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Updated: June 14, 2025
At their feet ran the railroad track, encumbered with a string of freight-cars; a tall water-tank, a grimy stage for unloading coal, and a small office shack marked the station. Prescott, however, did not notice much of this; he was more interested in the signs of conflict on the persons of the men he met.
Once she wrote on the extreme lower corner of the sheet: Mrs. W. F. Bates. "Oh, pshaw!" she exclaimed, and tore the corner off and threw it into the fire. The locomotive had relieved itself, and no noise remained save the jangling of a long line of freight-cars on another track.
Dragging their prisoner forth, they glanced up and down to see that no one was in sight, and with Jack at his feet and Alex and Wilson at his arms, they hastened across the rails, passed between two freight-cars, and in the deep shadow beyond placed him on the ground and bound him firmly to a rail. "Be sure you don't talk now," said Wilson derisively as they turned away. "What next?" Jack asked.
"Swam for it," muttered Dancing, shaking himself. "Where's Stanley?" "Out behind the flat cars. He is arming the vigilantes. We've fenced off the yards with loaded freight-cars. They've fired the roundhouse on us, but the rifles and ammunition that came to-night are upstairs here. Take some of these guns, Bill, and hand them around in front. Bucks can follow you with a box of ammunition."
About that time the stage would pass, setting out on its dusty run to Meander, and everybody on it and in it would wave, everybody in the genial company before the tent would wave back, and all of the adventurers on both sides would feel quite primitive, in spite of the snuffling of the locomotive at the railway station, pushing around freight-cars.
The husbands and fathers we are here to look after are the amiable parties who stove in our car-windows and soaped our rails and let drive such pygmy projectiles as coupling-pins, a wild switch engine or two, and blazing freight-cars at us as we came in awhile ago." "Our people are in no wise connected with that," cried Elmendorf.
He had to run, and he was the more furious because of that. Another bullet, flying wide, hummed to his left before he gained the shelter of the farthest line of freight-cars. Here he hid and watched. The firing appeared to be all behind him, and, thus encouraged, he stole along to the end of the line of cars, and around. A bright blaze greeted his gaze. An isolated car was on fire.
The sand spirals would lick like flames along the bulk of the lofty tub, and soar skyward. It was not shipping season. The freight-cars stood idle in a long line. No cattle huddled in the corrals. No strangers moved in town. No cow-ponies dozed in front of the saloon. Their riders were distant in ranch and camp. Human noise was extinct in Separ.
Three miles out and the Mogul's six drivers were spinning like so many tops. Flat along the grimy roofs of the heaving freight-cars behind, the cloud of coal smoke from her stunted chimney fled rearward until clear of the train, then drifted idly across the rolling uplands. Ahead and to right and left, distant, snow-capped summits barred the sky-line.
It seemed to him that if he ran just a little farther he must surely find the house and the other things he was looking for; but he found nothing but more craters and more mountains of dirt; and little by little the horrible truth became clear to him, that all the way down the railroad track, as far as he could see or run, this gigantic trough extended, a valley of raw dirt with mountains on each side, crowned here and there with wheels and axles and iron trucks of blown-up freight-cars, and filled in the bottom with the deadly fumes of trinitrotoluol!
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