So it came about that this mechanical lieutenant waited, laughing in
his sleeve, until he saw the Italians coming with the crossing-frogs.
Then, judging the time to be fully ripe, he ducked under the Rosemary
to "bleed" the air-brake.

Winton heard the hiss of the escaping air above all the industry
clamor; heard, and saw the car start backward. Then he had a flitting
glimpse of a man in grimy overclothes scrambling terror-frenzied from
beneath the Rosemary. The thing done had been overdone. The fireman
had "bled" the air-brake too freely, and the liberated car, gathering
momentum with every wheel-turn, surged around the circling spur track
and shot out masterless on the steeper gradient of the main line.

Now, for the occupants of a runaway car on a Rocky Mountain canyon
line there is death and naught else. Winton saw, in a phantasmagoric
flash of second sight, the meteor flight of the heavy car; saw the
Reverend Billy's ineffectual efforts to apply the hand-brakes, if by
good hap he should even guess that there were any hand-brakes; saw the
car, bounding and lurching, keeping to the rails, mayhap, for some few
miles below Argentine, where it would crash headlong into the upward
climbing Carbonate train, and all would end.

In unreasoning misery, he did the only thing that offered: ran blindly
down his own embankment, hoping nothing but that he might have one
last glimpse of Virginia clinging to the hand-rail before she should
be lost to him for ever.

But as he ran a thought white-hot from the furnace of despair fell
into his brain to set it ablaze with purpose. Beyond the litter of