“In five minutes more we shall pass Agua Caliente,” he says.  “Will you kill the Irishman, or shall I?” Guilford’s lips move, but there is no audible reply; and Bucks takes Danforth’s weapon and passes quickly and alone to the forward vestibule.

The station of Agua Caliente swings into the field of 1010’s electric headlight.  Callahan’s tank has been bone dry for twenty minutes, and he is watching the glass water-gage where the water shows now only when the engine lurches heavily to the left.  He knows that the crown-sheet of the fire-box is bare, and that any moment it may give down and the end will come.  Yet his gauntleted hand never falls from the throttle-bar to the air-cock, and his eyes never leave the bubble appearing and disappearing at longer intervals in the heel of the water-glass.

Shovel has stopped firing, and is hanging out of his window for the straining look ahead.  Suddenly he drops to the footplate to grip Callahan’s arm.

“See!” he says.  “They have set the switch to throw us in on the siding!” In one motion the flutter of the exhaust ceases, and the huge ten-wheeler buckles to the sudden setting of the brakes.  The man standing in the forward vestibule of the Naught-seven lowers his weapon.  Apparently it is not going to be necessary to kill the engineer, after all.

But Callahan’s nerve has failed him only for the moment.  There is one chance in ten thousand that the circumambulating side track is empty; one and one only, and no way to make sure of it.  Beyond the station, as Callahan well knows, the siding comes again into the main line, and the switch is a straight-rail “safety.”  Once again the thought of his motherless child flickers into the engineer’s brain; then he releases the air and throws his weight backward upon the throttle-bar.  Two gasps and a heart-beat decide it; and before the man in the vestibule can level his weapon and fire, the one-car train has shot around the station, heaving and lurching over the uneven rails of the siding, and grinding shrilly over the points of the safety switch to race on the down grade to Megilp.

At the mining-camp the station is in darkness save for the goggle eyes of an automobile drawn up beside the platform, and deep silence reigns but for the muffled, irregular thud of the auto-car’s motor.  But the beam of the 1010’s headlight shows the small station building massed by men, a score of them poising for a spring to the platforms of the private car when the slackening speed shall permit.  A bullet tears into the woodwork at Callahan’s elbow, and another breaks the glass of the window beside him, but he makes the stop as steadily as if death were not snapping at him from behind and roaring in his ears from the belly of the burned engine.

“Be doomping yer fire lively, now, Jimmy, b’y,” he says, dropping from his box to help.  And while they wrestle with the dumping-bar, these two, the poising figures have swarmed upon the Naught-seven, and a voice is lifted above the Babel of others in sharp protest.