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That the Western Slope Limited, two hours late and trying to make up time, should have had a hot-box and, perhaps for the first time in months, stopped at the top of Saddle Pass and presented Evelyn Walton to him was one of Fate's simpler vagaries; but that now, after five years, he should find himself beside her nearly two thousand miles from their first place of meeting was something to think about.
No, I do not want the presidency there are enough perspiring Christians for revenue only quarreling and lying about each other because of that beggarly plum already. For months past it has given every Baptist journal in the state a hot-box, has filled every little preacher's head with all the petty intrigues of peanut politics.
Behind the engines came a baggage and express car, then a day coach, a diner and a sleeper. Slower and slower moved the train and finally, with a rasping of brakes and the hissing of released steam, it stopped. "What's up?" asked Wade. "Hot-box on the diner; see it?" "Yes, and smell it. Let's go down."
"Excuse me, madame, but I'm damned if I do unless you give me more beer. I've got a throat like a hot-box." Old friend of Mr. Nicholas Crips would have recognised those crisp tones instantly. Nickie the Kid had found his vocation.
You're too innocent to be left alone with your own tender. Oh, you you flatcar!" There was a roar of escaping steam before any one could answer, and .007 nearly blistered his paint off with pure mortification. "A hot-box," began the Compound, picking and choosing her words as though they were coal, "a hotbox is the penalty exacted from inexperience by haste. Ahem!"
Leave ME behind? you recent blanket-mortgage yearlin'! You plush-lined, nickel-plated, whistlin' wash room, d' yu' figure I can't go east just as soon as west? Or I'll stay right here if it suits me, yu' dude-inhabited hot-box! Why, yu' coon-bossed face-towel " But from here he rose in flights of novelty that appalled and held me spellbound, and which are not for me to say to you.
"Paint my bell sky-blue!" said Poney, the switcher. "Make me a surface-railroad loco with a hard-wood skirtin'-board round my wheels. Break me up and cast me into five-cent sidewalk-fakirs' mechanical toys! Here's an eight-wheel coupled 'American' don't know what a hot-box is! Never heard of an emergency-stop either, did ye? Don't know what ye carry jack-screws for?
I'm a sewin'-machine, they'll guy my sand-box off in the yard." And 007, his hot-box cooled and his experience vastly enlarged, hauled the Mogul freight slowly to the roundhouse. "Hello, old man! Bin out all night, hain't ye?" said the irrepressible Poney, who had just come off duty. "Well, I must say you look it. Costly-perishable-fragile-immediate that's you!
It was a handful of people in the country a simple-hearted handful. There was no railroad only a stage which creaked through the gullies and was late. Once it had a hot-box, and the place drifted through space, a vagrant atom. Time swung on a lazy hinge.
At last the train was stopped and brought back to the scene of desolation. It terminated like the bombardment of Fort Sumter "no one hurt," and all occasioned by a hot-box that could have been cooled in a very few minutes. Much swearing and good-humored jesting were now engaged in. Such is the result of the want of presence of mind.