CHAPTER XXV
THROUGH THE FLAMING FOREST
Again Ralph thought of the night when Zeph Dallas had leaped upon the bowlder beside the right of way and had waved him the signal “All’s clear” as the Flyer took the curve above Devil’s Den. But there was nobody on guard at this point, now.
Number 202 came rushing down to the dangerous point. Ralph shut off the throttle and applied the brakes with judgment. He knew that he was some minutes ahead of his schedule, but he hated to retard the train at all.
The wreck on the other side of the valley—the wreck of the train on which Cherry Hopkins had taken passage for Rockton—drew Ralph like a magnet. The news of the terrible disaster had shaken even the detectives riding on the locomotive.
The express took the curve. The track was clear to the next easy turn, right at the beginning of the trestle where the pillar had been blown out. A gang had been at work here putting in new masonry to take the place of the impermanent pillar which now held up the trestle, but the forest fire to the north had called them off the job.
Every railroad employee who could possibly be spared, had been sent to aid the State fire guard. One man was here to watch the dangerous spot, and with his lantern he signaled the Midnight Flyer to come on.
Ralph ran on easily to the end of the trestle, and so over it and onto the firm ground beyond. He speeded up again. But now the heat of the flaming forest began to be felt even in the locomotive cab.
“Hey, Fairbanks!” shouted Frank Haley, the detective, in the engineer’s ear. “Hey, you going to take the chance? I believe there is a back-draught. The fire is coming this way.”
Ralph nodded, with grimly set lips. He had noted the cloud of flame-streaked smoke lying across the tracks not half a mile ahead. How wide was that cloud? Were the trees directly beside the right of way on fire now? What, indeed, was he driving the express into?
He gripped the reverse lever. A flashlike picture of his own train wrecked and in the midst of the flaming forest rose before Ralph’s mental vision. Ought he to risk the unknown peril masked by the rose-hued cloud of drifting smoke?
But the thought of the wreck ahead called him on. Cherry in peril! Perhaps dying of her injuries. The thought was so enthralling that the young engineer could not bring himself to the reversal of the locomotive’s mechanism and the pulling down of the heavy train. He did shut off some speed. They rolled into the cloud of smoke at less than thirty miles an hour. At that rate, he could have stopped the heavy train within a hundred yards.
The suspense, if not the heat from the fire, brought the perspiration out on Ralph Fairbanks’ face as he leaned from the window. He shaded his eyes with his hand, trying to spy through the smother of smoke. The headlight’s beam was dimmed by the cloud. Now and then tongues of flame seemed to leap through it, as though reaching to lap the locomotive.
Above and higher than the rumble of the train he now distinguished the roar of the conflagration. With it came the loud snapping of falling trees and explosions when dead timber burst from the heat of the fire that consumed it at the heart.
He realized that he was taking an awful chance, and he had taken it on his own responsibility. At any point the pilot might crash into some fallen monarch of the forest.
The heat came up into his face in a suffocating wave. Ralph was forced to draw back into the cab. He had been wise enough to close the forward and first side window on his side of the locomotive. Embers—flaming and white-hot—began rattling against the glass.
A ball of fire—the torn-away top of some coniferous tree—hurtled overhead, barely missing the smokestack, and fell flaming and smoking upon the firemen’s side of the boiler. The varnish began to smoke. Stilling leaped through the front window, ran along the board, and kicked the flaming bush off the locomotive.
The fire was sweeping closer and closer to the right of way. Ralph realized at last that he was driving into, not through, a belt of smoke and flame.
Ahead, and across the valley, the forest had ignited closer to the rails. The farther they went, the greater the danger.
This discovery was made too late, however. Ralph realized that it would be worse than ridiculous to stop and try to back out of the fire zone. The flames were being swept nearer and nearer to the tracks. He opened wide his throttle again and the Flyer drove at increased speed into whatever fate had in store for them.
The headlight seemed utterly quenched now by the glare of the fire. Smoke swirled into the cab and filled their lungs. Choking and coughing, the detectives cowered on the deck. The fireman on duty at the furnace could scarcely see what he was about. Stilling, the other fireman, could see no more than Ralph could ahead of the locomotive.
Had the strikers or the ruffians employed in secret by Andy McCarrey imagined this situation they could easily have derailed the Midnight Flyer. Any obstacle on the track would have brought the fast train to grief. But if the forest fire was started by McCarrey’s order, he expected that the fire itself would halt the trains on the division. His object, at most, was to throw the trains out of schedule, rather than to wreck the trains.
The Midnight Flyer’s arrival at the basin of Shadow Valley a little ahead of her schedule, if anything, and the fact that Ralph Fairbanks was willing to take a chance overcame the conspiracy of the strike leaders. 202 came through the danger area without much hurt. The crew and detectives on the locomotives suffered the most. The train was a vestibule train for its entire length and the doors were kept closed. Such little heat and smoke as entered the ventilators was of small consequence.
In a few minutes the locomotive pilot burst through the far side of the smoke-cloud. The headlight beamed along the rails again. The forest here lay untouched by fire on either side of the right of way.
Haley smote Ralph on the shoulder, a congratulatory blow.
“Good boy, Fairbanks!” he shouted. “I thought you were running us into a hot corner one while. But you certainly know your business. How far are we from that wreck?”
Ralph could figure that out exactly after a glance at the first numbered signpost. He increased the speed of the train on the instant.
Not far ahead now lay the scene of the disaster, of which they had secured so few particulars. Timber Brook, the little settlement mentioned in the message that had been passed up to him at Shadow Valley Station, was already in sight.