ins," he went on evenly, "but neither fact relieves you of your
responsibility. It was your duty to make sure that the despatcher fully
understood the situation at Crosswater, and to refuse to pull out ahead
of the passenger without something more definite than a formal permit.
Weren't you taught that? Where did you learn to run trains?"

It was an opening for hard words, but the conductor let it pass.
Something in the steady, business-like tone, or in the shrewdly
appraisive eyes, turned Bradford the potential mutineer into Bradford
the possible partisan.

"I reckon we are needing a _rodeo_ over here on this jerk-water mighty
bad, Mr. Lidgerwood," he said, half humorously. "Take us coming and
going, about half of us never had the sure-enough railroad brand put
onto us, nohow. But, Lord love you! this little _pasear_ we're making
down this hill ain't anything! That's the old 210 chasin' us with the
passenger, and she couldn't catch Bat Williams and the '66 in a month o'
Sundays if we didn't have that doggoned spavined leg under the tender.
She sure couldn't."

Lidgerwood smiled in spite of his annoyance, and wondered at what page
in the railroad primer he would have to begin in teaching these men of
the camps and the round-ups.

"But it isn't railroading," he insisted, meeting his first pupil
half-way, and as man to man. "You might do this thing ninety-nine times
without paying for it, and the hundredth time something would turn up to
slow or to stop the leading train, and there you are."

"Sure!" said the ex-cowboy, quite heartily.

"Now, if there should happen to be----"

The sentence was never finished. The special, lagging a little now in
deference to the smoking hot box, was rounding one of the long hill
curves to the left. Suddenly the air-brakes ground sharply upon the
wheels, shrill whistlings from the 266 sounded the stop signal, and past
the end of the slowing service-car a trackman ran frantically up the
line toward the following passenger, yelling and swinging his stripped
coat like a madman.

Lidgerwood caught a fleeting glimpse of a section gang's green "slow"
flag lying toppled over between the rails a hundred feet to the rear.
Measuring the distance of the onrushing passenger-train against the
life-saving seconds remaining, he called to Bradford to jump, and then
ran forward to drag the Japanese cook out of his galley.

It was all over in a moment. There was time enough for Lidgerwood to
rush