Carleton nodded his head slowly. Steps were coming up the stairs. The voice of Flannagan, the wrecking boss, reached them, other voices excited and loud joined in. He slapped the master mechanic on the back. “I don’t wonder it caught you, Tommy,” he said. “It’s almost creepy. But there’s no time for that now. Come on.” Regan laughed, the same hard laugh, as he followed the chief into the dispatcher’s room. “East of number two switch-back, eh?” he swore. “If there’s any choice for hellishness anywhere on that cursed stretch of track, that’s it. My God, it’s come, and it’s come good and hard--good and hard.” It had. It was a bad mess, a nasty mess--but, like everything else, it might have been worse. Instead of plunging to the right and dropping to the canon eighteen hundred feet below, 505 chose the inward side and rammed her nose into the gray mass of rock that made the mountain wall. The wreckers from Dreamer Butte and the wreckers from Big Cloud tell of it to this day. For twenty-four hours they worked and then they dropped--and fresh men took their places. There was no room to work--just the narrow ledge of the right of way on a circular sweep with the jutting cliff of Old Piebald Mountain sticking in between, hiding one of the gangs from the other, and around which the big wrecking cranes groped dangling arms and chains like fishers angling for a bite. It was a mauled and tangled snarl, and the worst of it went over the canon’s edge in pieces, as axes, sledges, wedges, bars and cranes ripped and tore their way to the heart of it. And as they worked, those hard-faced, grimy, sweating men of the wrecking crews, they wondered--wondered that any one had come out of it alive. Back at headquarters in Big Cloud they wondered at it, too--and they wondered also at the cause. Every one that by any possible chance could throw any light upon it went on the carpet in the super’s office. Everybody testified--everybody except Dahleen, the fireman, and Coogan, the engineer; and they didn’t testify because they couldn’t. Coogan was in the hospital with queer, inconsequent words upon his tongue and a welt across his forehead that had laid bare the bone from eye to the hair-line of his skull; and Dahleen was there also, not so bad, just generally jellied up, but still too bad to talk. And the testimony was of little use. The tender of switch-back number one reported that the Limited had passed him at perhaps a little greater speed than usual--which was the speed of a man’s walk, for trains crawl down the Devil’s Slide with fear and caution--but not fast enough to cause him to think anything about it.