through them.

"This here'll do as well as any, I guess," said Meyers. He drew Mr.
Trimm past him into the seat nearer the window and sat down alongside
him on the side next the aisle, settling himself on the stuffy plush
seat and breathing deeply, like a man who had got through the hardest
part of a not easy job.

"Smoke?" he asked.

Mr. Trimm shook his head without raising it.

"Them cuffs feel plenty easy?" was the deputy's next question. He lifted
Mr. Trimm's hands as casually as if they had been his hands and not Mr.
Trimm's, and looked at them.

"Seem to be all right," he said as he let them fall back. "Don't pinch
none, I reckon?" There was no answer.

The deputy tugged a minute at his mustache, searching his arid mind. An
idea came to him. He drew a newspaper from his pocket, opened it out
flat and spread it over Mr. Trimm's lap so that it covered the chained
wrists. Almost instantly the train was in motion, moving through the
yards.

* * * * *

"Be there in two hours more," volunteered Meyers. It was late afternoon.
They were sliding through woodlands with occasional openings which
showed meadows melting into wide, flat lands.

"Want a drink?" said the deputy, next. "No? Well, I guess I'll have a
drop myself. Travelin' fills a feller's throat full of dust." He got up,
lurching to the motion of the flying train, and started forward to the
water cooler behind the car door. He had gone perhaps two-thirds of the
way when Mr. Trimm felt a queer, grinding sensation beneath his feet; it
was exactly as though the train were trying to go forward and back at
the same time. Almost slowly, it seemed to him, the forward end of the
car slued out of its straight course, at the same time tilting up. There
was a grinding, roaring, grating sound, and before Mr. Trimm's eyes
Meyers vanished, tumbling forward out of sight as the car floor buckled
under his feet. Then, as everything--the train, the earth, the sky--all
fused together in a great spatter of white and black, Mr. Trimm, plucked
from his seat as though a giant hand had him by the collar, shot forward
through the air over the seatbacks, his chained hands aloft, clutching
wildly. He rolled out of a ragged opening where the smoker had broken in
two, flopped gently on the sloping side of the right-of-way and slid
easily to the bottom, where he lay quiet and still on his back in a bed
of weeds and wild grass, staring straight up.

H