For, after all the agonizing strivings, he was too late. It was a rough quarter-mile down to the shadowy group of buildings whence the humming of the dynamo and the quick exhausts of the high-speeded steam-engine rose on the still night air. Judson knew that the last lap was not in his trembling muscles or in the thumping heart and the wind-broken lungs. Moreover, the path, if any there were, was either to the right or the left of the point to which he had attained; fronting him there was a steep cliff, trifling enough as to real heights and depths, but an all-sufficient barrier for a spent runner. The ex-engineer crawled cautiously to the edge of the barrier cliff, rubbed the sweat out of his smarting eyes, and peered down into the half-lighted shadows of the stockaded enclosure. It was not very long before he made them out--two indistinct figures moving about among the disused and dilapidated ore sheds clustering at the track end of the old spur. Now and again a light glowed for an instant and died out, like the momentary brilliance of a gigantic fire-fly, by which the watcher on the cliff's summit knew that the two were guiding their movements by the help of an electric flash-lamp. What they were doing did not long remain a mystery. Judson heard a distance-diminished sound, like the grinding of rusty wheels upon iron rails, and presently a shadowy thing glided out of one of the ore sheds and took its place upon the track of the old spur. Followed a series of clankings still more familiar to the watcher--the _ting_ of metal upon metal, as of crow-bars and other tools cast carelessly, one upon the other, in the loading of the shadowy vehicle. Making a telescope of his hands to shut out the glare from the lighted windows of the power-house, Judson could dimly discern the two figures mounting to their places on the deck of the thing which he now knew to be a hand-car. A moment later, to the musical _click-click_ of wheels passing over rail-joints, the little car shot through the gate-way in the stockade and sped away down the spur, the two indistinct figures bowing alternately to each other like a pair of grotesque automatons. Winded and leg-weary as he was, Judson's first impulse prompted him to seek for the path to the end that he might dash down the hill and give chase. But if he would have yielded, another pursuer was before him to show him the futility of that expedient. While the clicking of the hand-car wheels was still faintly audible, a man--the door-hammering madman, Judson thought it must be--materialized suddenly from somewhere in the under-shadows to run down the track after the disappearing conspirators. The engineer saw the racing foot-pursuer left behind so quickly that his own hope of overtaking the car died almost before it had taken shape.