The Wreckers

by Francis Lynde

The major and Mrs. Sheila were sitting together, near the middle of the car. I staggered up and took the seat just ahead of them, and the major asked me if Mr. Norcross was on the engine. I told him he was, and that ended it. What with the rattle and bang of the coach, the howling of the speed-made wind in the ventilators, and the shrill scream of the spinning wheels, there wasn't any room for talk during the whole of that breath-taking race to the old "Y" in the hills beyond Banta.

Knowing, from what Mr. Norcross had said, the point at which we were going to side-track and wait for the special and the wild engine, I grew sort of nervous and worked-up after we had crashed through the Banta yard and the day-coach began to sway and lurch around the hill curves. What if the special had been making better time than the boss had counted upon? In that case, we'd probably hit her in a head-ender somewhere on one of those very curves. And with the time we were making, and the time she'd be making, there wouldn't be enough left of either train to be worth picking up.

A mile or so short of the "Y" siding I went up ahead and handed myself out to the forward platform to see if I couldn't get a squint past the storming engine. I got it now and then, on the swing of the curves, but there was nothing in sight. Just the same, it was mighty scary, and I took a relief breath so deep that it nearly made me sick at my stomach when I finally realized that Kirgan had shut off and was slowing for the stop at the farther switch of the old "Y."

What was done at the switch was done swiftly, as men work when they have the fear of death gripping at them. If the special should come up while we were making the back-in, the result would be just about the same as it would have been if we had met it on the curves.

The jerking tug of the self-preservation instinct is pretty strong, sometimes, and I tumbled off the steps of the car as it was backing in around the western curve of the "Y." Our picked-up fireman was at the switch, setting it again for the main line. With our own engine silent, I could hear a faint sound like the far-away fluttering of a safety-valve. We were not ten seconds too soon. The special was coming.

Mr. Norcross, who was still in the engine cab, shot an order at Kirgan.

"Fling your coat over the headlight, and then be ready to snatch it and get off!" he shouted. "If they see it as they come up, it may stop them!" Then, catching a glimpse of me on the ground: "Break the coupling on the coach, Jimmie—quick!"

As I jumped to obey I understood what was to be done. The fireman at the switch was to let the special go by, and then the boss—just the boss alone on the engine—was to be let out on the main track to put himself between the chaser and the chased. It was a hair-raising proposition, but perhaps—just perhaps—not quite so suicidal as it looked. With skilful handling the interposed engine might possibly be kept out of the way by backing, and its warning headlight shining full into the eyes of the men in the 416's cab would surely be enough to stop them—if anything would.

I got the coupling broken on the car to set our engine free before the distant flutter noise had grown to anything more than a humming like that of an overhead swarm of angry bees. Kirgan was standing on the front end, with his coat thrown over the headlight, ready to jerk it off and jump when he got the word. Out at the switch, our fireman was keeping out of sight so that the engineer of the special shouldn't see him, and maybe get rattled and stop. As usual, the boss had covered every little detail in his instructions, and had remembered that the sight of a man standing at a switch in a lonesome place like this might give an engineer a fit of "nerves" and make him shut off steam.

I had just finished uncoupling the day-coach and the boss was easing our engine ahead a bit to make sure that she was loose, when the car-door opened behind me and the major and Mrs. Sheila came out in the front vestibule. It was Mrs. Sheila who spoke to me, and her voice had borrowed some of the big terror that I had seen in her eyes while she was sitting in the office at Portal City.