Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/346

 could see her quick fingers rip it into an oblong of fluttering white. He stooped for the carbine that lay in the car-bottom, and as he stooped he heard the girl call to him.

It was a call of something more than alarm. It was terror, unthinking and abject terror.

He was back at her side in a second: his first sickening thought was that a bullet had reached her.

But he saw only her outstretched hand, pointing foolishly and vaguely to something in front of her. He saw her wide and staring eyes, as she crouched down and back, lower and lower in the driving-seat, as though preparing herself for some vast and overwhelming blow.

He whipped about and followed the line of that terrified stare. Then he understood what it meant. He saw where the two lines of the narrow-gauge track came to an end; he saw where some half-dozen lengths of rails had been torn away, and tossed to one side. He saw the track, on which they rode, the track which he had come to regard as something fixed and stable, as something permanent as the earth itself, end in nothing.

His foot went down on the emergency brake, viciously, at the same moment that his outflung arm threw the speed lever off. He knew, even then, that it was all useless, that it was all too