Who’s the best bluffer? Send him out. Let him kid along with Lottie. Don’t say anything. Not yet. (Pretty hard to bluff a stewardess.) Buy her a drink. No. She’d think that was funny. Buy her a coffee. God, why’d she have to come so early?

Only eight-two! You mean—eight-two already! People will be coming to meet the passengers. They won’t be worrying. Sun shining. You wouldn’t think things could be so bad inside of two hundred miles. Would you now? Really. “Act of God!” “Prince of the power of the air!” Eight-three.

•

A half dozen men had gathered in the lounge-car just after eight o’clock. The conductor came in.

“Good morning,” said a passenger. “On time—”

Just then the brakes went on with a grab that shook the whole car. One passenger went right down in the aisle; the others flopped half over in the chairs. By the time they pulled themselves up the conductor was gone.

“God! Emergency stop!”

“Anybody hurt?”

The train was standing still. The men peered out. The rain was falling by bucketfuls. On one side the train was close against the steeply sloping wall of a canyon. On the other side—across the up-track—the canyon-wall dropped off fifty feet more to a roaring stream. The clouds were drifting in so low that they covered most of the opposite wall of the canyon beyond the stream.

“Nasty place! Glad we didn’t go off the track!”

They waited five minutes—ten minutes. They speculated what the trouble might be. The porter had no idea; no trainmen showed up.

“We’ll not get in on time anyway. Tough! Here we hit every stop on the nose all the way across, and get held up just at the end.”

“Come on,” said a young man to his companion, “let’s go out. Maybe there’s been an accident.”

The sheets of rain made them hesitate, but once they had their overcoats on, neither one wanted to be the first to back down. They hurried along toward the engine, where the trainmen gathered about.

They saw, not fifty feet ahead of the engine, water flooding across the tracks. Already it had washed out a lot of ballast, and the outside track was hanging in a long sag; even the inside track was much too doubtful-looking to risk the passage of a train.

The conductor was shaking his head. “Look at that track!” he said. “The track-walker just found it in time to stop us—lucky he did, too! But not even a crew here to work on it yet. It’ll be two hours if it’s a minute. Lucky if we get away under three.”