With several deep-toned, almost arrogant blasts big, panting 1107 got under way and began clanking over frogs and switches, making toward the tracks of the main line. Jeff crawled up into the cupola of the hack where Tim and three other husky wreckers sat, looking out above the flat cars toward the engine ahead.
“You’ll have a ride this night,” said Tim to Jeff, smiling as he spoke. “Ol’ eleven-o-seven is a speed boy, an’ with Ed Dixon in the cab we’ll be yanked along somethin’ fierce. Sixty mile an hour won’t be a patch to what we’ll make. The dispatchers have cleared the track from here to the wreck. They always do for the wrecking train. Ain’t only one train that can have the right o’ way over us and that would be a hospital train with nurses and doctors aboard which they’d send out if this was a passenger wreck. But t’ track’s clear to-night with everything in sidings, so ol’ Ed Dixon will burn up the rails.”
CHAPTER VII
THE WRECK
Jeff noticed that “Ol’ Ed” was proceeding to fulfill Tim’s predictions with a will. The wrecking train was gathering speed with every passing second. The clank of rail joints as the wheels passed over them developed from a measured beat to a steady hum. Jeff had never moved so fast in all his life. Up and down grades they roared, around curves they snapped with a vengeance that threatened to send the caboose off the tracks and whizzing through the air like the snapper of a whip. “Ol’ Eleven-o-seven’s” whistle seemed never to stop shrieking for grade crossings, and Jeff wondered what would happen to a luckless automobile or team of horses that might get caught on one of the crossings as the wrecking train plunged down upon them.
Mile after mile was clicked off with measured regularity and in twenty-two minutes by Jeff’s watch the thirty-five miles to the wreck were covered and the monster engine began to slow down as grinding, spark-flinging brake shoes were applied.
Jeff and big Tim and the rest knew that they were approaching the wreck long before the train began to come to its crunching stop, for far ahead on the tracks, far beyond the stabbing white ray of the engine’s searching headlight, they could make out a pink glow in the sky and a blotch of lurid red behind some trees.
“There it is and it’s caught fire, too,” said Tim, letting himself down from the cupola and slipping off his heavy coat again. “Come on, men. Tumble out. We got a job to do. The line must be open before the commutation trains start to come down to-morrow morning. Lively now. Snap to it.”
And snap to it they did. Jeff marveled at the enthusiasm with which they prepared to go out into the near zero weather and do battle with a stubborn wreck that was on fire in the bargain.
By the time the train had come to a halt and the wreckers had tumbled out, Jeff could see by the rays of the searching headlight, in all its stark unpleasantness, a huge mass of twisted iron and steel, up-ended cars, overturned trucks and splintered ties and débris through which licked red-tongued flames. Here was the wreck that was blocking the line, the wreck that these men must clear away before daylight. It was a sight almost horrible to behold. Part way down the embankment and turned on its side was the locomotive, steam and smoke still curling about it. It looked like some prehistoric giant wounded and dying. A smoke pall hung over the entire scene, into which the wreckers, armed with axes and crowbars plunged, looking more like gnomes than human beings in that weird setting.