Mike" grunting as he and Gibson struggled up the
side of the roadbed. 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. They heard "Red Mike" curse viciously as
he missed hitting the spike and Gibson jerked his hand away a fraction
of a second before the sledge would have smashed it against the rail.

Four spikes were driven to hold the derailer. Then Gibson and "Red Mike"
scrambled back into the gully, their figures hidden in the darkness.

"All set down there," whispered the detective, thus conveying to the
others the realization that the derailer was in place to swerve the
guiding wheels of the big locomotive of the "Lark" and send it crashing
into the ditch, pulling and overturning the coaches with it.

The horror of what might happen terrorized John for a moment. His body
tingled and perspiration broke out on his forehead. 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.

CHAPTER VII

"Thrillers," as he called them, had always disgusted John. A book
wherein the hero overcame the villain by desperate means and won the
girl by a single stroke of manly dauntlessness was to him like so much
trash. Melodramatic plays he despised. Griffith's pictures were the only
ones in which he could tolerate a "staged" thrill.

It never came into his mind as he heard the whistle of the "Lark" flying
a mile a minute over the rails to what might be a horrible disaster that
here was a real "thriller" exceeding the imagination of any cheap
novelist, aspiring playwright or industrious scenario writer. Later when
he rehearsed in his mind what happened that night, he realized that in
fact truth was often stranger than fiction. Every newspape