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Full blast she came, the black smoke from her stack running ahead as if to coax her on to greater speed. The brakeman waved his red lantern frantically in the air. There was a screeching sound of brake-shoes on the wheels, a long, shrill whistle, and the train sped past him, a misty dull serpent in the storm. He turned and followed as fast as he could.
The speed of the train slackened steadily but without jar, until the power of the compressed air clamped the brake-shoes on the wheels so tightly that they were practically locked and the train was stopped. By means of the air-brake the engineer had almost entire control of the train.
The sound of that whistle, blown back over the train, fell upon the ears of Patsy and the two dead-heads, and filled them with fear. A second later they felt the clamp of brake-shoes applied with full force; felt the grinding of sand beneath the wheels, and knew that something was wrong.
Two railways had run their lines, hewing, blasting, boring, and tunnelling up the narrow valley, first to reach the mines and finally to merge in a "cut-off" to the great Transcontinental, so that now huge trains of Pullmans went straining slowly up-grade past the site of old Fort Reynolds, or came coasting down with smoking tires and fire-spitting brake-shoes, and between the loss of the water for his horses, and the hemming in of his rifle-ranges by rail right of way, Uncle Sam declared Fort Reynolds no longer tenable for cavalry.
The section of the train with the boys aboard had become a runaway freight! "What has happened?" cried Mark. "The train's broken in two!" shouted Jack. "Come on! Help twist the brakes!" Both boys sprang to the wheel of the gondola. It was all they could do to give it a few turns, but they managed to make the brake-shoes grip the wheels to some degree, as was evidenced by the shrill shrieking.
"You ought to be in the yard, Poney," said the Mogul, severely. "We're all long-haulers here." "That's what you think," the little fellow replied. "You'll know more 'fore the night's out. I've bin down to Track 17, and the freight there oh, Christmas!" "I've trouble enough in my own division," said a lean, light suburban loco with very shiny brake-shoes.
Four or five miles farther along, however, there came a gentle grinding of brake-shoes upon the chilled wheel-treads that aroused him quickly.
The quick, short blasts of a whistle answered, then the crunch and grind and scream of biting brake-shoes and the big mountain racer, the 1012, pulling the second section of the Limited that night, stopped with its pilot nosing a diminutive figure in a torn and silver-buttoned uniform, whose hair was clotted red, and whose face was covered with blood and dirt.
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