"My debt to you was already very great: I owe you more now," he said.

But she gave him his quittance in a whiplike retort.

"And you will stand here talking about it when every moment is
precious? Go!" she commanded; and he went.

So now we are to conceive the maddest activity leaping into being in
full view of the watchers at the windows of the private car. Winton's
chilled and sodden army, welcoming any battle-cry of action, flew to
the work with a will. In a twinkling the corded piles of cross-ties
had melted to reappear in cobhouse balks bridging an angle from the
Utah embankment to that of the spur track in the rear of the
blockading Rosemary. In briefest time the hammermen were spiking the
rails on the rough-and-ready trestle, and the Italians were bringing
up the crossing-frogs.

But the Rajah, astute colonel of industry, had not left himself
defenseless. On the contrary, he had provided for this precise
contingency by leaving McGrath's fireman in mechanical command on the
Rosemary. If Winton should attempt to build around the private car,
the fireman was to wait till the critical moment: then he was to
lessen the pressure on the automatic air-brakes and let the car drop
back down the grade just far enough to block the new crossing.

So it came about that this mechanical lieutenant waited, laughing in
his sleeve, until he saw the Italians coming with the crossing-frogs.
Then, judging the time to be fully ripe, he ducked under the Rosemary
to "bleed" the air-brake.

Winton heard the hiss of the escaping air above all the industry
clamor; heard, and saw the car start backward. Then he had a flitting
glimpse of a man in grimy overclothes scrambling terror-frenzied from
beneath the Rosemary. The thing done had been overdone. The fireman
had "bled" the air-brake too freely, and the liberated car, gathering
momentum with every wheel-turn, surged around the circling spur track
and shot out masterless on the steeper gradient of the main line.

Now, for the occupants of a runaway car on a Rocky Mountain canyon
line there is death and naught else. Winton saw, in a phantasmagoric
flash of second sight, the meteor flight of the heavy car; saw the
Reverend Billy's ineffectual efforts to apply the hand-brakes, if by
good hap he should even guess that there were any hand-brakes; saw the
car, bounding and lurching, keeping to the rails, mayhap, for some few
miles below Argentine, where it would crash headlong into th