“There’s somethin’ on th’ track,” cried Johnson, after a moment, his trained eyes catching the first glimpse of a dim obstruction. “It’s a man!” he said. “It’s th’ track-walker. Somebody done fer him jest as he was signallin’ me! That’s why his lantern went out!” The men ran forward, Mr. Schofield among them. In the white glare of the headlight, they could see a form stretched heavily across the track, lying on its face. One of the men turned it over. “My God! It’s young West!” cried Mr. Schofield, and dropped on his knee beside him. “And shot through the breast,” added one of the detectives, indicating the growing blood-stain upon the boy’s shirt. They carried him tenderly back to the pay-car and laid him on a cot there. His right hand still grasped the handle of his shattered lantern, holding it so tightly that they could not remove it. Mr. Schofield himself did what he could to stop the flow of blood; then went forward cautiously to investigate. In the centre of the trestle, they found that a rail had been torn from the track. “There’s where we’d have been by this time but for that boy,” said Mr. Schofield, in a low voice, and motioned toward the abyss, his face set and livid. “How he got past the wreckers I can’t imagine. Now I want you men to run down the fiends who did this. We’ve got to have them, no matter what it costs! Now get after them! I’ll get this rail back—don’t bother about that—and take the pay-car in. You fellows catch these scoundrels!” The detectives hurried away into the night, while Mr. Schofield called the train-crew, got out an extra rail which was always kept by the side of the bridge, and soon had it spiked into place. “Now go ahead, Johnson,” he called to the engineer, “but you’d better run slow—maybe there’s another rail loose somewhere,” and he swung himself up the steps of the pay-car and sat down by Allan’s cot, with a very grim face. But let Johnson, the engineer, tell the rest of the story, as he told it to a group of interested auditors the very next day in the roundhouse office. “I tell you, I run over that trestle mighty cautious-like,” he said, “an’ it give me a turn when I looked down into that ditch an’ thought of what would have happened if th’ boy hadn’t flagged us. But we got across all right, an’ started through th’ cut, still runnin’ slow, fer I didn’t know but what there might be a rock on the track, when I heard somebody hollerin’ at me, an’ in a minute up comes Reddy Magraw climbin’ into th’ cab, lookin’ crazier ’n ever. “‘How did I git out here?’ he asked, wild-like. ‘Who fetched me out here? What ’m I doin’ ’way out here?’ “‘If you don’t know, I don’t,’ says I. ‘Set down there an’ rest. What’s th’ matter with your head?’ I asked, fer I saw it was all bloody on one side. “Reddy put his hand up and felt of his head; then he took his hand down an’ looked at the blood on it.