Cloud to Spider
Cut, twenty-one point seven miles, in _nineteen_ minutes.

There have been bad spills on the Hill Division, bad spills--but there
have never been worse than on that Friday night when the 505 jumped the
rails at the foot of the curve coming down the grade just east of
Spider Cut, shot over the embankment and piled the Coast Express,
mahogany sleepers and all, into splintered wreckage forty feet below
the right of way.

As Dorsay checked and with screaming brake-shoes the 1014 slowed,
Flannagan, with a wild cry, leaped from the cab and dashed up the track
ahead of the still-moving pilot. It was light enough--the cars of the
wreck nearest him, the mail and baggage cars, had caught, and, fanned
by the wind into yellow flames, were blazing like a huge bonfire.
Shouts arose from below; cries, anguished, piercing, from those
imprisoned in the wreck; figures, those of the crew and passengers who
had made their escape, were moving hither and thither, working as best
they might, pulling others through shattered windows and up-canted
doors, laying those who were past all knowing beside the long row of
silent forms already tenderly stretched upon the edge of the embankment.

A man, with face cut and bleeding, came running toward Flannagan. It
was Kingsley, conductor of Number Eighty. Flannagan jumped for him,
grasped him by the shoulders and stared without a word into his face.

But Kingsley shook his head.

"I don't know, Flannagan," he choked. "She was in the first-class just
ahead of the Pullmans. There's--there's no one come out of that car
yet"--he turned away his head--"we couldn't get to it."

"Couldn't get to it"--Flannagan's lips repeated the phrase
mechanically. Then he looked--and understood the grim significance of
the words. He laughed suddenly, jarring hoarse, as it is not good to
hear men laugh--and with that laugh Flannagan went into the fight.

The details of that night no one man knows. There in the shadow of the
gray-walled Rockies, men, flint-hearted, calloused, rough and ready
though they were, sobbed as they toiled; and while the derrick tackles
creaked and moaned, axe and pick and bar swung and crashed and tore
through splintering glass and ripping timber.

What men could do they did--and through the hours Flannagan led them.
Tough, grizzled men, more than one dropped from sheer weariness; but
ever Flannagan's great arms rose and fell, ever his mighty shoulders
heaved, ever h