Albert stuck his fingers in his mouth and sucked hard, and began to wonder why everything seemed to be moving. His head, which hurt like hell, was spinning. The cloying taste of red-eye whiskey in his craw explained both familiar sensations. But why did the stars overhead keep shifting position? And why did the splintery wood he was sprawled against seem to vibrate? He reached under his thick knit cap with the hand that didn't hurt and felt a sharp pain in his skull and the stickiness of blood. Must have fallen on his head. Good thing he has a skull like a cannonball.

No, he hadn't fallen. He'd gotten into a fight. He vaguely remembered talking to a tall, rangy jigger right before the lights went out. The damnedest thing was, he felt like he was on a train. Where he had found a train in a remote lumber camp halfway up a mountain in the Cascades was a mystery to him. Still sprawled on his back, he looked around. There was a fire behind him. The wind was blowing the flames away from him, but it was too close for comfort. He could feel the heat.

A whistle screamed so close he could touch it.

Don Albert sat up and was nearly blinded by a locomotive headlight right in his face. He was riding a train all right, rolling fast, a mile a minute, with flames behind him and another train in front of him coming straight at him. A hundred lights whirled around him like lights inside a nickelodeon: the flames behind him, the locomotive's headlamp flanked by green signal lights in front of him, the electric lights on poles glaring down at the freight yard, the lights in the yard's buildings, the lights in the tents, the lantern lights bouncing up and down as men ran for their lives, trying to get out of the way of the runaway train on which he was riding.

The locomotive blowing its whistle was not coming straight at him after all but was on a track next to the one he was rolling on. That was a huge relief, until he saw the switch dead ahead.

At sixty miles an hour, the heavy gondola blasted through the closed switch as if it were made of straw instead of steel and side-swiped the locomotive, which was a switch engine shuttling a string of empty boxcars. The gondola slammed past the locomotive in a thunderstorm of sparks, screeched against the locomotive's tender and into the empties, which tumbled off the tracks as if a child had swept a checkerboard with an angry fist.

The impact barely slowed the burning gondola. Upon jumping the tracks, it crashed into a wooden roundhouse filled with mechanics repairing locomotives. Before Don Albert could even think of leaping for his life, the lights went out again.

THREE MILES TO THE south, the right spur joined the main line where it began rising in a steep grade. The Wrecker climbed the incline for a half mile and retrieved a canvas gripsack he had stashed in a thick stand of lodgepole pine. He extracted wire cutters, climbing spurs, and gloves from the grip, strapped the spurs to his boots, and waited beside a telegraph pole for the first freight train of empties that regularly headed south for fresh loads. The northern sky began to glow red. He watched with satisfaction as the redness grew brighter and brighter, blotting out the starlight. As planned, the runaway had started a fire in the construction camp and rail yard.