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"Now fwhat the divvle will that be?" he rasped, pausing, torch in hand, to apostrophize his fireman. The answer came up out of the shadows to the rear on the lips of M'Tosh, the train-master. "You have the Naught-seven to-night, Callahan, and a pretty severe head wind. Can you make your time?"
And while they wrestle with the dumping-bar, these two, the poising figures have swarmed upon the Naught-seven, and a voice is lifted above the Babel of others in sharp protest. "Put away that rope, boys! There's law here, and by God, we're going to maintain it!" At this a man pushes his way out of the thick of the crowd and climbs to a seat beside the chauffeur in the waiting automobile.
He'd put his neck in a rope to spite the major. But it's a crazy thing, Mr. Kent." "I know it; but if it will give me twenty-four hours " "It won't. They can't get home on our line because we'll be tied up. But they can get the Naught-seven put on the Overland's Limited at A. & T. Junction, and that will put them back here before you've had time to turn around twice. Have they come down yet?"
When Receiver Guilford took possession of the properties, appurtenances and appendages of the sequestered Trans-Western Railway, one of the luxuries to which he fell heir was private car "Naught-seven," a commodious hotel on wheels originally used as the directors' car of the Western Pacific, and later taken over by Loring to be put in commission as the general manager's special.
An engine, not overburdened, uses less water proportionately to miles run as the speed is increased. He could outpace the safe-guarding mail, save water and take the chance of being shot in the back from the forward vestibule of the Naught-seven when he had gained lead enough to make a main-line stop safe for the men behind him.
Ormsby put his head out of the window and saw that the private car was to be taken on; remarked also that the thing was done with the utmost celerity. Once out on the main line with car Naught-seven coupled in, the train was backed swiftly down to the station and the small mystery of hurryings was sufficiently solved.
It was half an hour later when the door of the library opened to readmit the private secretary and the contractor, and in the interval the division superintendent's clerk had returned to say that the special train schedule was made up, and that the Naught-Seven would be waiting at the Union Station at twelve-ten.
With the mail treading on their heels the gentlemen in the Naught-seven will be chary about pulling Patsy down too suddenly in mid career. They have just passed Morning Dew, and the operator reports Tischer for disregarding his slow signal." "Can't you fix that?" asked Kent. "Oh, yes; that is one of the things I can fix. But there are going to be plenty of others."
There was yet a full hour's run ahead of him, and there was no more than a scant foot of water in the tank with which to make it. Thereafter he forgot the Naught-seven, and whatever menace it held for him, and was concerned chiefly with the thing mechanical. Would the water last him through?
Halkett had to go, and he went, not altogether unwillingly. And when it came to jumping across from the rear of the tender to the forward vestibule of the Naught-seven, or being chucked across, he jumped.
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