Brannigan screamed in his ear.

"She ain't in the clear!" he screamed. "It's a swipe! She ain't in
the clear!" he screamed again--and took a flying leap through the
off-side gangway.

Owsley never turned his head--only held there, grim-faced,
tight-lipped, facing what was to come--facing it with clear head, quick
brain, doing what he could to lessen the disaster, as forty years had
schooled him to face emergency. Owsley--for forty years with his
record, until that moment, as clean and unsmirched as the day he
started as a kid calling train crews back in the little division town
on the Penn in the far East! Strange it should come to Owsley, the one
man of all you'd never think it would! It's hard to understand the
running orders of the Great Trainmaster sometimes--isn't it? And
sometimes it doesn't help much to realize that we never will understand
this side of the Great Divide--does it?

The headlight caught it now--seemed to gloat upon it in a flood of
blazing, insolent light--the rear cars of the freight crawling
frantically from the main line to the siding--then the pitiful yellow
from the cupola of the caboose, the light from below filtering up
through the windows. It seared into Owsley's brain lightning quick,
but vivid in every detail in a horrible, fascinating way. It was a
second, the fraction of a second since Brannigan had jumped--it might
have been an hour.

The front of the caboose seemed to leap suddenly at the 1601, seemed to
rise up in the air and hurl itself at the straining engine as though in
impotent fury at unwarranted attack. There was a terrific crash, the
groan and rend of timber, the sickening grind and crunch as the van
went to matchwood--the debris hurtling along the running boards,
shattering the cab glass in flying splinters--and Owsley dropped where
he stood--like a log. And the pony truck caught the tongue of the open
switch, and, with a vicious, nasty lurch, the 1601 wrenched herself
loose from her string of coaches, staggered like a lost and drunken
soul a few yards along the ties--and turned turtle in the ditch.

It was a bad spill, but it might have been worse, a great deal worse--a
box car and the van for the junk heap, and the 1601 for the shops to
repair fractures--and nobody hurt except Owsley.

But they couldn't make head or tail of the cause of it. Everybody went
on the carpet for it--and still it was a mystery. The main line was
clear at the west end of the s