“It’s all right!” he reported; and Larry once more got a good breath—a breath of thankful relief that sent the tears to his eyes.
“Listen, Dick,” he gasped. “I’m praying that those brakes will hold till she gets on the bit of straight track at the big shale slide. I don’t dare try to catch her on these curves. Yell at me when you see the slide, and then hold your hair on. It’ll have to be there or nowhere!”
When Dick’s warning yell came, Larry stuck his head out of the cab window for one swift glance down the track. The runaway was just entering the half-mile tangent at the slide, swaying and lurching like a drunken thing.
“Now!” he bellowed, and with a jerk at the throttle lever he added the pull of a hundred and eighty pounds of steam to the urgings of the down-grade.
It was all over in a minute—in a second, as it seemed to Dickie Maxwell clutching for handholds as the 717 leaped backward around the final curve. [With a rush and a roar the flying locomotive shot down] the straight line [upon the masterless Pullman]. At the distance of a car-length Dick saw Bess Holcombe in the rear vestibule of the sleeper. She was clinging to the door jamb and trying to make her way out to the hand-rail. Madly he motioned her back, and as she disappeared the clashing touch was made.
[With a rush and a roar the flying locomotive shot down upon the masterless Pullman]
Larry Donovan thought that if he should live to be a hundred years old he should never again have such a keen thrill of agonizing suspense as that which came when he gently applied the engine brakes to put the coupling touch to the test. And when he found that he really had hold of the runaway and was checking its speed and his own, he came as near fainting as a healthy young athlete could and miss it.
“Oh, thank God!” he choked; and then: “Get back into that Pullman, Dick, and tell those women folks that it’s all right—they’re safe.”
The return run with the rescued car was quickly made, and Larry made it alone, leaving the driving step only once, to throw a few shovelfuls of coal into the firebox of the 717. The trial—the kind of trial he most dreaded—lay just ahead, and he was cudgeling his brain to find some way of dodging it, telling himself that he’d rather take a whipping than to face the crowd of crazily grateful people who would probably pounce upon him when the engine and car reached the valley sidings.