Part 16 (1/2)

”Where are your section men?” asked Bucks.

”In bed at the section house.”

”Who's with you?”

”Night agent. Sheriff with two cowboy prisoners waiting to take 59.”

Before the last word came, Bucks was back at him:

_To Opr._:

Ask Sheriff release his prisoners to save pa.s.senger-train. Go together to west switch house-track, open, and set it. Smash in section tool-house, get tools. Go to point of house-track curve, cut the rails, and point them to send runaway train from Ogalalla over the bluff into the river.

BUCKS.

The words flew off his fingers like sparks, and another message crowded the wire behind it:

_To Agt._:

Go to east switch, open, and set for pa.s.sing-track. Flag 59, and run her on siding. If can't get 59 into the clear, ditch the runaways.

BUCKS.

They look old now. The ink is faded, and the paper is smoked with the fire of fifteen winters and bleached with the sun of fifteen summers.

But to this day they hang there in their walnut frames, the original orders, just as Bucks scratched them off. They hang there in the dispatchers' offices in the new depot. But in their present swell surroundings Bucks wouldn't know them. It was Harvey Reynolds who took them off the other end of the wire--a boy in a thousand for that night and that minute. The instant the words flashed into the room he instructed the agent, grabbed an axe, and dashed out into the waiting-room, where the sheriff, Ed Banks, sat with his prisoners, the cowboys.

”Ed,” cried Harvey, ”there's a runaway train from Ogalalla coming down the line in the wind. If we can't trap it here, it'll knock 59 into kindling-wood. Turn the boys loose, Ed, and save the pa.s.senger-train.

Boys, show the man and square yourselves right now. I don't know what you're here for; but I believe it's to save 59. Will you help?”

The three men sprang to their feet; Ed

Banks slipped the handcuffs off in a trice. ”Never mind the rest of it.

Save the pa.s.senger-train first,” he roared. Everybody from Ogalalla to Omaha knew Ed Banks.

”Which way? How?” cried the cowboys, in a lather of excitement.

Harvey Reynolds, beckoning as he ran, rushed out the door and up the track, his posse at his heels, stumbling into the gale like lunatics.

”Smash in the tool-house door,” panted Harvey as they neared it.

Ed Banks seized the axe from his hands and took command as naturally as Dewey.

”Pick up that tie and ram her,” he cried, pointing to the door. ”All together--now.”

Harvey and the cowboys splintered the panel in a twinkling, and Banks, with a few clean strokes, cut an opening. The cowboys, jumping together, ran in and began fis.h.i.+ng for tools in the dark. One got hold of a wrench; the other, a pick. Harvey caught up a clawbar, and Banks grabbed a spike-maul. In a bunch they ran for the point of the curve on the house-track. It lies there close to the verge of a limestone bluff that looms up fifty feet above the river.

But it is one thing to order a contact opened, and another and very different thing to open it, at two in the morning on December twenty-fifth, by men who know no more about track-cutting than about logarithms. Side by side and shoulder to shoulder the man of the law and the men out of the law, the rough-riders and the railroad boy, pried and wrenched and clawed and struggled with the steel. While Harvey and Banks clawed at the spikes the cowboys wrestled with the nuts on the bolts of the fish-plates. It was a baffle. The nuts wouldn't twist, the spikes stuck like piles, sweat covered the a.s.sailants, Harvey went into a frenzy. ”Boys, we must work faster,” he cried, tugging at the frosty spikes; but flesh and blood could do no more.