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Then he turned around, and shouted down the track to his crew. "Hey, boys! Spread out along the right of way and see if you can't find a claw-bar. The devils that do these tricks always throw away their tools." We stood together in a little tragic group. The old peasant woman came over to where I stood, she walked with a dead, wooden step. "Contessa," she whispered, her old lips against my hand.
The five put their shoulders against the car and pushed with all their might, but it refused to budge. "If we only had a crowbar," said Adrian, "we could start it in a jiffy. Suppose some of you look in the car. There might be one there." The three Mexicans jumped to obey. Directly they appeared in the doorway with a large claw-bar in their hands. "Will this do?" asked one. "Sure!
It was conclusive evidence. Everybody could see how the workman's hands, as he labored with the claw-bar to draw the spikes, had cleaned off the rust. I hurried the motor away. We raced up the long winding road to Crewe's country-house, sitting like a feudal castle on the summit. And I wondered, at every moment, how I could keep my promise.
"Just tell them I'm coming," and he stood in the middle of the track looking ruefully after the rapidly disappearing car. After some moments he picked up the claw-bar and threw it spitefully into the ditch beside the track, as much as to say, "Lay there! You're the cause of all the trouble." Then he started slowly after the car.
A regular spike-puller claw-bar was used the marks of its heel are still in the ties; the place was chosen to the exact rail-length just where your engine would begin to hug the outside of the curve. Then the rail is sprung aside barely enough to let the wheel flanges through, and not enough to attract an engineer's attention unless he happened to be looking directly at it, and in a good light."
We hurried down the track to the motor-car. I had gained a little time. But how could I keep my promise. And the next moment the problem became more difficult. The track boss came up with a short iron bar that his men had found in the weeds along the right of way. "There's the claw-bar, that the devil done it with," he said. "You can tell it's just been handled by the way the rust's rubbed off."
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