Page:Cy Warman--The express messenger and other tales of the rail.djvu/136

124 past nor the future, but said to himself, as the sleeper plunged down an embankment, "Now, what the devil was I elected for?"

The driver of the special engine had a boy, and this boy had climbed up on a picket fence to kiss his father good-by that morning at their home in Salt Lake, but he slipped, fell, and hung there with a fence picket through the seat of his first pair of trousers, and it was all so funny that, now as the engineer recalled the circumstance, he threw back his head and laughed as heartily as he had ever laughed in his life. The fireman, casting a farewell glance at his companion, saw him laughing, and concluded, in his last moment, that the driver had suddenly become insane, but as he glanced ahead where death was waiting, he was not sure that he was sane himself.

The driver, having finished his laugh and still feeling no shock, looked ahead. The track was clear! He unlatched the reverse lever and threw the engine in the forward motion, and the speed of the train, which had been but little checked, carried them away down among the sand hills. The driver looked at