A Fool for Love

by Francis Lynde

Winton heard the hiss of the escaping air above all the industry clamor; heard, and saw the car start backward. Then he had a flitting glimpse of a man in grimy overclothes scrambling terror-frenzied from beneath the Rosemary. The thing done had been overdone. The fireman had “bled” the air-brake too freely, and the liberated car, gathering momentum with every wheel-turn, surged around the circling spur track and shot out masterless on the steeper gradient of the main line.

Now, for the occupants of a runaway car on a Rocky Mountain canyon line there is death and naught else. Winton saw, in a phantasmagoric flash of second sight, the meteor flight of the heavy car; saw the Reverend Billy's ineffectual efforts to apply the hand-brakes, if by good hap he should even guess that there were any hand-brakes; saw the car, bounding and lurching, keeping to the rails, mayhap, for some few miles below Argentine, where it would crash headlong into the upward climbing Carbonate train, and all would end.

In unreasoning misery, he did the only thing that offered: ran blindly down his own embankment, hoping nothing but that he might have one last glimpse of Virginia clinging to the hand-rail before she should be lost to him for ever.

But as he ran a thought white-hot from the furnace of despair fell into his brain to set it ablaze with purpose. Beyond the litter of activities the octopod was standing, empty of its crew. Bounding up into the cab, he released the brake and sent the great engine flying down the track of the new line.

In the measuring of the first mile the despair-born thought took shape and form. If he could outpace the runaway on the parallel line, stop the octopod and dash across to the C. G. R. track ahead of the Rosemary, there was one chance in a million that he might fling himself upon the car in mid flight and alight with life enough left to help Calvert with the hand-brakes.

Now, in the most unhopeful struggle it is often the thing least hoped for that comes to pass. At Argentine, Winton's speed was a mile a minute over a track rougher than a corduroy wagon-road; yet the octopod held the rail and was neck and neck with the runaway. Whisking past the station, Winton had a glimpse of a white-mustached old man standing bareheaded on the platform and gazing horror-stricken at the tableau; then man and station and lurching car were left behind, and the fierce strife to gain the needed mile of lead went on.

Three miles more of the surging, racking, nerve-killing race and Winton had his hand's-breadth of lead and had picked his place for the million-chanced wrestle with death. It was at the C. G. R. station of Tierra Blanca, just below a series of sharp curves which he hoped might check a little the arrow-like flight of the runaway.

Twenty seconds later the telegraph operator at the lonely little way station of Tierra Blanca saw a heroic bit of man-play. The upward-bound Carbonate train was whistling in the gorge below when out of the snow-wreaths shrouding the new line a big engine shot down to stop with fire grinding from the wheels, and a man dropped from the high cab to dash across to the station platform.

At the same instant a runaway passenger car thundered out of the canyon above. The man crouched, flung himself at it in passing, missed the forward hand-rail, caught the rear, was snatched from his feet and trailed through the air like the thong of a whip-lash, yet made good his hold and clambered on.

This was all the operator saw, but when he had snapped his key and run out he heard the shrill squeal of the brakes on the car and knew that the man had not risked his life for nothing.