Pitching over the hill with the “01” the moment Folsom’s tail-lights had passed the outlet switch, Gallagher had a sharp attack of memory.  The day before, in the Horse Creek yard, he had seen and remarked a jagged scratch on the side of the Nadia.  Hence, he was watching for the narrow rock cuttings, and the three passages perilous on the cliff face were made in safety.

Once off the mountain, however, the greater peril began to assert itself.  For a time the Irishman kept himself fully awake and alert by pushing the 956 to the ragged edge of hazard, scurrying over the short tangents and lifting her around the curves in breath-taking spurts.  Later this expedient began to lose its fillip.  Since the train was running wholly on the air-brakes there was nothing for the fireman to do, and Jackson, the loyalest understudy Gallagher had ever known, tumbled from his box in a doze, staggered across the gang-way into the half-filled tender, and fell like a man anaesthetized full length on the coal.  Gallagher did not try to arouse him.

“‘Tis hell for wan, an’ twice hell for two,” he muttered; and then he shifted his right hand to the brake-cock and grasped the hot throttle lever with the ungloved left.  And for a time the pain of the burn sufficed.

It was another piece of luck, good or bad, that made Ten Mile station the special train’s meeting point with the second train of empties.  This time it was Graham, the other engineer, who heard.  He had stopped at Ten Mile on the bare chance that the wire between that point and Saint’s Rest had been repaired; public opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, an engineer does not run “wild” when he can help it.

The engineer of the third section had come out of the night operator’s office disappointed, and was climbing to his engine to pull out, when he heard, or thought he heard, the dull rumble of a train racing down the canyon.  It came in sight while he listened, and the yellow flare told him that it was either Gallagher or Folsom doubling back on one of the construction engines.  What startled him was the fact that the coming train appeared to be running itself; there was no warning whistle shriek and no slackening of speed.

Graham was a Scotchman, slow of speech, slow to anger, methodical to the thirty-third degree.  But in an emergency his brain leveled itself like a ship’s compass gimballed to hang plumb in the suddenest typhoon.  Three shrill whistle calls sent a sleepy flagman racing to set the switch of the siding.  With a clang the reversing lever came over and the steam roared into the cylinders.