The Hazards of Helen

A lone telegraphist’s daughter, Helen, intercepts a cryptic wire that a runaway locomotive—driverless, coal-gorged, a steel rhinoceros—is thundering toward a picnic excursion packed with oblivious day-trippers. With no time to parley and the nearest siding miles away, she vaults onto a borrowed Indian Twin, leather skirt snapping like a pennant, and plunges down the cinder seam between iron rails. Mile-posts blur into hash marks; trestles quiver; the sun drops copper coins on her goggles while the phantom engine ahead snorts black bile into the sky. She is throttle against fate, a human fuse racing to splice herself between innocence and annihilation.