The panting engine slowed almost to a snail's pace, having only a scant fuel ration with which to negotiate curve and grade combined.

To our right there was a nearly sheer drop of four hundred feet, with a stream at the bottom boiling among limestone boulders.
But there was no time to study scenery.

From the middle compartment of the car there came yells for help and the peculiar noise of thump and scuffle that can't be mistaken.

Men fight in various ways, Lord knows, and the worst are the said-to-be civilized; but from Nome to Cape Town and all the way from China to Peru the veriest tenderfoot can tell in the dark the difference between fight and horseplay.
I reached the door of the compartment in time to see three of them (two bleeding from knife-wounds in the face) force Yussuf Dakmar backward toward the window, the whole lot stabbing frantically as they milled and swayed.

The fifth man was holding on to the scrimmage with his left hand and reaching round with his right, trying to stick a knife into Yussuf Dakmar's ribs without endangering his own hide.
But the sixth man was the rascal I had kicked.