mmit of the ridge, his tongue was
like a dry stick in his mouth, refusing to shape the curses that his
soul was heaping upon the alcohol which had made him a wind-broken,
gasping weakling in the prime of his manhood.

For, after all the agonizing strivings, he was too late. It was a rough
quarter-mile down to the shadowy group of buildings whence the humming
of the dynamo and the quick exhausts of the high-speeded steam-engine
rose on the still night air. Judson knew that the last lap was not in
his trembling muscles or in the thumping heart and the wind-broken
lungs. Moreover, the path, if any there were, was either to the right or
the left of the point to which he had attained; fronting him there was a
steep cliff, trifling enough as to real heights and depths, but an
all-sufficient barrier for a spent runner.

The ex-engineer crawled cautiously to the edge of the barrier cliff,
rubbed the sweat out of his smarting eyes, and peered down into the
half-lighted shadows of the stockaded enclosure. It was not very long
before he made them out--two indistinct figures moving about among the
disused and dilapidated ore sheds clustering at the track end of the old
spur. Now and again a light glowed for an instant and died out, like the
momentary brilliance of a gigantic fire-fly, by which the watcher on the
cliff's summit knew that the two were guiding their movements by the
help of an electric flash-lamp.

What they were doing did not long remain a mystery. Judson heard a
distance-diminished sound, like the grinding of rusty wheels upon iron
rails, and presently a shadowy thing glided out of one of the ore sheds
and took its place upon the track of the old spur. Followed a series of
clankings still more familiar to the watcher--the _ting_ of metal upon
metal, as of crow-bars and other tools cast carelessly, one upon the
other, in the loading of the shadowy vehicle. Making a telescope of his
hands to shut out the glare from the lighted windows of the power-house,
Judson could dimly discern the two figures mounting to their places on
the deck of the thing which he now knew to be a hand-car. A moment
later, to the musical _click-click_ of wheels passing over rail-joints,
the little car shot through the gate-way in the stockade and sped away
down the spur, the two indistinct figures bowing alternately to each
other like a pair of grotesque automatons.

Winded and leg-weary as he was, Judson's first impulse prompted him to
see