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some mighty smart cooking out on the range,” Huck observed, “but this beats anything I ever ran into.”
    After they’d eaten all their belts could hold comfortably, they lit up pipes and cigarettes and smoked in dreamy comfort, staring out of the open door at the corn and wheat fields, the stretches of rolling grassland that flew past in endless panorama of sun-drenched peace.
    “We’ll hit the Washoe yards in a hour or so now,” Old Tom observed.
    “Yeah,” nodded Lank. “Hafta unload then. There’s an alley ‘longside the yard lead, jest ‘fóre they stop to change engines. We’ll duck inter that and lie low until she’s ready to pull out again. Think they’ll be lookin’ for you two fellers?”
    “Don’t think so,” Gaylord replied. “Got a notion this quick-thinkin’ young hellion fooled ‘em proper. Chances are they’re still beatin’ up the brush or combin’ the town for us.”
    “Sounds reasonable,” admitted Lank. “I got a notion it’ll work out jest as you figger.”
    It did. They passed the Washoe yards without incident, leaving the train in case of an inspection by the bulls, lying in the long grass of the alley until the wheels began to turn again and then making a quick dash for the open car.
    All day the train boomed across endless plains, the grade climbing steadily; and as the dusk began to turn the hollows into mystic blue lakes ofshadow, the skyline changed. Ahead were vast, nebulous shapes rising into the sun-washed vault. Shadowy and unreal at first, they swiftly took on solidity and form.
    “Mountains,” Old Tom grunted. “We’re in Colorado, now, shootin’ through Baco County. Las Animas next, and my stop.”
    “Mine, too,” Lank Mason remarked, “over near the Huerfano line.”
    The train roared into a cut, crashed through between steeply restraining walls, and then thundered along in the deepening shadow of towering cliffs.
    Huck leaned against the jamb of the boxcar door and rested his eyes wonderingly on the wild grandeur of the mountain scenery looming against the angry red of a stormy sunset sky. It was Huck who—even before the engineer of the manifest—first saw the avalanche of earth and stone roaring down toward the track over which the train would have to pass.
    Under the beat of winter hail and summer rain, that gaunt cliff had stood throughout the ages—had staunchly resisted the onslaught of the elements. But the patient, never resting, never despairing fingers of frost and water probed deeper and deeper, prying strata from strata, cracking with quiet, persistent strength the heart of eternal rock itself.
    And now, the air waves disturbed by the pounding exhaust of the giant locomotive provided the final kinetic push necessary to disturb the delicate balance of the hesitating granite.
    Outward and downward, slowly, majestically atfirst, as if reluctant to leave its bed of the eons, the mighty mass answered the resistless pull of gravity. With appalling swiftness it gathered speed, rolling, tumbling, with individual segments the size of a house leaping high into the air and hurtling through space for hundreds of yards.
    Like the raised lip of an angry dog, the grinding flood upreared at the edge of the towering battlement that flanked the right-of-way. It seemed to poise for a moment, straining for greater height in its upward sweep; then the curling lip broke raggedly and hurtled downward toward the slim wisps of the tracks half a thousand feet below.

IV
Roaring Death
    In the locomotive cab, the grizzled engineer, a veteran of half a dozen wrecks in the wild mountain country, fought with every trick he knew to save his train from that mighty surge. His fireman’s warning yell had been his first inkling of disaster ahead as the engine lurched around a curve. He slammed the throttle shut and threw on every ounce of pressure in his brake cylinders.
    The screech of air through the port, the clanging of brake rigging and the grind of the shoes against