Toomey dropped his shovel and glanced forward over Ben's burly shoulder, then, grabbing the vertical handrails on cab and tender, leaned out and gazed astern. The wagon road twisted over the bleak "divide" the train had just rounded, and, barring a team or two jogging slowly into town, was bare of traffic. "No chasers so far," he shouted, as he again stooped to his tools. "No chasers but us could catch 'em," growled Ben. "We'll give 'em a toot of the whistle!" he shouted across to Geordie, and the steam blast shrieked through the keen morning air in obedience to the quick pull at the cord. And now 705 was fairly flying, the green flags at the rear flattened like shingles in the whistling wind, and a cloud of mingled dust and smoke rolling furiously after the caboose. Big Ben had "pulled her wide open," and under full head of steam the powerful engine tore like a black meteor up the glistening track. In eagerness and excitement almost uncontrollable George Graham clung to his perch and gazed with all his eyes. Barely a mile ahead now spurred the fugitives, his old friend Nolan in their midst--Nolan whom he had come all those miles to see! And then a strange thing happened. So far from finding reassurance, friendship, sympathy in the whistle blast, the riders had read the very opposite. So far from slackening speed and letting the signalling train come up on them, they had suddenly veered to the left, the south, and, bending low like jockies over their coursers' manes, they shot across the track, dived down into the pebbly bottom, and the next thing Geordie saw they were plunging breast-deep through the brown and heaving torrent, the waters foaming at their knees. "Might 'a' known it!" bellowed Toomey, disgusted. "'Course they reason we've got the sheriff and posse aboard, and they're taking the short-cut to the--you know," he said, with a sudden significant gulp, to Geordie, and a warning glance at Ben. Even now that he had left the trooper habits months behind, Toomey could not forget or disregard trooper ethics. Ben might be friendly to Nolan, just as he claimed, but--would Ben keep other's secrets?