The dinky puffed nobly and its wheels slipped and screamed on the rails as it strove to gather speed, despite the dragging weight of the flat cars. The chuffing exhaust drowned all other sound. The tall cedars and Ponderosa pine trees began to move past more swiftly. It was like riding a smoke-filled tunnel.
Just before the dinky reached the downgrade curve, a vagary of the wind swept the smoke back. Jack had a view of thin rails that dipped suddenly over the brink and corkscrewed down the mountain. He figured he would hold the dinky to low speed until they actually entered the heated zone. But the brakes?
Good Lord! He had not thought of that.
The logging train was not equipped with air appliances. Hand brakes on the flats were used to ease the loads of logs down the mountain. Jack sent his fireman back over the tender to instruct the men about the brakes. And, if they got into fire so hot that the men could not expose themselves, well—Jack refused to think further along that line.
Jack had thought he had taken extreme risks in the planes. But up in the air you could see something. Now the smoke closed in again and he was compelled to draw a corner of the wet canvas across his mouth and nose.
They were on the very brink of the grade. Instead of the dinky pulling the flats, Jack could now feel the shoving weight of the cars. The dinky was leaping ahead and down. If he had only thought of those brakes sooner. But the wheels squealed and grated on the rails. The men of the logging crew knew their stuff. For a mile they eased along, the smoke lifting and dropping, alternately shutting off Jack’s wind and giving him a chance to breathe.
Jack’s fireman crouched under the corner of the damp canvas. The dinky and the flats would run by gravity all the way to the transfer pier on the St. Joe River, if they held the rails.
The smoke lifted. For an instant Jack had a sense of relief. But the reason for the sudden swirling of the smoke wiped that out. A sheeted wall of flame leaped across the track ahead. The men on the cars had seen it, too. Jack felt the dinky lurch forward. The brakes on the flats had been released.
It seemed to Jack that the weight behind must hurl the rolling little engine from the rails. But the drive-wheel flanges were tapered for just that sort of thing. The wheels screeched, but they held.