he slewing cars, and, curiously, the deep,
brooding silence of the mountains, frowning, it seemed, at this
sacrilege of noise; behind, showed the yellow glimmer from the caboose,
the dark, indistinct outline of a watching figure in the cupola.

Suddenly, snatching at the brake wheel to help him up, Bradley sprang
erect. From directly underneath his feet came a strange, confused,
muffled sound, like a rush of men from one end of the car to the other.
Then there broke a perfect bedlam of cries, yells, shouts and
screams--and then a revolver shot.

In an instant Bradley was scrambling down the ladder to
investigate--they could not hear the row, whatever it was, in the
caboose--and in another he had kicked the car door open and plunged
inside. A faint, bluish haze of smoke undulated in the air, creeping
to the roof of the car; and there was the acrid smell of powder--but
there was no sign of a fight, no man, killed or wounded, sprawling on
the floor. But the twenty men who filled the car were crouched in
groups and singly against the car sides; or sat upright in their bunks,
their faces white, frightened--only their volubility unchecked, for all
screamed and talked and waved their arms at once.

They made a rush for Bradley, explaining in half a dozen languages what
had happened. Bradley pushed them roughly away from him.

"Speak English!" he snapped. "What's wrong here? Can't any of you
speak English?"

An Italian grabbed his arm and pointed through the door Bradley had
left open behind him to the next car forward. "Pietro!" he shouted out
wildly. "Gotta da craze--mad--gotta da gun!"

"Well, go on!" prodded Bradley. "He's run into the next car. I
understand that--but what happened here? Who's Pietro?"

But the man's knowledge, like his English, was limited. He did not
know much--Pietro was not one of them--Pietro had come only that
morning to Big Cloud from the East--Pietro had gone suddenly mad--no
man had done anything to make Pietro mad.

And then suddenly into Bradley's mind leaped the story that he had read
in the papers a few days before of an Italian, a homicidal maniac, who
had escaped from an asylum somewhere East, and had disappeared. The
description of the man, as he remembered it, particularly the great
size of the man, tallied, now that he thought of it, with the fellow
who had been in the car when he had first passed through. He glanced
quickly around--the man was gone. So that was Pie