Then he heard a roaring sound above him along the grade. The sharp staccato tooting of the drilling engine he heard also. Then far below him, four miles away, the long confident whistle of No. 44 at a grade crossing. The rails were slippery, and he knew that the train was coming slowly up the grade. As the hand-car toppled across the track he threw upon the heap two heavy ties, and scrambled up the opposite bank. Now the roaring was upon him! Crash! A snap and a whirl, and the wheels of the foremost ore-car caught the obstruction. The load piled forward, and the flats behind reared up and threw their heavy freight in all directions. He had wrecked her just in time.
He hurried back to the crossing. A tangle of wire and frame-work, the bicycle lay at the road-side. He must have missed striking that huge rock by nothing short of a miracle. The lamp, twisted and broken, was attached to the front fork. He could smell the oil, and he sopped it with his handkerchief. His hands were sticky, and the match refused to light. At last he struck a handful of them; they flashed feebly, then sputtered and went out. In the brief space Rollins had seen that his hands were dripping red.
A great white eye and the tinkling of the rails told that the little switch engine would strike the obstruction first.
It was alongside now! The young man saw that the wheels were reversing furiously. Then he heard a second crash and a screeching, long continued, that went through and through his dizzy brain.
"Safe! safe!" he said, and fell limp in the sand.
"Are you hurted, Bill, lad?" said the engineer of the switch engine, rubbing his bruised sides and letting up for a minute his pull on the whistle rope. "Them ore-cars jumped the track."
"No; all O K," came the answer from the opposite side of the cab. "Jest bumped a bit. Listen! There's old Jack whistling for brakes."
The shrieking of the switch engine was warning No. 44 in time. They could make-out her head-light through the leaves of the trees just at the tangent of the curve a quarter of a mile below. Some figures were running up the track, for they could see a lantern bobbing up and down, and soon the voices were quite close.
"What has happened here?" inquired a man with brass buttons, as he caught a glimpse of the engineer swinging himself painfully off the step to the ground behind the wreckage.