hey look out and see the last oil-car just
clearing the divide. It's nothing; they're over now; they're running
faster. Queer place, this! There's a spring here with two streams that
part in the middle like a woman's hair; one goes down the east side, the
other down the west side. What? Broken in two?

The caboose crew start to run forward; a brakeman on the front half
starts to run back. Thirty-seven cars behind the engine a coupling has
snapped, and the train is taking the down grade in two sections:
twenty-three loaded oil-cars are running away, and a million gallons of
oil are chasing two million gallons down a mountain-side!

Everything now depends upon the brakeman on the forward section. He is
the only man who can judge the danger, and signal the engineer what to
do. The engineer does not even know that anything is wrong. It is
plainly the brakeman's business to keep the front half of the train out
of the way of the rear half. They must go faster, faster as the runaway
cars gain on them. Any one can see that it is undesirable to have two
million gallons of oil struck by a million gallons coming at forty miles
an hour.

Yet the brakeman does the wrong thing (no man can be sure how he will
act in imminent peril); the brakeman signals the engineer to stop.
Perhaps he planned a gradual slow-up to block the flying section gently;
perhaps he did not realize how fast the runaway was coming. Most likely
he lost his head entirely, as better men have done in less serious
crises. At any rate, the front section presently drew up with grinding
brakes on the ledge of track that stretches along the cheek of the
mountain just over the slope where the slumbering village lay, not five
feet from Carling's warehouse, beyond which were the coal-yards and the
wooden houses of Glen Gardner, the post-office, the hardware store, and
the main street. Of all places for that train to stop, this was the
worst.

[Illustration: "SNYDER, WHITE AS A GHOST, RACED AHEAD OF THE FIRE."]

It was a matter of seconds now until the crash came, and on this
followed a shattering blast that shook the valley and hill, and brought
the village to its feet in a daze of fear. Four oil-cars were smashed in
the wreck and hurled across the tracks for the rear cars to pile up on.
And straightway there was a gushing oil-well here, out of which in the
first ten seconds came an explosion with the noise of cannon, that
showered burning oil over fields and trees an