IT was a nasty night, with a drizzling rain nearly as thick as a fog—a rain which obscured the signals and left the rails so slippery that a quick stop was almost impossible—yet just the sort of night to make a quick stop imperative if disaster were to be averted.

Young John Steele, station-master, telegrapher, ticket-agent, and man-of-all-work in the lone shanty known on the railway map as Hitchen’s Siding, ignored by all other maps, stood beside the telegraph instrument wondering whether the rain had affected the efficiency of the wires, or whether the train despatcher had gone crazy. Here was Number Sixteen, the freight from the west, coming in, and there were no orders for her. Number Three, known to the outside world as the “Pacific Express,” the fastest train on the road, was already forty minutes overdue, tearing westward through the night somewhere, and John did not know where. All he knew was that she was trying to make up lost time as well as the greasy metals would allow, and here he stood without orders!

Once more he seized the key, and calling the despatched office in Warmington again demanded: “What orders for Sixteen?” Then he went outside, and on his own initiative kicked away the iron clutch that released the distant semaphore. The red star of danger glimmering through the drizzle to the east might hold the express if the driver saw it in time.

Number Sixteen had drawn up to the platform, and as her conductor came forward Steele ran to meet him, shouting: “Sidetrack your train, Flynn! Sidetrack her on the jump!”

“Where’s my orders?” asked the conductor.

“There’s no orders. I order you. Get her off the main line at once.”

“Your orders! Well, for cold cheek——”

Steele lost none of the precious moments in argument, but, turning from the angry conductor, yelled to the engineer: “Whistle for the switch, and kick her back on to the siding. Number Three may be into you any moment.”

No youth in Steele’s position has the right to give a command to an engineer over the head of a conductor, neither should his orders to the conductor be oral—they must be documentary. Steele was shattering fixed rules of the road, and he knew it.

The conductor of a perishable goods train thinks himself nearly as important as if he ran an express, so Flynn was rightly indignant at this sudden assumption of unlawful authority by a no-account youth at a noaccount station. But a conductor is usually in a comparatively safe place, while the driver of an engine must bear the brunt of a head-on collision, so the grimy Morton at the throttle did not stand on etiquette, but blew the whistle for an open switch and backed his train into the siding. Steele watched the switch light turn to safety again, heaved a sigh of relief, then put his stalwart arms to the lever and slowly pulled off the danger signal to the east, and left the main line clear for the through express.

“What’s all this sweat about?” cried Flynn. “Where’s Number Three?”

“I don’t know,” replied John quietly.

“You don’t know? Well, I’m blessed! I’ll tell you one thing, my impetuous youngster. If Number Three has lost more time, and I’m ordered on to the next siding, you’ll lose your job.”

“I know it.”

John turned in from the platform to the telegraph-room, and Flynn followed him. As they advanced the instrument began a wild rataplan, and Steele paused, raising his hand for silence. Even Flynn, who did not understand its language, felt that the machine was making a frantic, agonised appeal.

“Listen to that!” cried Steele, a note of triumph in his voice.

“What’s it saying?” whispered the conductor, awed in spite of himself.

‘“Sidetrack Sixteen! Sidetrack Sixteen! In God’s name sidetrack Sixteen!’ There’s your orders at last, Flynn. It’s lucky you didn’t wait for them.”

The final words were obliterated by a roar as of a descending avalanche, and the express tore past, ripping the night and the silence; fifty miles an hour at the least; the long line of curtained windows in the sleeping-cars shimmering in the station lights like a wavering biograph picture—there and away while you drew your breath. In the stillness that followed, the brass instrument kept up its useless, idiotic chatter. A heavy step sounded on the platform, and the engineer appeared at the door, his face ghastly in its pallor, the smudges on it giving a heightening effect of contrast.