“Listen!” he shouted.

The sound that had started the crowd to cheering was repeated again.

Too-oo-oo-oot!

“It’s the train!” cried Reade joyously.  “It can’t be more than two or three miles below here, either.  It will get through on time!”

With nine minutes to spare, the train rolled into the station at Lineville.  It was not the same train that had left Stormburg, for that train had been halted, safely, just before reaching the scene of the disastrous blow-out.  At that point the passengers had alighted and had been conducted on foot to the other side of the gap caused by the explosion.  Here Hazelton’s Lineville special stood ready to convey them into Lineville.  So the road had been legally opened, since the passengers from Stormburg—–­among whom was the lieutenant governor of the state had been brought all the way through over the line.  Within the meaning of the law a through train had been operated over the new line, and within charter time.

The S.B. & L. had won!  It had saved its charter.  On the morrow, in Wall Street, the value of the road’s stock jumped by some millions of dollars.

Let us not forget the pilot train.  That returned to Lineville in the rear of the passenger train.  Though the pilot train had a conductor, Harry Hazelton was in real charge.

“Look whom we have here, Tom!” called Harry from the open side door of the baggage car, as Reade raced up to greet his successful chum.

A man, bandaged, injured and groaning, lay on the floor of the baggage car.

“Why, it’s Naughty Peter, himself!” cried Tom.  “Peter, I’m sorry to find you in this shape.  I am afraid you have been misbehaving.”

“We found him not far from the track, near the blow-out,” Hazelton explained.  “Whether he attended to that bit of bad work all alone, or whether his companions believed him dead and fled for their own safety, I can’t learn.  Bad Pete won’t say a word.  He was unconscious when we first discovered him.  Now he knows what’s going on around him, but he’s too badly hurt to do more than hold his tongue.”

It was only when Bad Pete recovered his health—–­in jail—–­and found himself facing a long term in prison, that he was ready to open his mouth.  He could tell nothing, however, beyond confessing that he and three other men, including an operator, had attended to the blow-out.  Pete had no knowledge of the real parties behind the plot.  He knew only that he had acted under ’Gene Blanks orders.  So Bad Pete was shown no mercy, but sent behind the bars for a term of twenty-five years.  Owing to Black’s stubborn silence the outrages were never traced back to any official of the W.C. & A.

’Gene Black was sentenced to prison for thirty years.  The other rascals, who had worked under his direction, all received long terms.

The student engineers, wholly happy and well paid, returned to their college.