"Go on, Sammy Durgan!" urged Sammy Durgan anxiously to himself. "Don't you be skeered, Sammy, you got a revolver. 'Tis yourself, and not Maria, that'll do the locking of the doors hereafter, and 'tis Regan you can pass with fine contempt. Think of that, Sammy Durgan! And all for a bit of a run that'll not take the time of a batting of an eyelash, and with no one to notice you doing it. 'Tis a clever plan you've devised, Sammy Durgan--it is that. Go on, Sammy; go on!" Sammy Durgan wriggled a little on the ground, cocked his revolver--and wriggled a little more. "I will!" said Sammy Durgan with a sudden pinnacling of determination--and he sprang to his feet. Some loosened shale rattled down behind him. Sammy Durgan dashed through the mouth of the cut--and then for a moment all was a sort of chaos to Sammy Durgan. From the narrow edge of the embankment, just clear of the cut, a man stepped suddenly out. Sammy Durgan collided with him, his cocked revolver went off, and, jerked from his grasp by the shock, sailed riverwards through the air, while, echoing its report from the express car door, a man screamed wildly and grabbed at a bullet-shattered wrist; and the man with whom Sammy Durgan had collided, having but precarious footing at best, reeled back from the impact, smashed into another man behind him, and with a crash both rolled down the almost perpendicular embankment. Followed a splash and a spout of water as they struck the river--and from every side a tornado of yells and curses. "'Tis my finish!" moaned Sammy Durgan--but his feet were flying. "I--I've done it now! If I ran back up the cut they'd chase me and finish me--'tis my finish, anyway, but the engine 'll be the only chance I got." Sammy Durgan streaked across the track, hurdled, tumbled, fell, and sprawled over the pile of ties, recovered himself, regained his feet, and made a frantic spring through the gangway and into the cab. With a sweep Sammy Durgan shot the reversing lever over into the back notch, and with a single yank he wrenched the throttle wide. There was nothing of the craftsman in engine-handling about Sammy Durgan at that instant--only hurry. The engine, from a passive, indolent and inanimate thing, seemed to rise straight up in the air like an aroused and infuriated beast that had been stung. With one mad plunge it backed crashing into the buffer plates of the express car behind it, backed again, and once again, and the tinkle of breaking glass sort of ricochetted along the train as one car after another added its quota of shattered window panes, while the drivers, slipping on the rails, roared around like gigantic and insensate pinwheels. Sammy Durgan snatched at the cab frame for support--and then with a yell he snatched at a shovel. A masked face showed in the gangway. Sammy Durgan brought the flat of the shovel down on the top of the man's head.