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Bucks curled up in his blanket late, but, in spite of unaccustomed surroundings and the pitch and lurch of the caboose, which was hardly less than the tossing of a ship in a gale, Bucks dozed while his companion and the brakeman watched. The latter, a large, heavy fellow, was a busy man, as the calls for brakes and only hand-brakes were then known were continual.
He even fell to "firing" as the yodeling O'Hagan got his train moving again, and then, perched on the tender coal, took pot-shots with his brand-new revolver at a last pair of strikers who were attempting to manipulate the hand-brakes. That had been the first train to get out of the yards in seven days.
The road, being privately owned, was, like most logging-roads, neglected as to roadbed and rolling-stock; also it was undermanned, and the brake- man, who also acted as switchman, had failed to set the hand-brakes on the leading truck after the engineer had locked the air-brakes.
Winton saw, in a phantasmagoric flash of second sight, the meteor flight of the heavy car; saw the Reverend Billy's ineffectual efforts to apply the hand-brakes, if by good hap he should even guess that there were any hand-brakes; saw the car, bounding and lurching, keeping to the rails, mayhap, for some few miles below Argentine, where it would crash headlong into the upward climbing Carbonate train, and all would end.
The day coaches had been emptied, the hand-brakes set, and all the wheels blocked with links and pins and stones, when the link between the engine and the mail-car snapped and the engine moved forward.
Lanterns waved, or danced up and down, before and behind him; and on every side, six tracks deep, sliding backward and forward, with clashings of couplers and squeals of hand-brakes, were cars more cars than .007 had dreamed of.
While the "grade crossing" slew its thousands of non-travelling citizens, the freight-car, with its link-and-pin coupling, its block-bumpers, its hand-brakes, its slippery roofs, its manifold shiftings over frogs and switches, slew its tens of thousands of railway operatives.
If he could outpace the runaway on the parallel line, stop the octopod and dash across to the C. G. R. track ahead of the Rosemary, there was one chance in a million that he might fling himself upon the car in mid flight and alight with life enough left to help Calvert with the hand-brakes. Now, in the most unhopeful struggle it is often the thing least hoped for that comes to pass.
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