ogether the two men jerked their heads up to listen; Tressa
felt their arms tighten about her. Through the darkness they strained
down the track to the east, their hearts thudding almost audibly.

The sound swelled--swept toward them out of the night. Swiftly it grew
to dominate the darkness, echoing through the forest. It became a roar.

"Chug--chug--chug--chug!" but in such a swiftly throbbing stream as to
be almost a steady torrent of sound.

Torrance leaped to the grade and stood, a heroic figure outlined
against the dim sky, struggling to pierce the mystery with his eyes.

"Speeders!" he jerked, in a breathless whisper. "Two of them, and
going like hell! The rifle--quick!"

Then suddenly, not a mile away, it ceased, dying to silence in a few
panting chugs, leaving the void a crash of silence. Not a breath
now--it was like a nightmare. Even the camp was listening.

They heard each other's breathing catch, but that was all. Back in the
locked stable the two horses snorted with fear; the strain had reached
even them.

A short ten minutes of awful waiting. Then "chug--chug--chug!" again.
With fantastic rapidity the warm engines picked up to racing speed.
Torrance swung his head incredulously toward Conrad.

_The speeders were going the other way now._

The contractor stumbled to the shack like a blind man and sank in a
chair.

"My God!" he breathed.

Three miles down the track, in what remained of a deserted end-of-steel
village, Sergeant Mahon sat in his shirt sleeves, smiling across the
corner of a table into the eyes of his wife, the only white woman,
except Tressa Torrance, within a day's hard ride.

Of the village that ten months before covered a life as fevered as it
was unclean, only the Police barracks remained in repair, since life
had passed the rest by and forgotten it. The ill-defined streets,
incorporated as a part of the plan of the original village only because
the helter-skelter builders knew no other plan for a village, were more
ill-defined than ever because less used. Where nothing but pedestrians
passed, where the "Mayor" was merely proprietor of the leading
dance-hall, where there was no to-morrow, there had never been
side-walks. Now the space from ruined shack to tumble-down shop was
overgrown with weeds. Yet down the length of it, meandering drunkenly
to avoid butts of stumps as solid as the day they were axed, and
steering clear of creeping decay in the buildings th