Top-Notch Magazine/Volume 14/Number 3/Signals Against Him/Chapter 8

ITH Twenty-eight and the wrecking outfit, each crew with the right of way, rushing together on the single track, and no chance to change the signal so it could be read and heeded in time, there seemed little to do but get out of the way and wait for the trains to meet head on.

As between a holdup and a wreck with loss of life, Harding would not have hesitated a moment. The matter, however, had passed that phase. What could be done, if anything, to keep the Cardigan yard from being piled with wreck and ruin? This was what concerned Harding.

To one point the events of the past night and day, and part of another night seemed to have been urging him. Fortune, one might think, was giving him her one supreme dare. By devious ways she had brought him to Cardigan and hedged him around with unusual circumstances. It was possible that Harding's whole future might hinge on the way he conducted himself during the next sixty seconds.

Was this to be his Austerlitz or his Waterloo? Was he to let the crisis pass, and fail, or was he to jump into it manfully and win?

Milly's father was in the cab of the engine hauling Twenty-eight. If Harding hung back, unnerved, what would Milly have to say? Again, and much more to the point, what would William, senior, and Uncle Horace have to say, if they knew and their spectral lips were allowed to speak? On the instant, many things impressed themselves upon the consciousness of Harding. There was a switch key in his pocket. He had carried it as a sort of pocket piece ever since his roundhouse days. He had clung to it, during the past year, as he had clung to his father's watch—it was a reminder, a memento, a link that bound him to the old division. Then Harding was familiar with the road. He knew that, there at Cardigan, there was a three-mile run off the main lead, a spur that led to the north and into a gravel pit. Could he throw The wreckers onto that spur?

He flashed his eyes up and down the track. It was a hundred feet from where he stood to the switch. Already Twenty-eight had nosed around the hill, and the eye of the engine hauling the wreckers was blotted out by a patch of timber a little way beyond the switch.

Kent, from his cab window, could not see the other train any more than he could see the stop signal—which should have been against him, but wasn't. His train was fifteen minutes late, and he had not gained on his schedule while coming down the mountain. The dispatcher had figured closely, for the necessity of rushing the wrecking outfit to Hesperus was great—very great, indeed, since he had planned to lay out the fast train and let the wreckers have the track.

“Great heavens!” wailed Higgins, cowering against the wall of the station and staring eastward, “what train is that?”

Harding did not answer. He had no time. He was running at top speed to ward the switch, gripping the switch key in his hands. He missed his footing when he leaped from the platform to the gloom of the tracks and fell, striking his knee on the rail and rolling over and over in the sharp cinders. In a twinkling he had his feet under him again, and was plunging on.

The engine hauling the wreckers broke from the screen of timber, and Harding found himself full in the headlight's glare. He rushed toward it, jumped clear of the rails to the switch stand, and the light helped him to get the key in the lock; and then he swung back on the target.

The big engine, the flat with the derrick, the box car behind, and the waycar at the end, slewed to the spur and leaped and jumped over the poorly ballasted track that led to the gravel pit. The tail lights of the caboose had barely the key in the lock; then he swung back on the target.

Kent had shut off and thrown on the air; and then, when he found himself safe and with the rails still under him, he let the engine out once more, and Twenty-eight jerked away on the last lap to Crook. He looked out of his window at the form hanging to the switch lever; and, while he knew something had gone wrong, he also realized that the wrong had been righted and that explanations would be called for in due course. So Kent did not halt, but roared on with Twenty-eight, fighting his way back into his schedule.

It was all over in a minute. The fast train vanished into the gloom to the eastward, and the wreckers were halting on the gravel spur and making ready to back down to the main track and find out what in Sam Hill Number Twenty-eight meant by treating an extra's rights in that high-handed fashion.

The engine crew ahead of the derrick was as badly demoralized as the crew ahead of the mail car, for both had rubbed elbows with death in that agonizing moment when the opposing head lights crossed. Berdyn, driver of Engine Eighty-one, which was hauling the wreckers that night, had come out of his chills and tremors to give a beautiful imitation of the army in Flanders. Casey, on the other side of the cab, was doing the same thing.

Meanwhile, Harding, faint and dizzy now that the crisis was safely passed, had thrown the switch a third time so the wreckers could back out of chancery, and then had slumped down in the gravel and cinders. He still had his wits about him, but felt fearfully in need of a little rest and comfort.

