“We shan’t run very far,” he commented.

It seemed a hair-graying age to the watchers at the Nadia’s windows before the men behind the commissary barricade got their infernal machine placed to their liking.  They stared at it, all three of them, fascinated, deaf and blind to all else.  A minimized shudder as of drumming wheels or escaping steam was in the air when they saw the flare of the match that betokened the firing of the fuse, but no one of the three heard it.

It was when the sputtering line of fire had buried itself in its tube that they became suddenly alive to the unbelievable fact that a locomotive was thundering down the yard on the Nadia’s track.  A rifle cracked; then another and a third; but the engine came on as if its driver bore a charmed life.

Surely Michael Gallagher must have prayed to the saints that night.  He did not know that the very seconds had become priceless:  he knew only that Frisbie had sent him on ahead to snake the president’s car out of the Horse Creek yard as quickly as possible.  Yet if he could have seen the bomb and the sputtering fuse, he could not have slowed more deftly to let the automatic couplers clutch each other, nor, at the touch and clamp, could he have reversed and gathered headway with greater skill.

The three occupants of the Nadia staggered to their feet as the private car lunged ahead in the grasp of the big engine, increasing speed with every wheel-turn.  Mechanically, and as one man, they rushed to the rear platform.  The mock cannon stood where it had been thrust; but in the camp street a handful of men were wrestling madly with the pipe fuse-carrier, breaking it, wrenching it in pieces, and stamping futilely upon the snake-like thing hissing and spitting under their feet.

“Look!” sobbed Adair.  “They know—­they’ve discovered that box-car!  Oh, why in the name of the pitiful Christ don’t they drop it and run?”

This from the man who had laughed, and aimed and fired and laughed again, in the heat of battle.  But Ford’s rejoinder was the bitter malediction of the defeated industry captain.  “Damn their worthless lives!” he stormed.  “In the next half-minute the Pacific Southwestern stands to lose a quarter of a million dollars!”

It was but a vanishing glimpse that they had of the handful of madmen stamping and dancing under the masthead light in front of the commissary; a glimpse withdrawing swiftly into a dim perspective as the Nadia was whisked around the curve and up the Horse Creek grade.

It was after Gallagher had picked up the lights of the waiting train of armed track-layers, and was whistling to announce his success, that the end came.  For the three watchers on the rear platform of the president’s car the little constellation of arc-stars in the valley below was suddenly blotted out in a skyward belching of gray flame; a huge volcano-burst of momentarily illuminated dust.  Instinctively they braced themselves for the concussion that followed,—­a bellowing thunderclap and a rending of earth and air that shook the surrounding hills and drowned the shriek of Gallagher’s whistle.