The engineer nodded. “I don’t know what you are after, but I guess I can take your word,” he said. “You seem that kind of a man.”
Ten minutes later the fireman vanished into the darkness, and the blaze of the headlamp went out before he returned and the roar of the drivers sank. The rhythmic din grew slack, and became a jarring of detached sounds again, the snow no longer beat on the glasses as it had done, and, rocking less, the great locomotive rolled slowly down the incline until it stopped, and Grant, taking the lantern handed him, sprang down from the cab. Four other men were waiting on the calaboose platform, and when Grant hid the lantern under his fur coat they floundered down the side of the graded track which there crossed a hollow. A raw wind whirled the white flakes about them and Breckenridge could scarcely see the men behind him. He was thankful when, slipping, sliding, stumbling, they gained the level.
From there he could just distinguish the road bed as something solid through the whirling haze, and he felt they were following a bend of it when Grant stopped and a clinking sound came out of the obscurity above them. It might have been made by somebody knocking out key wedges or spikes with a big hammer and in his haste striking the rail or chair.
Then Grant said something Breckenridge could not catch, and they were crawling up the slope, with the clinking and ringing growing a trifle louder. Breckenridge’s heart beat faster than usual, but he was tolerably collected now. He had a weapon he was not unskilled with in his pocket, and the chance of a fight with even desperate men was much less disconcerting than that of plunging down into a frozen river with a locomotive. He had also a reassuring conviction that if Larry could contrive it there would be no fight at all.
He crawled on, with the man behind clutching at him, now and then, and the one in front sliding back on him, until his arms were wet to the elbows and his legs to the knees; but the top of the grade seemed strangely difficult to reach, and he could see nothing with the snow that blew over it in his eyes. Suddenly Larry rose up, there was a shout and a flounder, and, though he did not quite know how he got there, Breckenridge found himself standing close behind his comrade, and in the light of the lantern held up saw a man drop his hammer. There were other men close by, but they were apparently too astonished to think of flight.
“It’s Larry!” somebody exclaimed.
“Stop where you are,” said Grant sharply as one man made a move. “I don’t want to shoot any of you, but I most certainly will if you make me. Are there any more of you?”
“No,” said one of the men disgustedly.
Grant walked forward swinging his lantern until his eyes rested on one partly loosened rail. “And that is as far as you have got?” he said. “Take up your hammer and drive the wood key in. Get hold of their rifles, Charley. I guess they are under that coat.”
There was an angry murmur, and a man started to speak; but Grant stopped him.