ke a laboring ship.

Brockway consulted his watch. "A little over fifty miles an hour, I
should say. You will be quite safe in calling it that, anyway, when you
tell your friends that you have run a fast express train."

"They'll never believe it," she said; "but I wouldn't have missed it for
the world. What must I do now?--watch the track?"

Brockway said "Yes," though, with all his interest in other things, he
had not omitted that very important part of an engineer's duty from the
moment of leaving Arriba. After a roaring silence of some minutes,
during which Brockway gave himself once more to the divided business of
scanning the rails and burning sweet incense on the altar of his love,
she spoke again.

"What is that we are coming to, away out there?" she asked, trying
vainly to steady herself for a clearer view.

"The lights of Red Butte," he answered, relaxing his vigilance for the
moment at the thought that his little side-trip into the land of joy
would so shortly come to an end.

"No, I don't mean those!" she exclaimed, excitedly; "but this side of
the lights. Don't you see?--on the track!"

Brockway allowed himself but a single swift glance. Half-way between the
flying train and the station the line crossed a shallow sand creek on a
low trestle. On both sides of the swale, crowding upon the track and
filling the bed of the creek, was a mass of moving forms, against which
the lines of glistening rails ended abruptly.

At such a crisis, the engineer in a man, if any there be, asserts itself
without reference to the volitional nerve-centres. In the turning of a
leaf, Brockway had thrown himself upon the throttle, dropped the
reversing-lever, set the air-brake, and opened the sand-box; while
Maclure, seeing that his substitute was equal to the emergency, woke the
echoes with the whistle. A hundred yards from the struggling mass of
frightened cattle, Brockway saw that the air-brake was not holding.

"Don't move!" he cried; and Gertrude cowered in her corner as the heavy
reversing-lever came over with a crash, and the great engine heaved and
buckled in the effort to check its own momentum.

It was all over before she could cry out or otherwise advertise her very
natural terror. The moving mass had melted away before the measured
approach of the train; the trestle had rumbled under the wheels; and the
926 was steaming swiftly up to the station under Brockway's guidance.

"Have you had more than enough?" he