“An hour and forty-five minutes from Brewster, on a passenger schedule. We’ll better that by ten or fifteen minutes, though.”
Evidently young Cargill meant to better it if he could. At Tabor Mine, ten miles out, the big engine’s exhaust had become a continuous roaring blast, and the tiny station at the mine siding flashed through the beam of the electric headlight like some living thing in full flight to the rear. At Kensett, where the line skirts the reservoir lake of the Timanyoni High Line Irrigation Company, they passed a long freight on the siding; the caboose was only a few yards inside of the clear post, and Sprague winced involuntarily when the engine cab shot past the freight’s rear end with what seemed only an inch or two to spare.
Corona was the next night telegraph station, and here the wrecking special met the two following sections of the freight drawn out upon the sidings to right and left. Cargill’s grip closed upon the throttle when the switch and station lights swept into view; but the station semaphore was wigwagging the “clear” signal, and once more the big man on the fireman’s box sat tight while the flying special roared through the narrow main line alley left by the two side-tracked freights.
Maxwell was holding his watch in his hand when the special cleared the switches at Corona and the great beam of the headlight began to flick to right and left in the dodging race among the foot-hills.
“Well make Timanyoni, at the mouth of the canyon, in ten minutes’ better time than our fast mail makes it,” he said to Sprague; and the Government man nodded grimly.
“It’s all right, Dick,” he shouted back. “Just the same, I’d like to know how a man ever acquires the nerve to send a train around the hill corners this way when he hasn’t the slightest notion of what may be waiting for him five hundred yards in the future.”
Apparently the stalwart young fellow on the opposite side of the cab owned the necessary nerve. Easing the huge flyer skilfully around the sharpest of the turnings, he drove it to the limit on the tangents in spurts that seemed to promise certain destruction at the next crooking of the track. But the wheels of the train were still shrilling safely on the steel when the headlight beam, playing steadily for the moment, brought the lonely station at the canyon’s mouth into its field.
Cargill was whistling peremptorily for the signal before the short train had fully straightened itself on the tangent below the station. But for some reason the red light on the station semaphore remained inert. Instantly the sweating fireman jerked his fire-door open, and the four pairs of eyes in the flyer’s cab were all fixed upon the motionless red dot over the track when Cargill sounded his second call.
While the whistle echoes were still yelling in the surrounding hills the climax came. Out of the station door darted a man with a red lantern. Cargill pounced upon the throttle, and in the same second the brakes went into the emergency notch with a jerk that flung the superintendent and the fireman against the boiler-head and slammed the guest unceremoniously into the cab corner.
At the shriek of the brakes, the man with the red lantern turned and ran in the opposite direction, waving his signal light frantically; and the wrecking special was still only shrilling and skidding to its stop when a long passenger-train drawn by two engines slid smoothly out of the canyon portal and came grinding down the grade with fire spurting from every suddenly clipped wheel-rim.