t the
breaking day brought no surcease of strugglings. When it came to the
bitter end, when his eyelids would close involuntarily and he would wake
with a start to wonder dumbly how far the 956 had come masterless,
Gallagher took a chew of tobacco and began to rub the spittle into his
eyes--the last resort of the sleep-tormented engineman. Like all the
other expedients it sufficed for the time; but before long he was
nodding again, and dreaming that a thousand devils were burning his eyes
out with the points of their red-hot pitchforks.

Out of one of these nightmares he came with a yell of pain to see what
figured for the moment as another nightmare. Three hundred feet ahead
the track seemed to vanish for three or four rail-lengths. It was
second nature to jam on the brakes and to make the sudden stop. Then he
sat still and rubbed his smarting eyes and stared again. The curious
hallucination persisted strangely. Fifty feet ahead of the stopped
engine the glistening lines of the steel ended abruptly, beginning again
a car-length or two beyond. Without disturbing the sleeping Jackson,
Gallagher got down and crept cautiously out to the break. It was a
break. He stooped and felt the rail ends with his hands.

When he straightened up his passenger was standing beside him.

"What is it?" asked Adair. "Have we lost something?"

Gallagher waved a grimy hand at the gap.

"The thrack," he said. "'Twas there whin I pulled me sthring av empties
out over ut lasht night. 'Tis gone now, else I'm thot near dead for
sleep I can nayther see nor feel sthraight."

Adair was calmly lighting a cigarette.

"Your senses are still in commission," he said; "there is a good-sized
piece of track missing. Who sniped it, do you suppose?"

The engineer was shaking his fiery head.

"'Tis beyond me, Misther Adair."

"That's the deuce of it," smiled the young man. "It's beyond the train.
How is your engine--pretty good on the broad jump?"

Gallagher was not past laughing.

"She'll not lep thot, this day. But who'd be doin' this job betune dark
an' mornin', d'ye think?"

"You will have to ask me something easy, I'm not up in all the little
practical jokes of the country. But if I should venture a guess, I
should say it was some one who didn't want me to answer the first call
for breakfast at your end-of-track camp this morning. What do we do?"

Gallagher was thinking.

"We passed a camp av surfacers tin mile back, and there'd be rails