er--'tis a dead man I am!"

Ahead and to either side swept Sammy Durgan's eyes like a hunted
rat's--and they held, fascinated, on where the old spur track led off
from the main line. But it was not the spur track that interested
Sammy Durgan--it was that the rock wall, diverging away from his elbow,
as it were, presented a wide and open space.

"It's killed I am, anyway," moaned Sammy Durgan. "But 'tis a chance.
If--if mabbe I could jump far enough there where there's room to let it
pass, I dunno--but 'tis killed, I'll be, anyway--oh, Holy Mither--but
'tis a chance--oh, Holy Mither!"

Hissing in its wind-swept flames, belching its cataract of smoke that
lay behind it up the grade like a pall of death, roaring like some
insensate demon, the tank-car leaped at him five yards away. And,
screaming now in a paroxysm of terror that had his soul in clutch,
crazed with it, blind with it, Sammy Durgan jumped--_blindly_--just
before he reached the spur.

Like a stone from a catapult, Sammy Durgan went through the air, and
with a sickening thud his body crashed full into the old stub
switch-stand and into the switch handle, whirled around, and he
ricochetted, a senseless, bleeding, shattered Sammy Durgan, three yards
away.

It threw the switch. The handcar, already over it, sailed on down the
main line and around the next bend, climbed up the front end of the 508
that was hauling No. 3 up the grade, smashed the headlight into
battered ruin, unshipped the stack, and took final lodgment on the
running board, its wheels clinging like tentacles to the 508's bell and
sand-box; but the tank-car, with a screech of wrenching axles, a
frightened, quivering stagger, took the spur, rushed like a Berserker
amuck along its length, plowed up sand and gravel and dirt and rock
where there were no longer any rails, and toppled over, a spent and
buckled thing, on its side.

It was a flying switch that they talk of yet on the Hill Division. No.
3, suspicious of the handcar, sniffed her way cautiously around the
curve, and there, passengers, train crew, engine crew and Tommy Regan,
made an excited exodus from the train--just as MacMurtrey, near mad
with fear, Swedes, Hungarians and Polacks stringing out along the right
of way behind him, also arrived on the scene.

Who disclaims circumstantial evidence! Regan stared at the burning
oil-tank up the spur, stared at the bleeding, senseless form of Sammy
Durgan--and then he yelled for a doc