"The trestle is all right," answered Geoffrey, climbing into the cab. "I held you up, and I'm going on with you to bring out a doctor to my partner, who is dangerously ill."
The engineer's comments were indignant and sulphurous, while the big fireman turned back his shirt sleeves as if preparing to chastise the man rash enough to interfere with express freight traffic. Geoffrey, reaching for a shovel, said:
"When we get there, I'll go with you to your superintendent at Vancouver; but, if either of you try to put me off or to call assistance, I'll make good use of this. I tell you it's a question of life and death, and two at least of your directors are good friends of the man I want to help. They wouldn't thank you for destroying his last chance. Meantime you're wasting precious moments. Start the train."
"Hold fast!" commanded the grizzled engineer, opening the throttle. "When she's under way, I'll talk to you, and unless you satisfy me, by the time we reach Vancouver there won't be much of you left for the police to take charge of."
Then the two locomotives started the long cars on their inter-ocean race again.
CHAPTER XII
GEOFFREY TESTS HIS FATE
It was a lowering afternoon in the Fall, when Thurston and Julius Savine stood talking together upon a spray-drenched ledge in the depths of a British Columbian cañon. On the crest of the smooth-scarped hillside, which stretched back from the sheer face of rock far overhead, stood what looked like a tiny fretwork in ebony, and consisted of two-hundred-foot conifers. Here and there a clamorous torrent had worn out a gully, and, with Thurston's assistance, Savine had accomplished the descent of one of the less precipitous. Elsewhere the rocks had been rubbed into smooth walls, between which the river had fretted out its channel during countless ages. The water was coming down in a mad green flood, for the higher snows had melted fast under the autumn sun, and the clay beneath the glaciers had stained it. Foam licked the ledges, a roaring white wake streamed behind each boulder's ugly head, and the whole gloomy cañon rang with the thunder of a rapid, whose filmy stream whirled in the chilly breeze.
Savine gazed at the rapid and the whirlpool that fed it, distinguishing the roar of scoring gravel and grind of broken rock from its vibratory booming, and though he was a daring man, his heart almost failed him.