As in all such movements of extreme stress, action seemed to be slow — though you knew it was proceeding, really, with appalling speed.
Slowly, it seemed, the five cars of the train looped to right and left off the tracks, and hurled themselves like five mad beasts on the wounded locomotive. Slowly the cars and engine piled over each other like jackstraws. Slowly the whole dreadful mess came to a halt in a cloud of dust and splinters.
There was silence, in which the last remnants of the droning noise in the empty sky sounded out. Then that, too, was gone, and a chorus of screams and of hissing steam rose from the wreckage ahead.
Mac and Smitty skidded to a stop on the road beside the wreck, and ran across sandy waste from road to track.
“The murrrderin’ skurlies!” Mac ground out, as he saw a man crawl from the wreckage, stare blankly around, and then collapse. The bitter-eyed Scot shook his fist at the empty sky, from which had come the noise. “They’re fiends, no less, to do these things!”
He began hauling debris aside in a feverish search for passengers who might still be alive. Beside him Smitty, with the strength of a bull elephant, did the same.
But both, in the midst of the work, could see at a glance, all too clearly, what had caused the wreck.
The car wheels had caved under the cars and locomotive.
Every wheel they saw was cracked and flawed and broken like brittle glass that has been dropped on hard tile. The wheels had simply pounded to pieces under the speeding train, dropping cars and engine and all to slide wheelless along the track till the snout of the locomotive caught in the ties and telescoped the whole mess together.
CHAPTER XV
The Boss!
As Carlisle had said, he intended to ride with the girls on the train to the last stop before Ludlow. Nellie and Rosabel saw, as the train slowed for that stop, that it was a small depot unused and shut up during most of the day. The name of it was Larchgrow, and there wasn’t a house or building of any sort in sight of it over the sandy dunes.
“We get off here,” Carlisle said softly, as the train slowed. “You go first. Get up and walk ahead of me to the vestibule of the car. Take your bags with you so it’ll look natural.”
On this, a commuters’ train, there was no porter. Nellie took her small bag from the rack, and Rosabel took the larger one they’d brought.
They walked down the aisle.
Behind them walked Carlisle, face pleasant and smiling. He had his newspaper rolled and in his right hand. He slapped it idly against his thigh as he walked. Had anyone stared closer he might have seen the gun in the inside of the roll. No one, however, stared at all.
The two girls got off. Carlisle followed and stood a few feet from them, smiling amiably. The train rolled off, gathering momentum swiftly.
Carlisle dropped the smile.
“O.K.,” he said. “Walk ahead of me to the road— Wait! Back behind the building!”
A car had appeared on the road, and Carlisle forced the two girls to hide behind the depot till it had passed. It went by in a hurry. And then Nellie and Rosabel heard the sound that had sent Mac and Smitty, in that car, ahead so fast to try to catch up with the train.
The eerie noise from the sky.
Carlisle, blond and sleek and well-groomed as any prominent young clubman, smiled at the sound. But Nellie Gray and Rosabel stared at each other in dawning horror.
“The train!” gasped Nellie. She stared at Carlisle.
“Is that noise — does that mean — is the train going to be wrecked?”
“Probably,” said Carlisle, as indifferent about it as though discussing the weather.
“You’ll pay for these things! You’ll all pay!”
“Oh, come now,” said Carlisle affably. “I think it was very considerate of the boss not to come around while we were on the train. Don’t you?”
“The boss?” Nellie echoed him. “What unspeakable person is behind this? Or — is it you?”
“You flatter me,” said Carlisle. He prodded the two ahead of him, toward the road, distant here. “I haven’t the money it takes to hatch up a scheme like this. No, I’m not the one. But you know who the one is. You’ve all been fluttering him for forty-eight hours.”
“You mean Vanderhold? Darcey? Colonel Ringset?”
“I don’t necessarily mean any one of the three,” said Carlisle.
“Who, then?”
“My dear young lady,” Carlisle said with ghastly pleasantry, “suppose you think that just possibly you might escape. So you want to get information from me first. You haven’t a chance of escaping. But on the million-to-one possibility that you might, I shall tell you — nothing.”
“How did you know we were to be on that train?” persisted Nellie. Rosabel was looking straight ahead as she walked, by Nellie’s side, in front of the man. She was looking like a very badly scared, utterly helpless Negress. And while she looked that way, she watched for the slightest opening to act against Carlisle.
“It was reasonable to suppose that some of you would ride the train, eventually, so I rode it, too, to pick up whichever of you should board it for points north. I’ve been going back and forth all day. And finally you two get aboard.”
They went in silence, then, the rest of the way to the road. There was nothing in sight when they got there.
Carlisle shouted, “Shad!”
There was the snarl of a starter not far away, and a car wobbled over the matted growth and bumps from behind a dune where it had stopped till the car bearing Mac and Smitty had gone by.
“In!” said Carlisle, nodding to the car.
There were two men in the driver’s compartment. They were tough-looking thugs whose grins were worse than threats.
Nellie and Rosabel got in the back. Carlisle piled in front with the other two. He rode there, turned around so that he could cover the girls at every instant. Not for a second was there a gun off them.
The car drove slowly, drifting along at about thirty miles an hour. And in the sky above them the eerie droning noise began to sound again. It settled down toward them, louder and louder, nearer and nearer—
In Ludlow, Mac and Smitty delivered three badly injured persons from the wreck to the emergency hospital. The rest were coming in farmers’ cars and ambulances.
For the moment there was nothing more Smitty and Mac could do to help, so they drove to the Ludlow Hotel, where Nellie and Rosabel were supposed to come from an afternoon train. Both men resolutely put from their minds a hideous thought.
Possibly the two girls had been on that train, in the wreck, and had been so hidden by debris that their bodies hadn’t emerged during the first rescue work.
“They’ll probably show up about six o’clock, on a train routed around that point on another track,” Smitty said firmly.
“Of course,” said Mac, a little too loudly. “In the meantime, we’ll wait in the lobby.”
Ludlow was not very big, but the hotel was large and elaborate. It was supported by resorters from the city who spent a week to a summer along the beach. The lobby was as full of plush as a big city hotel.
It was not very big, for the size of the hotel, however. Mac and Smitty, sitting not far from the door, could hear what went on at the clerk’s desk.
A man came in whom Nellie Gray would have recognized, though Mac and Smitty didn’t. He was about sixty, with clear, pinkish skin, and light, clear eyes.
He went to the desk, and the clerk there was very respectful indeed. He knew this man — as did most people all around that district.
“Yes, Mr. Darcey,” he said. “What can I do for you?”