A rifle
cracked; then another and a third; but the engine came on as if its
driver bore a charmed life.

Surely Michael Gallagher must have prayed to the saints that night. He
did not know that the very seconds had become priceless: he knew only
that Frisbie had sent him on ahead to snake the president's car out of
the Horse Creek yard as quickly as possible. Yet if he could have seen
the bomb and the sputtering fuse, he could not have slowed more deftly
to let the automatic couplers clutch each other, nor, at the touch and
clamp, could he have reversed and gathered headway with greater skill.

The three occupants of the Nadia staggered to their feet as the private
car lunged ahead in the grasp of the big engine, increasing speed with
every wheel-turn. Mechanically, and as one man, they rushed to the rear
platform. The mock cannon stood where it had been thrust; but in the
camp street a handful of men were wrestling madly with the pipe
fuse-carrier, breaking it, wrenching it in pieces, and stamping futilely
upon the snake-like thing hissing and spitting under their feet.

"Look!" sobbed Adair. "They know--they've discovered that box-car! Oh,
why in the name of the pitiful Christ don't they drop it and run?"

This from the man who had laughed, and aimed and fired and laughed
again, in the heat of battle. But Ford's rejoinder was the bitter
malediction of the defeated industry captain. "Damn their worthless
lives!" he stormed. "In the next half-minute the Pacific Southwestern
stands to lose a quarter of a million dollars!"

It was but a vanishing glimpse that they had of the handful of madmen
stamping and dancing under the masthead light in front of the
commissary; a glimpse withdrawing swiftly into a dim perspective as the
Nadia was whisked around the curve and up the Horse Creek grade.

It was after Gallagher had picked up the lights of the waiting train of
armed track-layers, and was whistling to announce his success, that the
end came. For the three watchers on the rear platform of the president's
car the little constellation of arc-stars in the valley below was
suddenly blotted out in a skyward belching of gray flame; a huge
volcano-burst of momentarily illuminated dust. Instinctively they
braced themselves for the concussion that followed,--a bellowing
thunderclap and a rending of earth and air that shook the surrounding
hills and drowned the shriek of Gallagher's whistle.

A blast of air, down-drawn from th