Just ahead of her she
could see the trestle that led to the railroad bridge and the steps
mounting up to it. The station lay across the river.
Another sounds startled her, the melancholy siren of an approaching
train, and almost simultaneously, a repeated call, thin now and
far away.
"Gloria! Gloria!"
Anthony must have followed the main road. She laughed with a sort of
malicious cunning at having eluded him; she could spare the time to wait
until the train went by.
The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory
roar and clamor, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the
shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush
of the cleft wind and the clocklike tick of the rails, moved toward the
bridge--it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of
blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them,
which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an
instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back
instinctively to the far side of the road. The light was tepid, the
temperature of warm blood.... The clicking blended suddenly with itself
in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the
thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the
lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside.
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