The switch engine had puffed up with a caboose; ahead of it Peeto had coupled in the pile driver. At the last minute Callahan concluded to go, and with the bridge gang tumbling into the caboose, the assistant superintendent, Ed Peeto, and Healey climbed into the engine, and they pulled out, five in the cab, for the Spider Water.
Healey, moody at first, began joking and laughing the minute they got away. He sat behind Denis Mullenix, the engineer, and poked his ribs and taunted him with his heavy heels. At last he covered Denis' big hands on the throttle with his own bigger fingers, good-naturedly coaxed them loose, and pushing him away got the reins and the whip into his own keeping. He drew the bar out a notch and settled himself for the run across the flat country.
As they sped from the shelter of the hills, the storm shook them with a freshening fury, and drove the flanges into the south rail with a grinding screech. The rain fell in a sheet, and the right-of-way ran a river. The wind, whipping the water off the ballast, dashed it like hail against the cab glass; the segment of desert caught in the yellow of the headlight rippled and danced and swam in the storm water, and Healey pulled again at the straining throttle and latched it wider.
Notch after notch he drew; heedless of lurch and jump; heedless of bed or curve; heedless of track or storm; and with every spur at her cylinders the engine shook like a frantic horse. Men and monster alike lost thought of caution and drunk a frenzy in the whirl that Healey opened across the swimming plain.
The Peace River hills loomed suddenly in front like moving pictures; before they could think it the desert was behind.
"Phil, man, you must steady up!" yelled Callahan, getting his mouth to Healey's ear. The roadmaster nodded and checked a notch, but the fire was in his blood, and he slewed into the hills with a speed unslackened. The wind blew them, and the track pulled them, and a frenzied man sat at the throttle.
Just where the line crosses the Peace River the track bends sharply through the Needles to take the bridge. The curve is a ten degree. As they struck it, the headlight shot far out upon the river—and they in the cab knew they sat dead men. Instead of lighting the box of the truss, the lamp lit a black and snaky flood with yellow foam sweeping over the abutment, for the Peace had licked up Agnew's thirty-foot piles—and his bridge was not.
There were two things to do; Healey knew them both, and both meant death to the cab, but the caboose sheltered twenty of Healey's faithful men. He instantly threw the air, and with a scream from the tires, the special, shaking in the brake shoes, swung the curve. Again the roadmaster checked heavily, and the pile driver, taking the elevation like a hurdle, bolted into the Needles, dragging the caboose after it. But engine and tender and five in the cab plunged head on into the river.
Not a man in the caboose was killed. They scrambled out of the splinters and on their feet, men and ready to do. One voice came through the storm from the river, and they answered its calling. It was Callahan, but Durden, Mullenix, Peeto, and Healey never called again.
At daybreak, wreckers of the West End, swarming from mountain and plain, were heading for the Peace, and the McCloud gang—up—crossed the Spider on Healey's bridge—on the bridge the coward trainmen had reported out, quaking as they did in the storm at the Spider foaming over its approaches. But Healey's bridge stood—stands to-day.