to open the switch, anyhow," Harvey shouted, starting up the track.
"Save yourselves."

Heedless of the warning, Banks struggled with the plate-bolts in a
silent fury. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. "Give me the maul!" he
cried.

Raising the heavy tool like a tack-hammer he landed heavily on the bolt
nuts; once, and again; and they flew in a stream like bullets over the
bluff. The taller cowboy, bending close on his knees, raised a yell. The
plates had given. Springing to the other rail, Banks stripped the bolts
even after the mad train had shot into the gorge above them. They drove
the pick under the loosened steel, and with a pry that bent the clawbar
and a yell that reached Harvey, trembling at the switch, they tore away
the stubborn contact, and pointed the rails over the precipice.

The shriek of a locomotive whistle cut the wind. Looking east, Harvey
had been watching 59's headlight. She was pulling in on the siding. He
still held the switch open to send the runaways into the trap Bucks had
set, if the passenger-train failed to get into the clear; but there was
a minute yet--a bare sixty seconds--and Harvey had no idea of dumping
ten thousand dollars' worth of equipment into the river unless he had
to.

Suddenly, up went the safety signals from the east end. The 101 was
coughing noisily up the passing-track--the line was clear. Banks and the
cowboys, waiting breathless, saw Harvey with a determined lurch close
the main-line contact.

In the next breath the coalers, with the sweep of the gale in their
frightful velocity, smashed over the switch and on. A rattling whirl of
ballast and a dizzy clatter of noise, and before the frightened crew of
59 could see what was against them, the runaway train was passed--gone!

"I wasn't going to stop here to-night," muttered the engineer, as he
stood with the conductor over Harvey's shoulder at the operator's desk a
minute later and wiped the chill from his forehead with a piece of
waste. "We'd have met them in the canon."

Harvey was reporting to Bucks. Callahan heard it coming: "Rails cut, but
59 safe. Runaways went by here fully seventy miles an hour."

It was easy after that. Griffin is the foot of the grade; from there on,
the runaway train had a hill to climb. Bucks had held 250, the local
passenger, side-tracked at Davis, thirty miles farther east. Sped by the
wind, the runaways passed Davis, though not at half their highest speed.
An instant later, 250's eng