The Red Signal (Grace Livingston Hill Book) by Grace Livingston Hill

'phone, then I won't bother you,” and he vanished into the little booth at the other side of the room. “That fellow takes on a great many airs for an engineer, I should say!” remarked a traveller at the ticket window as he received his belated change from the ticket agent. “Perhaps you'd like to call up my grandmother for me?”
     The agent eyed the stranger scornfully.
    “Nobody has a better right,” he remarked with a withering glance. “His father's the president of the road!” Then he turned with a grim smile and enjoyed the chagrin on the face of the stranger.
    Three minutes later the young engineer burst forth from the telephone booth with a smile on his firm lips and a light of battle in his eyes. A word with the train dispatcher, and he swung up into his cab, opened the throttle and set No. 5 booming down the track.
    A stubby little man with a face like a purple turnip, and small, curious eyes, watched from his station behind a pile of milk cans and then hurried across the road to a little cigar store where was a telephone. He put his head in at the door and spoke in a cunning whisper:
     “You c’n tell ’em she's went!” he remarked laconically, and then with an air of having completed an arduous task he lounged over to the saloon and refreshed himself.
    Three minutes later one of the oldest and most trusted engineers on the road, who had just come in from his regular run and was looking forward to a few hours at his home, received a rush order to take his engine to a certain siding ten miles above the Junction and wait for No. 5.
    About the same time, from a city twenty miles beyond Platt's Crossing a group of men, several of them belonging to the Secret Service, tumbled hurriedly on a special train, with every track cleared ahead of them, and sped as fast as steam could carry them toward the bridge that spanned the stream at Platt's Crossing.
    No sound of whistle went ahead to warn of their coming as they approached the bridge. The engine slowing down, came to a halt in the woods. They had their orders not to alarm the people of the region nor to startle any lurkers and put them on their guard.
    Silently the little company swarmed from the special and melted into the woods, coming by devious ways through the underbrush, each one in his own appointed spot, to search the bridge and the track in either direction.
    When No. 5 reached the lonely siding where the trusted engineer waited, it was the work of but a few minutes to juggle around some empty box cars that stood on the side track, and presently No. 5 thundered complacently on its way to Platt's Crossing, making up time while the most trusted engineer rumbled off on a detour toward the coast with a string of innocent-looking cars racketing be-hind him and smiling grimly as he thought of home and bed and the rest he would have taken if it had not been for that special order; but he looked back at his train now and then as it followed him round a curve, and there was a complacent triumph in his eye despite the lost rest.
    It was just half an hour since she entered the barn, if Hilda had only known it, till the 'phone rang, and startled her into a frightened heap in the hay again. Then, as she sank down, her senses seemed to come awake.
    Schwarz had not locked that door with a key when he went out of the barn! It must, have locked itself automatically with a night latch when he closed the door! Why couldn't she then open it from the inside? Why couldn't she get out now, quickly, before he came? There might not he another chance for hours.
    She started up, peered cautiously out from the window, saw that Schwarz was still shouting at the men as he backed toward the barn; and then she dived down the ladder, groping her way to the door. There was one heart-throbbing minute when she fumbled for the little knob of the latch, turned it and found that the door yielded; then a glad whiff of fresh air in her face as she held her breath and peered listening