"In bed at the section house."
"Who's with you?"
"Night agent. Sheriff with two cowboy prisoners waiting to take 59."
Before the last word came, Bucks was back at him:
To Opr.:
Ask Sheriff release his prisoners to save passenger-train. Go together to west switch house-track, open, and set it. Smash in section tool-house, get tools. Go to point of house-track curve, cut the rails, and point them to send runaway train from Ogalalla over the bluff into the river.
Bucks.
The words flew off his fingers like sparks, and another message crowded the wire behind it:
To Agt.:
Go to east switch, open, and set for passing-track. Flag 59, and run her on siding. If can't get 59 into the clear, ditch the runaways.
Bucks.
They look old now. The ink is faded, and the paper is smoked with the fire of fifteen winters and bleached with the sun of fifteen summers. But to this day they hang there in their walnut frames, the original orders, just as Bucks scratched them off. They hang there in the dispatchers' offices in the new depot. But in their present swell surroundings Bucks wouldn't know them. It was Harvey Reynolds who took them off the other end of the wire—a boy in a thousand for that night and that minute. The instant the words flashed into the room he instructed the agent, grabbed an axe, and dashed out into the waiting-room, where the sheriff, Ed Banks, sat with his prisoners, the cowboys.
"Ed," cried Harvey, "there's a runaway train from Ogalalla coming down the line in the wind. If we can't trap it here, it'll knock 59 into kindling-wood. Turn the boys loose, Ed, and save the passenger-train. Boys, show the man and square yourselves right now. I don't know what you're here for; but I believe it's to save 59. Will you help?"
The three men sprang to their feet; Ed