At this time at least there was to be no encounter. For as Curlie sprang forward the man turned and saw him. At the same instant an empty train came rattling around the curve.
Urged on by who knows what desperate need, the stranger played a bold hand. The cars were moving rapidly. Not three feet above them, charged with enough electricity to kill a hundred men, ran a high tension wire. Despite all this, the stranger made a sudden leap, caught the side of a steel car, struggled desperately, regained his balance, and disappeared within its depths.
At that instant Curlie felt hope vanish. Despair gripped his heart. The man with that package, the loss of which meant to him dismissal, disgrace, perhaps a prison, was rattling away. Who could tell whither the car was bound? Knowing nothing of these tunnels, the boy could not so much as guess.
All this passed through his mind like a flash. Cars still bumped and rattled by. It was a long, empty train.
The boy looked up the tunnel. Except for a narrow space above, the cars filled the tunnel completely. If he attempted to duplicate that man’s feat and failed in the least detail, he would meet instant death.
Yet he could not surrender. Too much was at stake. He had risked too much for others. Now he must risk more for his own honor. With a brief prayer for guidance and protection, he put out both hands, gripped the edge of a steel car, swung his feet high, caught the gleam of copper wire above him, felt the shudder of steel beneath him and then fell with a force that stunned him to the bottom of the car.
For a long time after that the train, bearing its strange cargo, rattled on and on into the perpetual night that is the tunnel system beneath the great city.
The various sections of this intricate system are placed in exactly the same manner as are the streets of the city. Indeed, at their intersections they are plainly marked: “State and Madison,” “Wabash and Monroe,” “Michigan and Jackson.” Had Curlie dared to raise himself from the floor of the car he might at once have determined his position in relation to the city above him.
The deadly copper wire warned him down. “Besides,” he reasoned, “what’s the good? One does not rise through fifty feet of clay and sand, rock and cement to burst up from the street like a chick from an egg.”
There is in this tunnel an intricate system of signal lights. Red just ahead warns the operator of the engine that a train will soon cross his path. Green indicates a clear track.