I ran toward the station, firing as I went. Once I looked back. Ben was kneeling down, adjusting torpedoes under the very pilot of the plow.
Now there isn’t any use of my explaining how the Limited roared by, her engineer satisfied with the green of the semaphore; nor how he gave her the air when the torpedoes warned him.
Nor, for that matter, of the futile pursuit of the bandits who had intended to ditch her. All that came out in the morning paper. If I remember, there was even a picture of the pile of cross-ties chained to the track.
The fact that will interest you is what we discovered in Hastings station. Without bothering to explain to 77’s wondering crew, we dashed into the waiting-room and threw open the door of the ticket office.
At the table sat Donaldson. He was stiff and rigid, and from an ugly blotched hole in his neck there crept a frozen stream of blood. His right hand still rested on the telegraph-key.
“Good God!” I muttered. “Dead! He never moved after he was shot.”
And then, somehow feeling Ben’s eyes upon me, I looked at him. His smile was ghastly.
“Sure?” he said. “I told you so back in the tower. He never moved after he was shot? Then what about that message? How did he know about the cross-ties?”
“Shut up!” I shrieked. “Here, let’s get him out of this. We’ll go down on 77. I’m through!”
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the January 31, 1920 issue of All-Story Weekly magazine.