On the second run down the line toward the new point of hazard, Larry shot a quick side glance at Dick, giving the eye signal that they had agreed upon. The engineer was now busy with his throttle and brake, and since he could hardly do three things at once, he apparently failed to notice that Dick was edging his way slowly toward the right-hand engine gangway.
The climax came as the locomotive was lumbering past the busy army of workmen laying its double line of steel down to the ostensible new crossing; the fortunate moment when the engineer, who had given his train a trifle too much headway, was jamming the throttle shut and twitching at the brake-handle to make a stop.
Quietly, and so quickly that he could hardly be missed, Dick swung out of the gangway and dropped to the ground; and at the same instant Larry stooped, thrust two fingers through the jingling ring on the cab floor and gave a mighty upward jerk. A second later, under cover of the thunder-bellowing, deafening roar that the jerk had set off under the engine, he leaped from the gangway and was immediately swallowed up and lost in the thronging crowd of Short Line workmen who surrounded him and rushed him to the rear with yells of triumph.
For a few tumultuous moments confusion worse confounded wrought its own sweet will in the ranks of the “enemy.” Larry’s simple plan, so successfully carried out, had been to “kill” the blockading engine at the point farthest removed from the real crossing, and his careful study of the under parts of the locomotive had been to determine the all-important fact that the blow-off cock of the boiler, situated directly under the cab, could not be closed from the cab if it were once opened wide.
This was the clever expedient for a bloodless getting rid of the lawless obstruction, and it worked like a charm. With the engine boiler losing its water as fast as a hundred-and-sixty-pound steam pressure could blow it out, it was only a matter of seconds before the engine was completely out of commission. Inside of a minute the twinkly-eyed bandit and his fireman were frantically dumping the fire to save the boiler from burning its crown-sheet; the blocking train was safely and permanently “stalled” out of the way; and the Short Line track-layers, abandoning the new crossing site as one man, were hurling themselves with a mighty shout of “Gangway!” upon the job of installing the already prepared crossing-frogs before the crew of the stalled train, now hot-footing it up the track, could reach the O. C. camp and bring reënforcements.
It was in the evening of this same day, a day in which another goodly stride ahead had been marked down to the credit of the Short Line extension, that one of the material trains forging to the newest front carried a freight caboose as a trailer. In the caboose, which was serving for the moment as the private car of General Manager Maxwell, the chief of construction, riding the new line with his ranking officer, told the story of the brief but brilliant crossing fight—which was no fight at all.
“Blew the water out of their engine, did he?” laughed the general manager, when the story was told. “Being Dick’s father, I suppose I shouldn’t have let him go with young Donovan on any such hare-brained adventure if I had been on the ground; but it is all right: I should be sorry if he had taken your offer to stay behind. And perhaps, as you say, his loose tongue was needed to keep those enginemen from thinking too pointedly about other things. Dick could talk himself out of jail if he were given a fair chance: it’s the thing he does best. Where are the boys now?”
“I’ve sent them ahead with a small gang of axmen to clear the right-of-way. We’re in timber for a couple of miles up there.”