CHAPTER XXXIII
Hand-car
WELL!" Mr. Barcus broke a silence whose eloquence may not be translated in print. "Can you beat it?"
"Not with this outfit," Alan admitted gloomily.
"But, damn it! We've got to!"
"Profanity—even yours, my friend—won't make this Pullman move without an engine."
"All the same we can't stop here waiting for that gang of things to return in the light engine and cut our blessed throats."
Mr. Law answered this unanswerable contention only with a shrug. Then, stepping out on the forward platform of the Pullman, he cast a hopeless eye over the landscape. Then he lowered his gaze to the tracks and siding—and started sharply.
"Eh, what now?" Barcus inquired.
"Some thoughtful body has left an old hand-car over there in the ditch," Alan replied. "Maybe it isn't beyond service—looks as if it might work. Come along and lend me a hand."
THE DRUNKEN GUIDE BETRAYED HIS IDENTITY TO ROSE.
IT WAS A STRANGE MEETING BETWEEN THE SISTERS.
When he reappeared, after some five minutes, Rose accompanied him, and Barcus was smiling.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, old top," he explained, "but I was smitten with an inspiration. There didn't seem to be any sense in letting the amiable Judith loose upon this fair land, so I found a coil of wire in the porter's closet and wired the handle of the drawing-room door fast to the bars across the aisle. It'll take her some time to get out."
"What about the window?"
"It doesn't open wide enough for anybody but a living skeleton to get through."
"You don't yet know the lady," said Alan with grim foreboding.
Ten minutes more had passed before the two grimy and perspiring gentlemen succeeded in placing the hand-car upon the tracks. Far back along the line a locomotive hooted mournfully.
"That's a freight whistle," Barcus advised, helping Rose aboard the hand-car.
"Maybe you can distinguish the whistle of a freight-car locomotive from that of a passenger-train engine. I don't say you can't, but I'll take no chance on your judgment being good. Hop aboard here, if you're coming with us!"
Groaning soulfully, Barcus hopped aboard.
"It isn't the hard work I mind," he explained, laying hold of the handle-bar; "it's my silly pride, it's this swift descent from the sublime to the utilitarian that irks me. Think of it: yesterday a Pullman porter, to-day a donkey engine!"
None the less, he put a willing back into the work. Slowly the hand-car gathered momentum and surged noisily up the track as Alan and Barcus, on opposite sides of the handle-bar, alternately rose and fell back; slowly it mounted the slight grade to the bend in the track, rounded it, lost sight of the stalled Pullman on the siding, and began to move more swiftly on a moderate down-grade.
Behind it the thunder of an approaching train grew momentarily in volume. But just as Alan was about to advocate leaving the tracks to clear the way for the train, its rumble began to diminish and gradually was stilled.
"What do you make of that?" Alan panted.
"The freight has taken the siding to wait for some through train to pass. We'll have to look sharp and be ready to jump."
Five minutes later a second whistle, of a different tone, startled them.
"Afraid it's all up with us now," Alan groaned, "that sounded precisely like the whistle of the light engine."
"Sure it did!" Barcus agreed. "It wouldn't be us if we had any better luck. The saints be praised for this down-grade!"
The hand-car made a very fair pace, at the urge of the two, and the grade was happily long, turning and twisting like a snake through the hills.
Moreover, it seemed that the light engine had stopped at the siding long enough to couple up Trine's Pullman. It was fully a quarter of an hour before a growing rumble warned the trio on the hand-car, just as it gained the end of the grade. At this point discovery of the switch of a spur-line that shot off southward into the hills furnished Alan with an inspiration.
Stopping the hand-car after it had jolted over the frogs, he jumped down, set the switch to shunt the pursuit off upon the spur, and leaped back upon the car. Meeting his eye, Barcus nodded his approval. The stratagem served them. The special took the switch without pause, and the roar of its progress, shut off by an intervening mountain, was suddenly stilled to a murmur.
But even so there was neither rest for the weary nor much excuse for self-congratulation: the rumble of the special was not altogether lost to hearing when the thunder of the freight drowned it out. Then Alan stood up and signed to Barcus to imitate his example.
"Jump off—leave the hand-car where it is—they'll have to stop to clear it off the track."
"And then"
"I'll buy a lift from them," Alan promised. "It's our only hope. We can't keep up this heart-breaking business forever, and it can't be long before Trine and Marrophat discover their mistake!"