g loudly, from the siding to the main track, the
ugly brown cars winding grudgingly after. This was before the days of
mile-long freight-trains with air-brakes and patent couplers. Over the
grades of the Transcontinental no engine yet had pulled more than
twenty "empties." There was ever the danger of breaking in two. In the
dim interior of the caboose the conductor, with Geordie Graham by his
side, was bending over a battered and dishevelled form. As the rear
trucks went clicking over the switch-points, the former sprang to the
open doorway to see that his brakeman reset and locked the switch, and
with a swift run overtook the caboose and swung himself aboard.

"I'll be up in a minute, Andy," cried Cullin to his aid, already
scrambling up the iron ladder for his station on the roof. "This poor
devil's battered into pulp and I can't leave him." And again he was by
Graham's side--Graham who, kneeling now and sponging with cold water
the bruised, hacked, disfigured face of the senseless victim, had made
a startling discovery.

Here, with his clothing ripped, torn, and covered with dirt and blood,
with one arm obviously broken and his head beaten, kicked, and cruelly
gashed--here, beyond a doubt, lay the man who nearly five years earlier
had been the one obstacle between him and the goal of his ambition, the
cadetship at West Point; here lay the son of the man probably most
prominent in the conspiracy against the absent shareholders of Silver
Shield; here, in fine, lay the almost lifeless body of the youth he had
seen spying upon their arrival at Denver--young Breifogle himself.

By this time the Mogul was grinding her way up the track, in determined
effort to land the Time Freight in the yards at Argenta before the
whistle blew for seven o'clock. It was a twelve-mile pull up-grade,
every inch of the way--twisting, turning, and tunnelling, as has been
said--and the caboose reeled and swayed from side to side as it rounded
the reverse curves and swung at the tail of the train. Cullin, lantern
in hand, had climbed to his seat in the lookout.

"I've got to be up here," he explained, "till we are through the
tunnels. Do what you can. I suppose sponging is all we _can_ do."

Graham nodded. He had stripped the leather-covered cushion from the
conductor's chair, and with this and a rolled coat made a support for
the senseless head. He had a fire-bucket of cold water, and even as he
plied the wet sponge and sought to stanch th