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"Get down!--drop!" Young Dick shouted

But the opportunity had passed On a down grade, the engine picked up the train rapidly Facing thecars, with empty air at his back and the depth beneath, Tim tried to drop on hands and knees But the first twist of his shoulders brought him in contact with the car and nearly out-balanced hiht The train was et down

Young Dick, kneeling and holding, watched The train gathered way The cars moved more swiftly Tim, with a cool head, his back to the fall, his face to the passing cars, his ar point, balanced and swayed The faster the trainhis will, he controlled hi

And all would have been ith hi Dick knew it, and saw it co six inches wider than any car on the train He saw Ti He saw Tim steel himself to meet the abrupt subtraction of half a foot from the narrow space wherein he balanced He saw Tim slowly and deliberately sway out, sway out to the extre was physically inevitable An inch more, and Tim would have escaped the car An inch more and he would have fallen without iin of an inch, and hurled hi Twice he whirled sidewise, and two and a half times he turned over, ere he struck on his head and neck on the rocks

He never moved after he struck The seventy-foot fall broke his neck and crushed his skull And right there Young Dick learned death--not the ordered, decent death of civilization, wherein doctors and nurses and hypodermics ease the stricken one into the darkness, and cere institutions conspire to give a happy leave-taking and send-off to the departing shade, but sudden death, priarnished, like the death of a steer in the shaht there Young Dick learned more--the mischance of life and fate; the universe hostile to man; the need to perceive and to act, to see and know, to be sure and quick, to adjust instantly to all instant shiftage of the balance of forces that bear upon the living And right there, beside the strangely crumpled and shrunken re Dick learned that illusion must be discounted, and that reality never lied