Chapter 16 We Rescue George

I ran towards the lights. Soon I began to see the outline of the train. I was suddenly afraid that it would start up again - this was not a reasonable thought, but fear is not reasonable.

I reached the train and now I was running along its side. There were people on the ground by the engine. They could see someone running towards them with a torch, and when I was fairly near to them, one of them shouted out, 'Get back on the train! There's no need for people to be out here!'

I slowed to a walk, very out of breath. 'No,' I said, 'I'm . . . I'm not from this train. I'm from the one in front.' I pointed up ahead, but the lights of the Canadian showed nothing except trees and snow and tracks.

'What train?'one of them said.

'The Transcontinental Race Train,' I gasped. 'It's up there. You can't see it, because it's around the corner.'

'But the Race Train is supposed to be thirty-five minutes ahead of us,' said the engineer.

'It had a hot box,' I said, although this meant little to me.

'Oh, I see,' said the engineer. He and the conductor decided to start the Canadian moving forward very slowly. I was glad not to have to walk any more, and I had a chance to recover my breath.

When we were all inside, and the engineer had released the brake, he asked me, 'How far ahead is the other train?'

'I don't know exactly. I can't remember how far I ran.'

'Was it you who lit the flares?'

'Yes.'

'Did you throw one of them?'

'Yes, I had to. I thought you hadn't seen the others. I didn't think you were going to stop.'

'It was just as well you did throw that last one,' said the driver. 'I had bent down to pick up a tool. I didn't see the flare you threw, but I heard the noise of it hitting the engine, and I stood up just in time to see another one by the side of the track. Rather lucky.'

That was an understatement, if I'd ever heard one.

'Why didn't your conductor use his radio?' asked the conductor of the Canadian.

'The radio's out of order,' I explained.

There was a bend up ahead. 'I think we're close now,' I said. 'Please be careful.'

'Right,' said the engineer. He drove around the bend as slowly as possible — and braked to a stop about twenty yards from the end of the Lorrimores' carriage.

'Well,' said the driver drily, 'I wouldn't want to come around the corner at 35 m.p.h. and be faced with that.'

We climbed down from the engine and went to meet the crew from the Race Train. It was as if they knew that the Canadian would stop: they didn't talk about flares and accidents, they talked about hot boxes. It turned out that the oil had leaked away from one of the axle boxes on the horse-car, causing the axle to overheat. They were still applying snow, and thought they could refill the box with oil and get the train started again in about ten minutes.

No one had been able to find George Burley yet. George's assistant said it was a good thing that he had been travelling in the horse-car: he had recognized the smell of the overheating box and raised the alarm. If he hadn't, the axle would have broken, the train would have come off the rails, and a very serious accident would have happened.

'Did you warn any of the passengers?' I asked.

'No,' said the assistant. 'There was no need to wake them up.'

I couldn't believe my ears. 'But the Canadian might not have stopped.'

'Of course it would, when it saw the flares.'

Their trust amazed me and frightened me. The conductor of the Canadian said that he would radio ahead to Kamloops; both trains would have to stop again there. People in Kamloops would soon be getting worried, he said, about the failure of the Race Train to arrive.

For the first time, I remembered Johnson lying back there in the snow. I hadn't seen him on the way back, and wondered whether he had woken up and run away. I didn't particularly care what had happened to him, but thinking about him made me realize where George must be.

'Johnson's room,' I told the assistant. 'Look in there for George.'

I can't go knocking on passengers' doors in the middle of the night,' protested the assistant.

'If Johnson's in there,' I said, 'I'll apologize to him myself.' Johnson wasn't in there, of course, but George was. He was tied up, and had a cloth, fixed down with sticky tape, filling his mouth so that he couldn't cry out. He had been twisting and turning, but had not been able to escape. He had also been hit on the head - perhaps with the same piece of wood that had been used on me. I pulled the tape off his mouth.

'Ouch, that hurt,' complained George, but the look in his eyes showed that he was feeling more pleasure than pain.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 488