n time?

There was something wrong with the dumping machinery of the slag-car,
and two men were working with it on the side away from the spilling
slope. Gordon had not breath wherewith to shout; moreover the
safety-valve was still screeching to gulf all human cries. Farley was
lying face down and motionless, with the twisted foot still held fast in
a wedge-shaped crack in the cooled slag. Tom bent and lifted him;
yelled, swore, tugged, strained, kicked fiercely at the imprisoned
shoe-heel. Still the vise-grip held, and the great kettle on the height
above was creaking and slowly careening under the winching of the engine
crew. If the molten torrent should plunge down the slope now, there
would be two human cinders instead of one.

Suddenly the frenzy, so alien to the Gordon blood, spent itself, leaving
him cool and determined. Quite methodically he found his pocket-knife,
and he remembered afterward that he had been collected enough to choose
and open the sharper of the two blades. There was a quick, sure slash at
the shoe-lacing and the crippled foot was freed. With another yell, this
time of glad triumph, he snatched up his burden and backed away with it
in the tilting half-second when the deluge of slag, firing the very air
with shriveling heat, was pouring down the slope.

Then he fell in a heap, with Farley under him, and fainted as a woman
might--when the thing was done.

XXXVI

FREE AMONG THE DEAD

The skirmish-line rivulets of melted slag had crept to within a few feet
of the two at the toe of the dump when the men of the engine crew ran
with water to drench them.

Tom recovered consciousness under the dashing of the water, and was one
of the bearers who carried Vincent Farley on a hastily improvised
stretcher to the surrey waiting at the office gate.

Afterward, he went for Doctor Williams, deriding himself Homerically for
playing the second act in the drama of the Good Samaritan, but playing
it, none the less. And not to quit before he was quite through, he drove
with the physician to Warwick Lodge, and sat in the buggy till the other
Good Samaritan had performed his office.

"Nothing very serious, is it, Doctor?" he asked, when the old physician
took the reins to drive his horse-holder home.

"H'm; he'll be rather badly scarred, and there is a chance that he will
lose the sight of one eye," was the reply. Then: "It's none of my
quarrel, Tom, but you hammered him pretty cruelly--with a sto