CHAPTER XIV
The Runaway Spoil Train
Barely a mile of the double track of the Panama railway stretched between the inspection car, on which Jim was racing for his life, and the oncoming passenger train. Glancing over his shoulder he could see the smoke billowing from the locomotive and the escape steam blowing out between her leading wheels. Behind him there was the scrunch, the grinding roar, of the long line of steel wheels carrying the runaway spoil train. He kneeled on his driving seat and looked first one way and then the other, hesitating what to do. The rush of air, as he tore along, sent his broad-brimmed hat flying, and set his hair streaking out behind him. His eyes were prominent, there was desperation written on his face; but never once did he think of taking the advice which the megaphone man flung at him.
"Jump for it! No! I won't!" he declared stubbornly to himself. "I'll stick here till there's no chance left; then I'll bring this machine up sharp, and leave her as a buffer between the spoil train and the one bearing passengers. Not that she'll be of much use. That heavy line of cars will punch her out of the way as if she were as light as a bag; but something might happen. The frame of this car might lift the leading wheels of the spoil train from the tracks and wreck her."
There was an exhaust whistle attached to his car, and he set it sounding at once, though all the time his eyes drifted from passenger train to spoil train, from one side of the track to the other. Suddenly there came into view round a gentle bend a mass of discarded machinery. He remembered calling Phineas's attention to it some weeks before. Broken trucks, which had once conveyed dirt from the cut at Culebra for the French workers, had been run from the main track on to a siding and abandoned there to the weather, and to the advance of tropical vegetation, that, in a sinister, creeping manner all its own, stole upon all neglected things and places in this canal zone, and wrapped them in its clinging embrace, covering and hiding them from sight, as if ashamed of the work which man had once accomplished. Jim remembered the spot, and that it was one of the unattended switching stations rarely used—for here the tracks of the railway were less encumbered with spoil trains—yet a post for all that where the driver of an inspection car might halt, might descend and pull over the lever, and so direct his car into the siding.
"I'll do it," he told himself. "If only I can get there soon enough to allow me to reach the lever."
He measured the distance between himself and the pursuing spoil train, and noted that it had increased. His lusty little engine, rattling away beneath its crumpled bonnet, was pulling the car along at a fine pace. True, the velocity was not so great as it had been when descending the first part of the incline, that leading out of the Culebra cut; but then the swift rush of the spoil train was also lessened. The want of fall in the rails was telling on her progress, though, to be sure, she was hurtling along at a speed approximating to fifty miles an hour; but the bump she had given to Jim's car had had a wonderful effect. It had shot the light framework forward, and, with luck, Jim determined to increase the start thus obtained.
"But it'll be touch and go," he told himself, his eye now directed to the switching station, just beyond which the mass of derelict French cars lay. "There's one thing in my favour: the points open from this direction. If it had been otherwise I could have done nothing, for, even if I had attempted to throw the point against the spoil train, the pace she is making would carry her across the gap. Why don't that fellow on the passenger engine shut off steam and reverse? Ain't he seen what's happening?"
He scowled in the direction of the approaching passenger train, and knelt still higher, shaking his fists in that direction. It seemed that the man must be blind, that his attention must be in another direction; for already the line of coaches was within five hundred yards of the points which had attracted Jim's attention, and he realized that she would reach the spot almost as soon as the spoil train would.
"'Cos she's closer," he growled. "If he don't shut off steam, anything I may be able to do will be useless. He'll cross the switch and come head on to the collision."