For days and days a northeaster had been blowing; it had whipped little drifts of rain and mist that stung the face and sent a chill to the bone, and, though there had been no actual downpour, the cold and the wet had never broken since the journey started. Now the wind came like a wolf down the Murchison Pass, howling and moaning. Andrew, closing his eyes, felt that the whole thing was dreamlike. Presently he would open his eyes and find himself back beside the fire in the house of Uncle Jasper, with the old man prodding his shoulder and telling him that it was bedtime. When he opened his eyes, in fact, they fell upon a solitary pine high up on the opposite slope, above the thicket where Jeff Rankin was hiding. It was a sickly tree, half naked of branches, and it shivered like a wretched animal in the wind. Then a new sound came down the pass, wolflike, indeed; it was repeated more clearly--the whistle of a train. It was the signal arranged among them for putting on the masks, and Andrew hastily adjusted his. "Did you hear that?" asked Allister as the train hooted in the distance again. Andrew turned and started at the ghostly thing which had been the face of the outlaw a moment before; he himself must look like that, he knew. "What?" he asked. "That voicelike whistle," said Allister. "There's no luck in this day--for me." "You've listened to Larry la Roche too much," said Andrew. "He's been growling ever since we started on this trail." "No, no!" returned Allister. "It's another thing, an older thing than Larry la Roche. My mother--" He stopped. Whatever it was that he was about to say, Andrew was never to hear it. The train had turned the long bend above, and now the roar of its wheels filled the canyon and covered the sound of the wind. It looked vast as a mountain as it came, rocking perceptibly on the uneven roadbed. It rounded the curve, the tail of the train flicked around, and it shot at full speed straight for the mouth of the pass. How could one man stop it? How could five men attack it after it was stopped? It was like trying to storm a medieval fortress with a popgun.