"What's the matter with you? Wake up, Joe!"

"What's the matter with you?" Joe wrenched himself violently away. The man who had not slept for fortyeight hours suddenly saw realities with his open eyes. An expression of horror and then of wonder crossed his sunken face, just as it happens to one who comes out of a hypnotic state. "I thought" he said slowly. "Why, Mike! Hullo! What's the news? Ha! ha ha! D- it, I wasn't asleep. Express No. 20 is 1.55 late, and I've got orders to give freight 114 fifty-five minutes."

Mike, the brakeman, eyed the signalman with shrewd curiosity. "He hain't drunk," he muttered to himself; "he never did drink, 'cos he's married, I s'pose. I'll bet he's got the la grippe. Are you all right now?" he said aloud. "I told you 42 is 13. Put that in your pipe and smoke it."

There came the impatient tooting of a whistle, and the brakeman, with a reluctant expression, hurried out.

Again Joe was left quite alone. No one was liable to drop in now. He glanced at the clock. It was nearly nine. He had only a little over two hours to wait for his relief. He did his best to look his situation coolly in the teeth. He felt exactly as he did once while he was going under the influence of ether. He had tried braking for a week, and got a jam in the leg. He understood his condition. He felt that he was liable to go under at any moment. Fight it! Fight it like a man! This thought whirled around his brain a hundred times, until he suddenly awoke to find that he had been battling with unconsciousness in his sleep.

of generalship that is as indispensable to railroad management as the telegraph itself. In emergencies he had saved the Road many a valuable hour by his prompt decisions and many a dollar by his strategetic combinations. It was no easy matter at Sumach Junction to know how and when to dispatch trains. It requires intuition, experience, and a steadiness of nerve that would wear out an ordinary man in a week's time. As the signals were set in their normal state "at danger," so was Joe's life keyed to apprehension.

Five minutes," said Nelson, "may make the difference between victory and defeat." Five seconds at the signaltower at Sumach Junction may make the difference between security and appalling death. Joe was young and courageous. He was thirty, and in the zenith of his self-confidence.

No. 42 was a New York express, and it was thirteen minutes late. It was therefore due at Sumach Junction at twenty-six minutes past nine o'clock. This great Road, which boasted of never having killed a passenger through its own negligence, never allowed its expresses to make up a minute of lost time. If the schedule were broken, trains must conform to their new time.

Then there was the freight No. 114. Since the Chicago express was an hour and fifty-five minutes late, the freight was given fifty-five minutes' run on the delinquent's time. Thus it came about that the freight was due at any time within a half hour. Joe felt as confused as any uninitiated reader of this page by all these familiar changes, and dreaded lest any more new instructions might be telegraphed him. He had a few minutes to himself, and, not knowing why, he went downstairs, and brought up one of the red lanterns that were kept lighted in the oil-room below.

"You never can tell," he said to himself.

Then he went to the western windows of the tower. The blinding snow seemed to be turning into frozen sleet. Outward the tracks wound up a hill and an inward train on track No. 2, when the bell rang its approach, could usually be seen with ease from the tower across the valley, two miles away.

66

suspicion. He stood with one foot on the latch, with his left hand on the distant," with his right guarding the "home," with his pipe smouldering between his teeth-he stood-he swayed -he gained his equilibrium-his lids dropped-and then he fell into a doze like a soldier who sleeps upon the march.

What strange dreams! Was he in another world? What! Railroads in heaven? The same ringing, insistent bell? The same signals? Could it be that in Paradise he had to throw the "route," and the "home," and the "distant" at safety for the express? That was not the idea of heaven to which he had been brought up in the Baptist church. Then the rumbling escape of steam. The deep inhalations of a curbed engine! The shriek of the

The roar of steam, vibrating as if there were a tunnel under the track; the lights from the brilliant parlor-car windows athwart the sardonic snow; the discontented faces of aristocratic ladies peering out of mahogany frames; the increasing groups of men as they flocked in the storm to the engine; the flickering oil torch lighting up the strong and sober face of the engineer; the elegant conductor looking at his watch calculatingly in the light of his own lantern; the passengers huddling behind and around him in the blastthese formed a series of pictures that engraved themselves upon Joe's excited mind. It seemed to Joe that the express had been flung at him as if from a dark stage trap.

But how did the train get there? How could it disobey the danger signals? Joe jumped to his levers.

As has been said, all signals are kept at danger, and unless they are set to safety, the train must stop before them. When a train approaches on a clear track, the signals are set at safety toward it first the "route," next the "home," and last the "distant." As the last car passes the drooping semaphores successively, these wooden fingers are raised to danger again in reverse order: first the " distant," next the "home," and last the "route,' which is adjacent to the signal-tower itself.

وو

Joe stared at the levers. His tortured, sleepless brain had not dreamed a dream; for the distant signal, No. 1, was thrown back to danger, and the red home and route were still at safety, showing that a train had been sent through. Joe had done his duty while his body slept, and he had been awakened even while he was about to clang back the "home" to danger. He could not recall the facts; but the unlying ievers confronted him with their steel story.

Instantly he threw the whole weight of his body on the home lever, to cast it back. The red bar started, it yielded, and then, as if it had encountered an irresistible spring, it halted midway. Joe brought the lever back, and regarded it incredulously. No. 23 had often stuck this way, but No. 2 never. With

VOL. XIV.-77

an oath he cast himself at it. He put up his foot to push it; he tugged, and stopped for breath, and massed his weight again. But the lever refused to work, and the home signal remained at safety with that diabolical persistency that surprises us in soulless things. Joe stepped back and looked darkly at the mutinous signal. Should the home be allowed to show two perpendicular green lights-a clear trackwhen the express was stalled two hundred yards the other side on the same rails? For life's sake, no!

Then the Superintendent's order inundated his mind. He had clean forgotten it-" No. 114 had fifty-five minutes time over No. 20. No. 114 was the freight, my God!"

"Ring-ring-ring-ring-ring!" the electric bell announced the approach of the train far up the grade, two miles away.

At that terrible sound Joe's face took on a ghastly pallor. Now, at last, he was thoroughly awake. Well he knew that freights never mind the distant semaphore. That is the warning for expresses. Its level threat would convey no presage of evil to the engineer of that maledicted freight. Nearer still stood the two perpendicular green lights of the "home" blinking, as if to say, "Go on! Safety! A free track!" and upon that "free track" stood the disabled express.

Joe assaulted the lever again his muscles cracked; his veins became undulating mounds; sweat blinded his eyes. But the lever refused.

Now, madly, the signal-man tried to switch the oncoming freight upon the accommodation track, that diverged from the bridge. But he could not stir the rod. That open signal had locked the switch peremptorily. Then Joe breathed heavily, and stood for one awful second to marshal his tired thoughts. The ice had clogged the wire. That was it. Ice! A hammer! a bar! to pull out the pin and disconnect the lock, and then there might be time to throw the switch.

Only the station mistress, peering between her geranium-leaves to watch the blockade, noticed a wild figure bounding from the tower, down the platform,