“I am thot, thanks to you, Sandy, lad.  ’Twas a foine bit av a scrimmage, an’ I’m owin’ ye wan.  Good night to ye.”

“Ye’ve got a clear track from this,” called Graham, swabbing his battered face with a piece of cotton waste drawn from one of the pockets of method.  “But ye’d better not take any more cat-naps.  Go on with ye, ye wild Irishman; ye’re obstructin’ the traffic.”

For twenty miles below Ten Mile Gallagher sat on his box like a man refreshed.  Then the devil of sleep postponed beset him again.  Once more the fireman was asleep on the coal, and to the little Irishman’s bombardment of wrenches and other missiles he returned only sodden groans.  Gallagher nerved himself to fight it through alone.  Mile after mile of the time-killing track swung slowly to the rear, and there was not even the flick of speed to help in the grim battle.

Dawn came when the end-of-track camp was still forty miles away, but the breaking day brought no surcease of strugglings.  When it came to the bitter end, when his eyelids would close involuntarily and he would wake with a start to wonder dumbly how far the 956 had come masterless, Gallagher took a chew of tobacco and began to rub the spittle into his eyes—­the last resort of the sleep-tormented engineman.  Like all the other expedients it sufficed for the time; but before long he was nodding again, and dreaming that a thousand devils were burning his eyes out with the points of their red-hot pitchforks.

Out of one of these nightmares he came with a yell of pain to see what figured for the moment as another nightmare.  Three hundred feet ahead the track seemed to vanish for three or four rail-lengths.  It was second nature to jam on the brakes and to make the sudden stop.  Then he sat still and rubbed his smarting eyes and stared again.  The curious hallucination persisted strangely.  Fifty feet ahead of the stopped engine the glistening lines of the steel ended abruptly, beginning again a car-length or two beyond.  Without disturbing the sleeping Jackson, Gallagher got down and crept cautiously out to the break.  It was a break.  He stooped and felt the rail ends with his hands.

When he straightened up his passenger was standing beside him.

“What is it?” asked Adair.  “Have we lost something?”

Gallagher waved a grimy hand at the gap.

“The thrack,” he said. “’Twas there whin I pulled me sthring av empties out over ut lasht night.  ’Tis gone now, else I’m thot near dead for sleep I can nayther see nor feel sthraight.”

Adair was calmly lighting a cigarette.

“Your senses are still in commission,” he said; “there is a good-sized piece of track missing.  Who sniped it, do you suppose?”

The engineer was shaking his fiery head.

“’Tis beyond me, Misther Adair.”

“That’s the deuce of it,” smiled the young man.  “It’s beyond the train.  How is your engine—­pretty good on the broad jump?”