d about all this. What do you want me to stop there for?"

"I don't see why you should worry. It does not concern you. Any way, I
have hired this special, and I give you my word that nothing I am going to
do will cause the least damage to any of the company's property. I want
you to stop, lend me a lantern, and sit tight in the cab until I tell you
to go on. We will make it two dollars a minute."

The engineer nodded. "I don't know what you are after, but I guess I can
take your word," he said. "You seem that kind of a man."

Ten minutes later the fireman vanished into the darkness, and the blaze of
the headlamp went out before he returned and the roar of the drivers sank.
The rhythmic din grew slack, and became a jarring of detached sounds
again, the snow no longer beat on the glasses as it had done, and, rocking
less, the great locomotive rolled slowly down the incline until it
stopped, and Grant, taking the lantern handed him, sprang down from the
cab. Four other men were waiting on the calaboose platform, and when Grant
hid the lantern under his fur coat they floundered down the side of the
graded track which there crossed a hollow. A raw wind whirled the white
flakes about them and Breckenridge could scarcely see the men behind him.
He was thankful when, slipping, sliding, stumbling, they gained the
level.

From there he could just distinguish the road bed as something solid
through the whirling haze, and he felt they were following a bend of it
when Grant stopped and a clinking sound came out of the obscurity above
them. It might have been made by somebody knocking out key wedges or
spikes with a big hammer and in his haste striking the rail or chair.

Then Grant said something Breckenridge could not catch, and they were
crawling up the slope, with the clinking and ringing growing a trifle
louder. Breckenridge's heart beat faster than usual, but he was tolerably
collected now. He had a weapon he was not unskilled with in his pocket,
and the chance of a fight with even desperate men was much less
disconcerting than that of plunging down into a frozen river with a
locomotive. He had also a reassuring conviction that if Larry could
contrive it there would be no fight at all.

He crawled on, with the man behind clutching at him, now and then, and the
one in front sliding back on him, until his arms were wet to the elbows
and his legs to the knees; but the top of the grade seemed strangely
difficult to reach, and