ooking over the master-mechanic's shoulder.

Neighbor jumped as if a bullet had struck him. "She'll never take a
siding to-night. She's coming down the main track. What's her orders?"
he demanded, furiously.

"Meeting orders for first 4 at Redbud, second 4 here, 78 at Glencoe.
Great Jupiter!" cried the dispatcher, and his face went sick and scared,
"they've forgotten second 4."

"They'll think of her a long time dead," roared the master-mechanic,
savagely, jumping to the west window. "Throw your red lights! There's
the Sky-Scraper now!"

Her head shot that instant around the coal chutes, less than a mile
away, and 55 going dead against her. I stood like one palsied, my eyes
glued on the burning eye of the big engine. As she whipped past a street
arc-light I caught a glimpse of Georgie McNeal's head out of the cab
window. He always rode bare-headed if the night was warm, and I knew it
was he; but suddenly, like a flash, his head went in. I knew why as well
as if my eyes were his eyes and my thoughts his thoughts. He had seen
red signals where he had every right to look for white.

But red signals now--to stop _her_--to pull her flat on her haunches
like a bronco? Shake a weather flag at a cyclone!

I saw the fire stream from her drivers; I knew they were churning in the
sand; I knew he had twenty air cars behind him sliding. What of it?

Two thousand tons were sweeping forward like an avalanche. What did
brains or pluck count for now with 55 dancing along like a school-girl
right into the teeth of it?

I don't know how the other men felt. As for me, my breath choked in my
throat, my knees shook, and a deadly nausea seized me. Unable to avert
the horrible blunder, I saw its hideous results.

Darkness hid the worst of the sight; it was the sound that appalled.
Children asleep in sod shanties miles from where the two engines reared
in awful shock jumped in their cribs at that crash. 55's little engine
barely checked the Sky-Scraper. She split it like a banana. She bucked
like a frantic horse, and leaped fearfully ahead. There was a blinding
explosion, a sudden awful burst of steam; the windows crashed about our
ears, and we were dashed to the wall and floor like lead-pencils. A
baggage-truck, whipped up from the platform below, came through the
heavy sash and down on the dispatcher's table like a brickbat, and as we
scrambled to our feet a shower of wheat suffocated us. The floor heaved;
freight-cars slid into the