Not yet, however, was there to be any rest for him. From the station platform came a cry and the sounds of a scuffle and a fall, all rising faintly above the noises from the spur track. Harding called again on his reserve powers, got his feet under him, and ran toward the station almost as fast as, a little while before, he had run away from it. Under the station lights he saw a black figure prostrate on the planks, while another figure, in wild flight, was just leaping from the platform.

“Stop!” Harding yelled, changing his own course to follow the fleeing form.

An oath came from the shadowy shape. It halted, whirled, and lifted an arm. A flash lit the gloom, preceding by a fraction of a second the stunning report of a firearm.

The shooting was at close quarters, for the point of the revolver was no more than a dozen feet from Harding when the charge was released. Harding felt as though some one had struck him a blow just above the waistline. He reeled, feeling sure he was wounded, and wondering whether the hurt was serious. The man who had fired the revolver had leaped on into the night. But he did not go far. A stray tie caught his foot, and he went heels over head, seemingly sinking downward into the very earth.

Harding saw this, and straightway ceased worrying about himself. So long as his injury did not interfere with his muscular powers or his ability to use his hands and feet, it was nothing to bother with. The other man had no more than stumbled before Harding was after him again. Harding found the same stray tie in exactly the same way. He tripped on it and fell over it, alighting on hands and knees in a ditch. The other man was squirming around within arm's reach, and Harding reached for hint, and the two closed and rolled over and over.

“I'll have your life for this, my buckaroo!” growled a hoarse voice which sounded strangely familiar in Harding's ears.

“You'll never again have as good a chance at my life as you had a minute ago,” returned Harding.

“It's you, is it?” snarled the other. “Calamity Bill, Hardluck Harding, the mug that wanted to ride with Chris!”

“The juniper that did ride with Chris! And you're Dan, one of the crooks that held up Jonas Prebble and had laid plans to go through the express car of Twenty-eight!”

This mutual recognition, accompanied as it was by assertions on Harding's part that must have been vastly disturbing, injected fresh rancor into the set-to. Suddenly a lantern flashed in Harding's eyes, and he found himself and his antagonist surrounded by several men—Berdyn, for one, and Hackelmyer, in charge of the wrecking train, for another.

“Here,” cried Berdyn, seizing Harding by the shoulder, “what's the row? Who fired that shot, and why was it fired?”

“Don't let that scoundrel get away!” panted Harding.

Hackelmyer and two more had the fellow in the reefer jacket. Berdyn, aided by the lantern, got a good look at William.

“If it ain't Hardluck Harding!” gasped the engineer. “Was it you threw the switch?”

“Yes,” said Harding.

“Why?” demanded Berdyn irritably, and, of course, foolishly.

“To get you out of the way of Twenty-eight,” said Harding.

“But we had right of way to Hesperus!” put in Hackelmyer. “We ought to be halfway up the mountain by now. Trawl will get somebody's scalp for this!“

“The dispatcher was doing a lot of close figuring,” explained Harding, “and the night man at Cardigan was off the job.”

“How was that?”

Harding stated the facts briefly, keeping himself in the background as much as possible, considering the star part he had been obliged to play in the proceedings.

“Well, I'll be blamed!” muttered Berdyn. “So that”—and he held his lantern in front of the man in the reefer jacket—“is one of the gang that was layin' to stick up the fast train!”

“And Harding whipped us over upon the spur just in the nick of time to keep us from going into Twenty-eight!” exclaimed the wondering Hackelmyer. “I guess his luck must have changed. But we've lost too much time here, Berdyn,” he fretted; “we've got to be going on.”

Harding's prisoner was half dragged and half carried to the station platform, bound with ropes and laid on the floor of the waiting room. Higgins had crawled into the, station, and he lay in a corner, haggard and bleeding and almost spent.

“I'll get division headquarters on the wire,” said Harding, “and have a doctor sent up to look after the night man. You wreckers had better be hammering the fishplates—I can do all that's to be done here.”

“But maybe there are more of the holdup gang hanging around?” returned Berdyn.

"I'll take chances on that,” answered Harding.

So the wreckers went on, and Harding went into the operator's room and began sending an account to headquarters of what had happened at Cardigan. He got some of it on the wire, along with the request for a doctor for Higgins, and then his endurance suddenly snapped and he fell forward across the table.

For an hour the man in the leather cap and reefer jacket fought like a fiend to free his hands of the rope that bound them; but he fought in vain.