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An enormous trailer-truck combination came bumbling toward them. Jill held up her hand for it to stop. Its headlights shone brightly upon her. Airbrakes came on. The giant combination cab in front, gigantic box body behind came to a halt. A man leaned out. He said amazedly, "Hey, what are you folks doin' here? Everybody's supposed to be long gone!
The airbrakes hissed, the cars bumped and clanked, and the train came to a laborious stop with the outermost cars beneath the lofty latticed framework of the main traveller. At once the electro-magnetic cranes began to descend, ready to swing off whole carloads of steel in their magic monstrous clutch.
Ere long, each suburban train from town would discharge its quota of daintily dressed shoppers, pallid office clerks and stenographers and prosperous business men. Not one of them would carry protection from the soaking rain, and competition between the juvenile vendors threatened to become acute. A lean, light suburban engine pulled in amid a cloud of escaping steam and a hissing of airbrakes.
He recognized the engineer at the first glance. "Hello, Mr. Blake!" he sang out. "You here?" "Brakes!" cut in Blake so incisively that the driver closed his throttle and applied the airbrakes with emergency swiftness. Anticipating his questions, Blake tersely explained: "Bridge in danger. I'm in charge. Have you a lot of empties handy?"
Ten thousand times I asked for the disclosing of this pitiful mystery, and ten thousand times a mocking laugh came back in the roar and shriekings of the train. The car wheels chuckled in rhythm, the airbrakes hissed in derision and the engine whistle hooted in scorn. It was daybreak when I threw myself on the couch and closed my eyes. I think I slept for an hour or so.
The stop at this town was brief; then the train sped on through the deep woods. But suddenly the airbrakes were put on again and they slowed down with a good deal of clatter and bumping. "We're not at Scarboro yet, surely?" cried Mrs. Murchiston. "No, no!" Mr. Cameron assured them. "We're stopping from some other cause why, this is merely a flag station. Not even a station just a crossing."
Three short jerks at the signal cord swish, swish, swish back from the engine t-oot-oot-oot a sudden let-up in speed, a screech of the airbrakes, a bang of the door, and the Texas Canon-Ball made one of its seldom stops at Dobbinsville and Harry Benton and his family stepped to the platform.
Now, the engine-crew will set the airbrakes on the mogul and leave her with steam up to throb all night; they'll not blow her down, for that would mean work firing her in the morning. Our task, Buck, will be to throw off the airbrakes and let her glide silently out of our log-landing.
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