e led them on. What men could do they did--but it was
graying dawn before they opened a way to the heart of the wreck--the
first-class coach that once ahead of the Pullmans was _under_ them now.

Flannagan, gaunt, burned and bleeding, a madman with reeling brain,
staggered toward the jagged hole that they had torn in the flooring of
the car. They tried to hold him back, the man who had spurred them
through the night alternately with lashing curse and piteous prayer,
the man who had worked with demon strength as no three men among them
had worked, the man who was tottering now at the end in mind and body,
they tried to hold him back--_for mercy's sake_. But Flannagan shook
them off and went--went laughing again the same fearful laugh with
which he had begun the fight.

He found her there--found her with a little bundle lying in the crook
of her outstretched arm. She moaned and held it toward him--but
Flannagan had gone his limit, his work was done, the tension broke.

And when they worked their way to the far end of the car after him,
those hard, grim-visaged followers of Flannagan, they found a man
squatted on an up-ended seat, a woman beside him, death and desolation
and huddled shapes around him, dandling a tiny infant in his arms,
crooning a lullaby through cracked lips, crooning a lullaby--to a
little one long hushed already in its last sleep.

Opinions differ. But Big Cloud to-day sides about solid with Regan.

"Flannagan?" says the master mechanic. "Flannagan's a pretty good
wrecking boss, pretty good, I don't know of any better--since the
Almighty had him on the carpet. He's got a plot up on the butte behind
the town, he and Daisy, with a little mound on it. They go up there
together every Sunday--never've known 'em to miss. A man ain't likely
to fall off the right of way again as long as he does that, is he?
Well, then, forget it, he's been doing that for a year now--what?"

V

THE MAN WHO SQUEALED

Back in the early days the payroll of the Hill Division was full of J.
Smiths, T. Browns and H. Something-or-others--just as it is to-day.
But to-day there is a difference. The years have brought a certain
amount of inevitable pedigree, as it were--a certain amount of gossip,
so to speak, over the back fences of Big Cloud. It's natural enough.
There's a possibility, as a precedent, that one or two of the
passengers on the _Mayflower_ didn't have as much blue blood when they
started on the vo