on your nerves," he said to the
big engineer, as the heavy engine and car lunged over the summit of the
pass and began to gather gravity momentum on the downward rush.

Hector nodded, and twitched the handle of the air-brake cock at shorter
intervals. Ford glanced back at the following car framed in the red glow
from the opened fire-box door. It was surging and bounding alarmingly
over the uneven track, not without threatenings of derailment. Ford was
willing to give the president the full benefit of his unreasonable
pertinacity; but there were others to be considered--and one above all
the others.

"Easy, man; easy!" he cautioned. "If you leave the steel on this
goat-track there won't be anybody left to tell the story. It's a
thousand feet sheer in some places along here. Suppose you let me take
her to the bottom of the hill."

The engineer stood aside with a good-tempered grin. He had seen the
chief of construction walking the one young lady of the party to the top
of Plug Pass and back, and it was not difficult to account for his
anxiety.

Throughout the ten long miles of the mountain descent Ford crouched on
the driver's seat and put his mind into the business of getting down the
slides and around the sagging curves without having a wreck. The 1012's
brake equipment was modern, and the Nadia's gear was in perfect order.
Now and then on a tangent the big engine would straighten herself for a
race or a runaway, but always the steady hand on the air-cock brought
her down just before the critical moment beyond which neither brakes nor
the steadiest nerve could avail. Thrice in the long downward rush Ford
checked the speed to a foot-pace. This was in the rock cuttings where
the jagged faces of the cliffs thrust themselves out into the white cone
of the headlight, scanting the narrow shelf of the right-of-way to a
mere groove in the rock. He was afraid of the cuttings. One of the many
tricks of the MacMorroghs was to keep barely within the contract limits
on clearance widths, and once the Nadia, sagging mountainward on the
roughly leveled track at the wrong moment, touched one of the
out-hanging rocks in passing. Hector heard the touch, and so did Ford;
but it was the engineman who made a grim jest upon it, saying: "If she
does that more'n once or twice, there'll be a job for the car painters,
don't you reckon, Mr. Ford? And for the carpenters."

Just below the doubling bend in the great loop they came in sight of t