The Hazards of Helen

Summary

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.

Synopsis

Helen, informed of the danger which menaces an excursion train because another engine on the same track is running wild, mounts a motorcycle and speeds down the track to warn the passengers of their imminent peril.