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Far away is the faint, familiar sound clink-clank, clink-clank of the man who tests the couplings. Nearer and nearer the sound comes.
Satan will do his best by bold attack and cunning deceit to tamper with your couplings. One of the saddest sights, and yet a not uncommon one, is to see a man who has been mightily used of God, but whose usefulness is now wholly gone.
The couplings of a train, climbing uphill from Gafsa past the Leila oasis, suddenly broke, with the result that the rear portion rushed backwards again, careered through the Gafsa station and up the artificial incline which leads towards the Oued Baiesh, crossed the bridge, and thundered at a vertiginous pace into the desert beyond.
Perhaps that was the reason I succeeded. As I walked I extended my plan. I could not march three hundred miles to the frontier. I would board a train in motion and hide under the seats, on the roof, on the couplings anywhere. What train should I take? The first, of course. After walking for two hours I perceived the signal lights of a station.
Then there was a heavy snorting and the locomotive came round a curve, rocking and belching out black smoke. The cars banged and rattled, slowing with jarred couplings and rolling on when the driving wheels gripped. Festing waited anxiously, because the wheels of a locomotive when driven hard strikes what is called a hammer blow.
Then the hands in turn began to shrink down and the cuffs to grow up into great, thick things as cumbersome as the couplings of a freight car. A voice that Mr. Trimm dimly recognized as his own was saying something about four million dollars over and over again. Mr. Trimm roused up and shook his head angrily to clear it. He rubbed his eyes free of the clouding delusion.
The journey of about ninety miles, over the very recently laid railway, was timed to take some eight or nine hours, and was uneventful and, though we travelled in open trucks, was not too unpleasantly hot. The frequent short gradients led to the most awful bumps and tearings at the couplings, but they stood the strain all right.
The blasts ceased at the funnel, and as the slackening couplings clashed while the cars rolled slowly through the eddying dust I started in amaze, for there were two faces at the unglazed windows of the decorated observation car which I knew well, but had never expected to see there.
Cheyne, in the boudoir stateroom, where the French maid, sallow-white with fear, clung to the silver door-handle, only moaned a little and begged her husband to bid them "hurry." And so they dropped the dry sands and moon-struck rocks of Arizona behind them, and grilled on till the crash of the couplings and the wheeze of the brake-hose told them they were at Coolidge by the Continental Divide.
"Seems like looking back on a quite separate life, doesn't it?" "Yes," said Lewis, nodding, "it does." "Of course it does, and in that fact you've got the germ of an individual philosophy. Every man who goes through the stress of life has need of an individual philosophy." "What's yours, sir?" "I was going to tell you. Life, to me, is like this train, a lot of sections and a lot of couplings.
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