"It's no use," Joe Halkett muttered with an insane laugh. "She'll never go past that crossin'."
"What do you mean?" Silk demanded. "Three Moose Crossing?" he repeated. And then, as if suddenly recollecting something, he looked down at Joe's face in the light from the fire-box; looked at it searchingly, wonderingly. "What do you know about Three Moose Crossing?" he asked with curious directness. "You were not on your engine that night—the night that Steve Bagshott was killed. What has it got to do with you?"
Halkett laughed—a ghastly, hollow laugh—then dropped into silence, while Silk forced the engine to fuller speed. But as the train dashed through the darkness, Halkett became more and more excited.
"The ghost'll be there, sure!" he repeated again and again.
"Well, and if it is," returned Silk, with his eye watchfully on the gauge, "I don't care for any of your ghosts. I don't care if there's a hundred of them so long as this train goes safe."
"But it can't go safe," cried Halkett, rising to his feet and laying a trembling hand on the sergeant's arm.
The train was covering the miles at terrific speed now as it went down the gradient. But it was not the speed that made Halkett shake like a reed and drove the blood from his cheeks.
"Sergeant," he said in a thick whisper as he clutched more tightly at Silk's arm, "that man who was run over—Steve Bagshott—wasn't killed by accident."
"What do you mean?" Silk cried. "What has come over you to-night?"
Joe bent his face forward. His hot breath was on the sergeant's cheek.