“Now then, Billy, try your hitch!  Put the strain on a little at a time and often.  Steady!—­now you’ve got her—­keep her coming!”

Slowly the big freight-puller rose out of its furrow in the gravel, righting itself to the perpendicular as it came.  Anticipating the inward swing of it, Dawson was showing his men how to place ties and rails for a short temporary track, and when he gave Darby the stop signal, the hoisting cables were singing like piano strings, and the big engine was swinging bodily in the air in the grip of the crane tackle, poised to a nicety above the steel placed to receive it.

Dawson climbed up to the main-line embankment where Darby could see him, and where he could see all the parts of his problem at once.  Then his hands went up to beckon the slacking signals.  At the lifting of his finger there was a growling of gears and a backward racing of machinery, a groan of relaxing strains, and a cry of “All gone!” and the 195 stood upright, ready to be hauled out when the temporary track should be extended to a connection with the main line.

“Let’s go up to the other end and see how your understudy is making it, Mac,” said the gratified superintendent.  “It is quite evident that we can’t tell this young man anything he doesn’t already know about picking up locomotives.”

On the way up the track he asked about Clay and Green, the engineer and fireman who were in the wreck.

“They are not badly hurt,” said the trainmaster.  “They both jumped—­on Green’s side, luckily.  Clay was bruised considerably, and Green says he knows he plowed up fifty yards of gravel with his face before he stopped—­and he looked it.  They both went home on 201.”

Lidgerwood was examining the cross-ties, which were cut and scarred by the flanges of many derailed wheels.

“You have no notion of what did it?” he queried, turning abruptly upon McCloskey.

“Only a guess, and it couldn’t be verified in a thousand years.  The ’95 went off first, and Clay and Green both say it felt as if a rail had turned over on the outside of the curve.”

“What did you find when you got here?”

“Chaos and Old Night:  a pile of scrap with a hole torn in the middle of it as if by an explosion, and a fire going.”

“Of course, you couldn’t tell anything about the cause, under such conditions.”

“Not much, you’d say; and yet a queer thing happened.  The entire train went off so thoroughly that it passed the point where the trouble began before it piled up.  I was able to verify Clay’s guess—­a rail had turned over on the outside of the curve.”

“That proves nothing more than poor spike-holds in a few dry-rotted cross-ties,” Lidgerwood objected.

“No; there were a number of others farther along also turned over and broken and bent.  But the first one was the only freak.”

“How was that?”

“Well, it wasn’t either broken or bent; but when it turned over it not only unscrewed the nuts of the fish-plate bolts and threw them away—­it pulled out every spike on both sides of itself and hid them.”