Heavy ties flew and splintered like so many matches. Sand rose in great geysers. The engineer and fireman had tried to jump at the last moment, but before they could the engine crashed over on its side. Broken boilers poured water on the hot fire, and there was a tremendous explosion.
The cars behind, with their hundreds of tons and mile-a-minute momentum, kept on grinding forward, pushing the debris of the engine along and piling in on each other. Then there was silence, punctuated by the crackle of flames and shattered finally by the screams of the passengers.
The conductor and brakeman, who had been in the last coach, were shaken up but otherwise unhurt. They rescued the passengers who were still alive, from the flames. The brakeman began running ahead to the next commuters’ town, over the roadbed from which the long section of rails had been so mysteriously taken.
The conductor raced toward a big man in ragged overalls who had helped in the wreck after appearing over the dunes a short time after the crash.
“Were you around here before the wreck?” the conductor demanded, almost out of his mind. It was the worst wreck in the road’s history. “Did you see anybody around here? Who could have taken a couple of miles of steel rails! And how, and why?”
The farmer blinked eyes that didn’t look very intelligent. He was shambling, shabby.
“I was around here for a coupla hours,” he said. “I didn’t see nobody anywheres near, though. Except in the sky.”
“In the sky?” chattered the conductor. “What are you talking about? What do you mean — in the sky?”
“I was around here lookin’ for a calf that got away,” the man said, blinking in stupid sympathy at the groaning forms laid on the sand. “I got a farm five miles in. I was in from the tracks a half-mile, mebbe. I heard a noise in the sky. It was like what a plane might make. Only there wasn’t no plane in the sky. But there was a man up there, walkin’.”
The conductor literally staggered. Then he cursed.
“Are you a lunatic? This is nothing to joke about. A man walking in the sky! You’d better have a better story to tell when the State police get here!”
“You asked what I seen,” the man said. “So I’m tellin’ you. I got good eyes. The best eyes of anybody in these parts. I see things most people have to have glasses to see. And I saw what I said.”
He shifted from one foot to the other in his earnestness.
“Way up in the sky, a guy was walkin’. Hunder’ yards to a step. He was pushin’ something in front of him. Looked about the size of a barrel. I don’t know what it was, and I don’t know how a guy can walk in the air, but that’s what this guy was doin’. I seen him plain, before he went into the sun and I couldn’t see no more.”
That was the man’s story, and he stuck to it.
He had heard a weird noise in the sky at about the time two miles of solid steel rails had vanished. He had looked for a plane, but had seen no plane. Instead, with a remarkably good pair of eyes, he had seen a man walking up there. Walking, in thin air! And pushing something ahead of him about the size of a barrel.
The crazy tale wasn’t worth paying attention to, of course. But, meanwhile, there was the theft of two miles of rail to clear up — and the thieves to be brought to justice for causing a railroad wreck of disastrous proportions.
The small Catawbi Railroad couldn’t stand many disasters like that wreck. In the small South Chicago office building owned as home office by the road, the president of the board of directors paced his office.
The president was Abel Darcey. He was not really a railroad man. He was a banker and a heavy investor in South Chicago industry, with a big home up along the lake.
The directors of the road weren’t railroad men, either. The Catawbi Railroad had a curious history.
Some years before, all the little shore towns through which the road had passed had decided that railroads were fair game for rich taxes. One after another, the townships had piled special taxes on the road till a point had been reached where its running was no longer profitable.
It had been abandoned. But that stranded several thousand well-to-do commuters with homes on the lake and offices in the city. So the commuters had gotten the taxes rescinded, each in the districts in which they lived; then they had formed their own stock company and taken the road over, with Abel Darcey to head the board of directors.
The road just about paid for itself, which was enough for the owners, since all they wanted was sure transportation. But there weren’t enough finances in its backing to stand shocks like that wreck!
Darcey stopped his pacing long enough to ring for his secretary. He was a clear-skinned man of sixty, with eyes ordinarily calm enough but now very worried indeed.
The secretary, a trim brunette, came in.
“Have you found out who made the offer to buy the road?” Darcey asked her.
“No, sir,” she said. “It came through the Michigan Bank. That’s all anyone knows.”
“Well, I notified all the chief stockholders that an offer had been made and they could get out from under if the wreck scared them off,” Darcey said, looking harassed. “I’m willing to sell and run. Got fifty thousand in the thing. Are the answers in yet?”
The secretary nodded. “One from Colonel Ringset, of Catawbi Iron Range, makes a majority report. I was just coming in with it. They don’t want to sell.”
Darcey sighed.
“I suppose they’re right in their attitude. But I wish I knew who wanted to buy. And I wish I knew what in Heaven’s name could be responsible for the disappearance of two miles — hundreds of tons — of steel railroad rails!”
The newspapers were out by then, with stories of the fantastic theft. All had big front-page headlines. But only one said anything about the sky walker.
A farmer had seen a man walking in the sky, taking hundred-yard strides and pushing something like a barrel ahead of him. The story was too silly for the big dailies to use. Only one, a minor tabloid, mentioned it.
CHAPTER V
Trapped!
Even without mention of the noise in the sky, Benson would have sped to the scene of the wreck with the first tick of the news teletype flashing news to the papers — and to him. The wreck was precisely the sort of thing he was half expecting as the next break.
But the tabloid’s account made him question the farmer first of all. The man repeated his account.
Benson’s pale eyes had no intimation of unbelief in them. Smitty and MacMurdie were looking askance at the man, but not Benson.
“You say the man was—walking—way up in the sky?” Benson said, paralyzed lips barely moving in his dead face.
“Uh-huh,” said the farmer.
“And he seemed to be pushing something ahead of him? Anyway — something was ahead of him?”
“That’s right.” The man grew belligerent. “Say, if you think I’m nutty, too—”
“I don’t think that,” said Benson quietly. “Now, you say he was walking very fast — taking huge strides up there.”
“It looked like he was takin’ a hunder’ yards to a step.”
“Mightn’t he, do you think, have been going even faster than that?”
“Yeah, he might. But he sure wasn’t goin’ any slower.”
They were standing near the wrecked cars. The roadbed, minus rails, was at one side of them. A few yards away, down a twenty-foot sand bluff, glittered the expanse of Lake Michigan, on the other side.
Several hundred yards out from shore a big lake steamer trailed a plume of smoke on its way toward Chicago.
“Can you,” said Benson, “read the name on that boat out there?”