At Morning Dew, the first night telegraph station out of the capital, the two sections were no more than a scant quarter of a mile apart; and the operator tried to flag the second section down, as reported.  This did not happen again until several stations had been passed, and Callahan set his jaw and gave the 1010 more throttle.  But at Lossing, a town of some size, the board was down and a man ran out at the crossing, swinging a red light.

Callahan looked well to the switches, with the steam shut off and his hand dropping instinctively to the air; and the superintendent shrank into his corner and gripped the window ledge when the special roared past the warning signals and on through the town beyond.  He had maintained a dazed silence since the episode of the flourished hammer, but now he was moved to yell across the cab.

“I suppose you know what you’re in for, if you live to get out of this!  It’s twenty years, in this State, to pass a danger signal!” This is not all that the superintendent said:  there were forewords and interjections, emphatic but unprintable.

Callahan’s reply was another flourish of the hammer, and a sudden outpulling of the throttle-bar; and the superintendent subsided again.

But enforced silence and the grindstone of conscious helplessness will sharpen the dullest wit.  The swerving lurch of the 1010 around the next curve set Halkett clutching for hand-holds, and the injector lever fell within his grasp.  What he did not know about the working parts of a modern locomotive was very considerable; but he did know that an injector, half opened, will waste water as fast as an inch pipe will discharge it.  And without water the Irishman would have to stop.

Callahan heard the chuckling of the wasting boiler feed before he had gone a mile beyond the curve.  It was a discovery to excuse bad language, but his protest was lamb-like.

“No more av that, if ye plaze, Misther Halkett, or me an’ Jimmy Shovel’ll have to—­Ah! would yez, now?”

Before his promotion to the superintendency Halkett had been a ward boss in the metropolis of the State.  Thinking he saw his chance, he took it, and the blow knocked Callahan silly for the moment.  Afterward there was a small free-for-all buffeting match in the narrow cab in which the fireman took a hand, and during which the racing 1010 was suffered to find her way alone.  When it was over, Callahan spat out a broken tooth and gave his orders concisely.

“Up wid him over the coal, an’ we’ll put him back in the car where he belongs.  Now, thin!”

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.

Now it so chanced that the governor and his first lieutenant in the great railway steal had weighty matters to discuss, and they had not missed the superintendent or the lawyer, supposing them to be still out on the rear platform enjoying the scenery.  Wherefore Halkett’s sudden appearance, mauled, begrimed and breathless from his late tussle with the two enginemen, was the first intimation of wrong-going that had penetrated to the inner sanctum of the private car.