Never before in the history of the road had the Denver Limited been entrusted to a green crew, for the engineer was also making his maiden trip. The day coach was almost empty. In the chair car, with four chairs turned together, the newly-made conductor, the head brakeman, a country editor, and the detective sent out to spot the crew, played high five. The three or four passengers in the sleeper were not asleep. They were sitting silently at the curtained windows and occasionally casting anxious glances at the Pullman conductor who seemed to be expecting something to happen. Where were all the people who used to travel by this splendid train? The road was now considered, by most people, as unsafe and the people were going round it. Public opinion, at the beginning of the strike, was about equally divided between the men and the company. Now and then a reckless striker or sympathizer would blow up a building, dope a locomotive or ditch a train, and the stock of the strikers would go down in the estimation of the public. Burlington stock was falling rapidly--the property was being wrecked. On nearly every side track could be seen two or three dead engines that had been ruined and abandoned by amateur engine-drivers, and now and then at way-stations the smouldering ruins of a freight train, whose blackened skeleton still clung to the warped and twisted track. At every station great crowds of people blocked the platforms, for the Limited had not been able to leave Chicago for more than a month. The engineer had scarcely touched the whistle, deeming it safer to slip quietly through the night, and the light train was now speeding noiselessly over the snow-muffled earth. They had left Chicago two hours late, and as they had a clear track, so far as other trains were concerned, the young driver was letting her go regardless of danger. At any moment they might expect to be blown into eternity, and it was just as safe at seventy miles an hour as at seventeen. Besides, George Cowels was desperate. For five long years he had fired this run with the same locomotive. He knew all her tricks and whims, her speed and power, and the road was as familiar to him as was his mother's face. He knew where the "old man" used to cut her back and ease off on the down grades. He knew that he ought to do the same, but he did not. "Let her roll," he would say to himself; and she did roll, and with every swing the bell sounded a single note, low and mournful, like a church bell tolling for the dead. It seemed to the unhappy engineer that it tolled for him, for that day he had died to all his friends.