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Updated: May 3, 2025
Last night he took me to where he plans to wreck the 'Lark' and we rehearsed what we are to do. We are to put the derailer on the track, send the train into the ditch and, during the confusion, rob the mail car and make our getaway in the machine. "And this is how I have arranged to save the 'Lark' and get 'Red Mike' red-handed.
"This detective gained 'Red Mike's' confidence and he wanted him to join with him in the wrecking of the 'Lark. My detective learned from 'Red Mike' that he planned to throw the 'Lark' into a ditch by placing a derailer on the track at a point in the hills a short distance from the city and to rob the mail car in the confusion of the wreck.
They saw "Red Mike" adjust the derailer to the rail and Gibson kneel to hold a spike as it was hammered into the tie by "Red Mike" wielding the sledge hammer. The blows of the hammer sounded sharply on the still night air.
He closed his eyes. He imagined he would hear the roar of the train as it crashed into the derailer and rolled over the embankment the screams and cries of the dying and injured. A sickening feeling swept him. He was faint. He could hear Brennan breathing deeply, the breath whistling out through his teeth from his lungs. "Gosh darn!" Benton gasped, as though he could hold himself no longer.
John reached for his watch. He was tugging to pull it from his pocket when the blast of an engine whistle sounded, it seemed, almost beside them. It was the "Lark" whistling for a crossing a mile away as it pounded on toward the derailer, where death and destruction yawned. "Thrillers," as he called them, had always disgusted John.
But I stopped Peter. I had no wish to slide on rubber-ice just for the sake of seeing it bend. "Can you imagine anything lovelier," I remarked as a derailer, "than the prairie at this time of the year, and this time of day?" Peter followed my eye out over the undulating and uncounted acres of sage-green grain with an eternity of opal light behind them.
For the mayor or the chief to have detracted from Gibson's act by hinting that he should have informed the police and caused "Red Mike's" arrest without going through with the plot to the point of assisting in placing the derailer on the track would have been instantly resented as an embittered and ungrateful move a cry of "sour grapes."
A stout woman, whose short hair straggling to her bare shoulders indicated that she had been preparing to retire, screamed and fainted into the arms of a little man who struggled desperately to save her from falling to the ground. Benton set up his camera on the track and his flashlight boomed again as he made a photograph of Gibson standing beside the derailer, the locomotive in the background.
A fear that there had been a mistake and that the engineer could not possibly bring the heavy train to a stop before the locomotive wheels struck the derailer seized him. The detective was on his feet, rifle ready to be thrown to his shoulder. Brennan leaped up and John saw that he held the automatic in his hand.
He strained his eyes trying to follow the figures into the darker shadows of the gully from which they emerged shortly. "That's the derailer they're carrying they're going to slap it on the rail," breathed the detective. They could hear "Red Mike" grunting as he and Gibson struggled up the side of the roadbed.
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