Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/49

 her through somehow if you have to drop the wreck over the cliff. You can back down to Riley's to let her pass. We'll do the patching up afterward. Understand?"

Flannagan nodded, and glanced impatiently at Spence.

The super opened and shut his watch. "Ready, Spence?" he asked shortly.

"Just a minute," Spence answered quietly.

Bunty waited to hear no more. He turned and ran down the stairs and across the tracks as fast as his legs would carry him. He scrambled breathlessly up the steps of the tool-car and edged his way in among the men grouped near the door. He was fairly inside before they noticed him.

"Hello," cried Allan, Bunty's bosom friend of the fitting-gang days, "here's the little Super! What you doin' here, kid?"

"I'm going up to the wreck," Bunty announced sturdily.

The men laughed.

"Well, I guess not much, you're not," said Allan, "What do you think your father would say?"

"Nothing," said Bunty, airily. "I just comed from the office," he added artfully, "and I'll tell you about the wreck if you like."

The men grouped around him in a circle.

"It's at the Gap," Bunty began, sparring for time as through the window he saw Flannagan coming from the office at a run. "And it's a freight train, and—and it's all smashed up, and"