“I reckon we are needing a rodeo over here on this jerk-water mighty bad, Mr. Lidgerwood,” he said, half humorously.  “Take us coming and going, about half of us never had the sure-enough railroad brand put onto us, nohow.  But, Lord love you! this little pasear we’re making down this hill ain’t anything!  That’s the old 210 chasin’ us with the passenger, and she couldn’t catch Bat Williams and the ‘66 in a month o’ Sundays if we didn’t have that doggoned spavined leg under the tender.  She sure couldn’t.”

Lidgerwood smiled in spite of his annoyance, and wondered at what page in the railroad primer he would have to begin in teaching these men of the camps and the round-ups.

“But it isn’t railroading,” he insisted, meeting his first pupil half-way, and as man to man.  “You might do this thing ninety-nine times without paying for it, and the hundredth time something would turn up to slow or to stop the leading train, and there you are.”

“Sure!” said the ex-cowboy, quite heartily.

“Now, if there should happen to be——­”

The sentence was never finished.  The special, lagging a little now in deference to the smoking hot box, was rounding one of the long hill curves to the left.  Suddenly the air-brakes ground sharply upon the wheels, shrill whistlings from the 266 sounded the stop signal, and past the end of the slowing service-car a trackman ran frantically up the line toward the following passenger, yelling and swinging his stripped coat like a madman.

Lidgerwood caught a fleeting glimpse of a section gang’s green “slow” flag lying toppled over between the rails a hundred feet to the rear.  Measuring the distance of the onrushing passenger-train against the life-saving seconds remaining, he called to Bradford to jump, and then ran forward to drag the Japanese cook out of his galley.

It was all over in a moment.  There was time enough for Lidgerwood to rush the little Tadasu to the forward vestibule, to fling him into space, and to make his own flying leap for safety before the crisis came.  Happily there was no wreck, though the margin of escape was the narrowest.  Williams stuck to his post in the cab of the 266, applying and releasing the brakes, and running as far ahead as he dared upon the loosened timbers of the culvert, for which the section gang’s slowflag was out.  Carter, the engineer on the passenger-train, jumped; but his fireman was of better mettle and stayed with the machine, sliding the wheels with the driver-jams, and pumping sand on the rails up to the moment when the shuddering mass of iron and steel thrust its pilot under the trucks of Lidgerwood’s car, lifted them, dropped them, and drew back sullenly in obedience to the pull of the reverse and the recoil of the brake mechanism.