the little Tadasu to the forward vestibule, to fling him into
space, and to make his own flying leap for safety before the crisis
came. Happily there was no wreck, though the margin of escape was the
narrowest. Williams stuck to his post in the cab of the 266, applying
and releasing the brakes, and running as far ahead as he dared upon the
loosened timbers of the culvert, for which the section gang's slowflag
was out. Carter, the engineer on the passenger-train, jumped; but his
fireman was of better mettle and stayed with the machine, sliding the
wheels with the driver-jams, and pumping sand on the rails up to the
moment when the shuddering mass of iron and steel thrust its pilot under
the trucks of Lidgerwood's car, lifted them, dropped them, and drew back
sullenly in obedience to the pull of the reverse and the recoil of the
brake mechanism.

It was an excellent opportunity for eloquence of the explosive sort, and
when the dust had settled the track and trainmen were evidently
expecting the well-deserved tongue-lashing. But in crises like this the
new superintendent was at his self-contained best. Instead of swearing
at the men, he gave his orders quietly and with the brisk certainty of
one who knows his trade. The passenger-train was to keep ten minutes
behind its own time until the next siding was passed, making up beyond
that point if its running orders permitted. The special was to proceed
on 201's time to the siding in question, at which point it would
side-track and let the passenger precede it.

Bradford was in the cab of 266 when Williams eased his engine and the
service-car over the unsafe culvert, and inched the throttle open for
the speeding race down the hill curves toward the wide valley plain of
the Red Desert.

"Turn it loose, Andy," said the big engineman, when the requisite number
of miles of silence had been ticked off by the space-devouring wheels.
"What-all do you think of Mister Collars-and-Cuffs by this time?"

Bradford took a leisurely minute to whittle a chewing cube from his
pocket plug of hard-times tobacco.

"Well, first dash out o' the box, I allowed he was some locoed; he
jumped me like a jack-rabbit for takin' a clearance right under Jim
Carter's nose that-a-way. Then we got down to business, and I was just
beginning to get onto his gait a little when the green flag butted in."

"Gait fits the laundry part of him?" suggested Williams.

"It does and it don't. I ain't much on systems