John reached for his watch. He was tugging to pull it from his pocket when the blast of an engine whistle sounded, it seemed, almost beside them.
It was the "Lark" whistling for a crossing a mile away as it pounded on toward the derailer, where death and destruction yawned.
CHAPTER VII
"Thrillers," as he called them, had always disgusted John. A book wherein the hero overcame the villain by desperate means and won the girl by a single stroke of manly dauntlessness was to him like so much trash. Melodramatic plays he despised. Griffith's pictures were the only ones in which he could tolerate a "staged" thrill.
It never came into his mind as he heard the whistle of the "Lark" flying a mile a minute over the rails to what might be a horrible disaster that here was a real "thriller" exceeding the imagination of any cheap novelist, aspiring playwright or industrious scenario writer. Later when he rehearsed in his mind what happened that night, he realized that in fact truth was often stranger than fiction. Every newspaper man eventually comes to the same realization.
In striking contrast to his feeling that minutes were hours a few moments before, it seemed only five or six seconds before the headlight of the oncoming train pierced through the darkness of the night. He felt that it was coming toward them faster than any train had ever traveled. A fear that there had been a mistake and that the engineer could not possibly bring the heavy train to a stop before the locomotive wheels struck the derailer seized him.
The detective was on his feet, rifle ready to be thrown to his shoulder. Brennan leaped up and John saw that he held the automatic in his hand.
Then the sound for which they had so anxiously waited came up to them from the track below. They could hear the brakes grinding and shrieking against the wheels of the locomotive and the coaches.