as always late. And it was
said of him that the only instance in which he ever reached the end of
his division on time was the day he ran away from Iron Hand's band of
Sioux at Goose Creek--on that occasion he had made, without a doubt, a
record run.

But when, one hot afternoon in August, Baggs left Medicine Bend with a
light engine for Fort Park, where he was to pick up a train-load of
ties, he had no thought of making further pioneer railroad history.
His engine had been behaving so well that his usual charges of
inefficiency against it had not for a long time been registered with
the roundhouse foreman, and Dan Baggs, dreaming in the heat and
sunshine of nothing worse than losing his scalp to the Indians or
winning a fortune at cards--gambling was another of his failings--was
pounding lightly along over the rails when he reached, without heeding
it, Goose Creek bridge.

There were those who averred that after his experience with Iron Hand
he always ran faster across the forbidden bridge than anywhere else.
On this occasion Baggs bowled merrily along the trestle and was
getting toward the middle of the river when the pony trucks jumped the
rail and the drivers dropped on the ties. Dan Baggs yelled to his
fireman.

It was unnecessary. Delaroo, the fireman, a quiet but prudent fellow,
was already standing in the gangway prepared for an emergency. He
sprang, not a minute too soon, from the engine and lighted in the
sand. But Dan Baggs's fixed habit of being behind time chained him to
his seat an instant too long. The bulky engine, with its tremendous
impetus, shot from the trestle and plunged like a leviathan clear of
the bridge and down into the wet sand of the creek-bed.

The fireman scrambled to his feet and ran forward, expecting to find
his engineman hurt or killed. What was his surprise to behold Baggs,
uninjured, on his feet and releasing the safety-valve of his fallen
locomotive to prevent an explosion. The engine lay on its side. The
crash of the breaking timbers, followed by a deafening blast of
escaping steam, startled Bucks and, with Bob Scott, he ran out of the
station. As he saw the spectacle in the river, he caught his breath.
He lived to see other wrecks--some appalling ones--but this was his
first, and the shock of seeing Dan Baggs's engine lying prone in the
river, trumpeting forth a cloud of steam, instead of thundering across
the bridge as he normally saw it every day, was an extraordinary one.