the train slowed again, made a momentary
stop, and began to screech and grind heavily around a sharp curve.
Lidgerwood looked out of the window at his right. The moon had gone
behind a huge hill, a lantern was pricking a point in the shadows some
little distance from the track, and the tumultuous river was no longer
sweeping parallel with the embankment. He shut his desk and went to the
rear platform, projecting himself into the group of sight-seers just as
the train stopped for the second time.

"Where are we now?" asked Miss Brewster, looking up at the dark mass of
the hill whose forested ramparts loomed black in the near foreground.

"At Silver Switch," replied Lidgerwood; and when the bobbing lantern
came nearer he called to the bearer of it. "What is it, Bradford?"

"The passenger, I reckon," was the answer. "Williams thought he saw it
as we came around Point-o'-Rocks, and he was afraid the despatcher had
got balled up some and let 'em get past Little Butte without a
meet-order."

For a moment the group on the railed platform was silent, and in the
little interval a low, humming sound made itself felt rather than heard;
a shuddering murmur, coming from all points of the compass at once, as
it seemed, and filling the still night air with its vibrations.

"Williams was right!" rejoined the superintended sharply. "She's
coming!" And even as he spoke, the white glare of an electric headlight
burst into full view on the shelf-like cutting along the northern face
of the great hill, pricking out the smallest details of the waiting
special, the closed switch, and the gleaming lines of the rails.

With this powerful spot-light to project its cone of dazzling
brilliance upon the scene, the watchers on the railed platform of the
superintendent's service-car saw every detail in the swift outworking of
the tragic spectacle for which the hill-facing curve was the
stage-setting.

When the oncoming passenger-train was within three or four hundred yards
of the spur track switch and racing toward it at full speed, a man, who
seemed to the onlookers to rise up out of the ground in the train's
path, ran down the track to meet the uprushing headlight, waving his
arms frantically in the stop signal. For an instant that seemed an age,
the passenger engineer made no sign. Then came a short, sharp
whistle-scream, a spewing of sparks from rail-head and tire at the clip
of the emergency brakes, a crash as of the ripping asunder of the