“G-g-great Scott! M-m-missed him all the t-time!” stammered one of the deputies, whose speech failed him at a crisis; and the big marshal flung his weapon down and ground it into the ballast under his heel in a fine frenzy of impotent wrath. Antrim was the first to recover presence of mind, or some semblance of it. “Come back with me and we’ll catch him yet!” he shouted, leading the race up the yard toward the relieved passenger engine, which the engineer was about to back under the coal chute. A breathless minute later they were clambering aboard, and the engineer recognised the chief clerk. “Catch that hand car for us, Tom!” gasped Antrim, fighting for breath and coherence. “There’s a--there’s a man’s life depending on it. Turn her loose!” The engineer nodded and dropped the reversing lever forward with a crash. One of the yard men saw them coming and ran to set the switch, and in a gathering tempest of clamour the engine shot out on the main line and the chase began afresh. Two miles down the cañon they came in sight of the hand car darting around the curves ahead of them. Gasset had abandoned the lever when the increasing speed of the car made it dangerous to try to keep up with the quick strokes of it, and was crouching on the deck, screening himself as well as he could behind the driving mechanism. Seeing this, the marshal borrowed the stuttering deputy’s revolver and watched his chances for another shot. Antrim saw, and shook his head, shouting to make himself heard above the din and clamour of the flying locomotive: “Don’t kill him; we must take him alive, if we can.” The marshal lowered the weapon, and the engineer signed to Antrim to come closer. “We can’t make it,” he protested, giving the spinning wheels a taste of the air brake. “He’s got the hill with him, and that light car will keep the track when we can’t. See?” Antrim nodded. “Keep him in sight, if you can,” he shouted back. “If you can hold your own till we come to that let-up in the grade at Berg Siding, maybe we can run him down.” But the end of the chase was nearer, though it need not have been if Gasset could have had the courage of his despair. Before the “let-up” came in sight there was a series of blood-chilling curves around which the hand car lurched with increasing velocity. Gasset’s hand sought the brake lever. The fusillade of pistol shots, the swift down-rush between the echoing walls of the cañon, the hopelessness of any escape from the shrieking monster in the rear, all went to the unnerving of him, and he applied the brake before he fully realized what would follow any sudden checking of speed in that tortuous pathway.