ight tracks.

It was Lem Wacker. A train of empty box freights blocked his way. He
stooped, made a diving scurry under one of them, and was lost to view.

Bart ran as he had never run before. The train cleared the tracks as he
reached the spot where Wacker had disappeared.

At that moment above the jangling, clumping activity of the yards there
arose on the night air one frightful, piercing shriek.

Bart halted with a nameless shock, for the utterance was distinctly
human and curdling. He glanced after the receding train, fancying that
Wacker might have got caught under the cars and was being dragged along
with them.

That roadbed was clear, however. Two hundred feet to the right was a
second train. Its forward section was moving off, having just thrown
some cars against others stationary on a siding.

Bart ran towards these. Wacker could not have so suddenly disappeared in
any other direction. He crossed between bumpers, and glanced eagerly all
around. There was no hiding-place nearer than the repair shops, and they
were five hundred feet distant.

Wacker could not possibly have reached their precincts in the limited
space of time afforded since Bart had last lost sight of him.

"He is hiding in some of those cars," decided Bart, "or he has swung
onto the bumpers of the section pulling out--hark!"

Bart pricked up his ears. A strange sound floated on the air--a low,
even, musical tinkle.

Its source could not be far distant. Bart ran along the side of the
stationary freights.

"It is Wacker, sure," he breathed, "for that is the same sound made by
the little alarm clock he bought at the sale this afternoon."

The last vibrating tintinnabulations of the clock died away as Bart
discovered his enemy.

Lem Wacker's burly figure and white face were discernible against the
direct flare of an arc light. He seemed a part of the bumpers of two
cars. Bart flared a match once, and uttered the single word:

"Caught."

Lem Wacker was clinging to the upright brake rod, and swaying there. His
face was bloodless and he was writhing with pain. One foot was clamped
tight, a crushed, jellied mass between two bumpers.

It seemed that his foot must have slipped just as the forward freights
were switched down. This had caused that frenzied yell. Perhaps the
thought of the money had impelled him not to repeat it, but the little
alarm clock which he carried in his pocket had betrayed him.

Bart took in the situation at a g