The instant the words flashed into the room he
instructed the agent, grabbed an axe, and dashed out into the
waiting-room, where the sheriff, Ed Banks, sat with his prisoners, the
cowboys.

"Ed," cried Harvey, "there's a runaway train from Ogalalla coming down
the line in the wind. If we can't trap it here, it'll knock 59 into
kindling-wood. Turn the boys loose, Ed, and save the passenger-train.
Boys, show the man and square yourselves right now. I don't know what
you're here for; but I believe it's to save 59. Will you help?"

The three men sprang to their feet; Ed

Banks slipped the handcuffs off in a trice. "Never mind the rest of it.
Save the passenger-train first," he roared. Everybody from Ogalalla to
Omaha knew Ed Banks.

"Which way? How?" cried the cowboys, in a lather of excitement.

Harvey Reynolds, beckoning as he ran, rushed out the door and up the
track, his posse at his heels, stumbling into the gale like lunatics.

"Smash in the tool-house door," panted Harvey as they neared it.

Ed Banks seized the axe from his hands and took command as naturally as
Dewey.

"Pick up that tie and ram her," he cried, pointing to the door. "All
together--now."

Harvey and the cowboys splintered the panel in a twinkling, and Banks,
with a few clean strokes, cut an opening. The cowboys, jumping
together, ran in and began fishing for tools in the dark. One got hold
of a wrench; the other, a pick. Harvey caught up a clawbar, and Banks
grabbed a spike-maul. In a bunch they ran for the point of the curve on
the house-track. It lies there close to the verge of a limestone bluff
that looms up fifty feet above the river.

But it is one thing to order a contact opened, and another and very
different thing to open it, at two in the morning on December
twenty-fifth, by men who know no more about track-cutting than about
logarithms. Side by side and shoulder to shoulder the man of the law and
the men out of the law, the rough-riders and the railroad boy, pried and
wrenched and clawed and struggled with the steel. While Harvey and Banks
clawed at the spikes the cowboys wrestled with the nuts on the bolts of
the fish-plates. It was a baffle. The nuts wouldn't twist, the spikes
stuck like piles, sweat covered the assailants, Harvey went into a
frenzy. "Boys, we must work faster," he cried, tugging at the frosty
spikes; but flesh and blood could do no more.

"There they come--there's the runaway train--do you hear it? I'm going