Pursued and pursuer were now on parallel tracks. Ralph wondered if he could be mistaken, and the locomotive ahead a special or returning from duty.
To test this he gave a familiar challenge call. From ignorance or defiance there was no response. Ralph was sure that the locomotive was in charge of some one. Its movements, the cinder drift, the wheeze of the safety valve, told that the machinery was being manipulated.
Ralph cast up in his mind all the facts and probabilities of the hairbreadth exploit in which he was participating. He acted on the belief that the locomotive he was chasing was wild, or soon to be put in action as one. It would be run to some intended point, abandoned, and sent full speed ahead on its errand of destruction.
Ralph did not know what might be ahead on either track. The schedule, he remembered, showed no moving rolling stock this side of the north main. He urged his fireman to fire up to the limit and did some rapid calculating as to the chances for the next twenty miles.
The locomotive ahead was fully a mile away before Roberts got old 93 in the right trim, as he expressed it. He clucked audibly as his pet began to snort and quiver. Pieces of the machinery rattled warningly, but that only amused him.
"She's loose-jointed," he admitted to Ralph; "but she'll hold together, I reckon, if you can only keep her to the rails. That fellow ahead is sprinting, but we're catching up fast. What's the ticket?"
"Our only hope is to beat the runaway and switch or bump her."
"There will probably be worse damage if we don't stop her."
The paralleled tracks widened a few miles further on to get to the solid side of a boggy reach. It was here that No. 93 came fairly abreast of the runaway. It was here, too, that the furnace door of the runaway was opened to admit coal, and the back flare of the hissing embers outlined the figure of a man in the cab.
"She's spurting," observed Roberts, watching all this, as the runaway started on a prodigious dash.
"I see she is," nodded Ralph, grimly trying to hold No. 93 over, yet aware that she was already set at her highest possible point of tension.
"Yes, there are the station lights ahead."
About four hundred yards to the left the runaway dashed past a deserted station. Ralph never let up on speed. The chase had now led to the cut-off, a stretch of about twenty miles. Where this ran into the main again there was an important station. This point Ralph was sure had been advised of the situation from headquarters if Glidden had done his duty, and the young railroader felt sure that he had.