the dry sand for the better
gripping of the smooth steel. Finally--it was when the embers of the
fire on the hill slope were flickering to their extinction--the bar
slipped and let him down heavily. The fall must have partly stunned him,
since it was some little time before he staggered to his feet, flung the
bar into the wreck with a morose oath, and limped away up the track
toward the headquarters camp, turning once and again to shake his fist
at the capsized locomotive in the ditch at the curve.

It was in the afternoon of the day following the wreck that Ballard made
the laboratory test for blame; the office room in the adobe shack
serving as the "sweat-box."

First came the flagmen, one at a time, their stories agreeing well
enough, and both corroborating Galliford's account. Next came Hoskins's
fireman, a green boy from the Alta Vista mines, who had been making his
first trip over the road. He knew nothing save that he had looked up
between shovelfuls to see Hoskins fighting with his levers, and had
judged the time to be ripe for the life-saving jump.

Last of all came Hoskins, hanging his head and looking as if he had been
caught stealing sheep.

"Tell it straight," was Ballard's curt caution; and the engineman
stumbled through a recital in which haziness and inconsistency struggled
for first place. He had seen something on the track or he thought he
had, and had tried to stop. Before he could bring the train under
control he had heard the crashing of the wreck in the rear. He admitted
that he had jumped while the engine was still in motion.

"Which way was she running when you jumped, John?--forward or backward?"
asked Ballard, quietly.

Bromley, who was making pencil notes of the evidence, looked up quickly
and saw the big engine-man's jaw drop.

"How could she be runnin' any way but forrards?" he returned, sullenly.

Ballard was smoking, and he shifted his cigar to say: "I didn't know."
Then, with sudden heat:

"But I mean to know, Hoskins; I mean to go quite to the bottom of this,
here and now! You've been garbling the facts; purposely, or because you
are still too badly rattled to know what you are talking about. I can
tell you what you did: for some reason you made an emergency stop; you
_did_ make it, either with the brakes or without them. Then you put your
engine in the reverse motion and _backed_; you were backing when you
jumped, and the engine was still backing when it left the rails."

Ho