The governor planned it in a few curt sentences.  Was there a weapon to be had?  Danforth, the private secretary, roused from his nap in the wicker chair, was able to produce a serviceable revolver.  Two minutes later, the sleep still tingling in his nerves to augment another tingling less pleasurable, the secretary had spanned the terrible gap separating the car from the engine and was making his way over the coal, fluttering his handkerchief in token of his peaceful intentions.

He was charged with a message to Callahan, mandatory in its first form, and bribe-promising in its second; and he was covered from the forward vestibule of the private car by the revolver in the hands of a resolute and determined state executive.

“One of them’s comin’ ahead over the coal,” warned James Shovel; and Callahan found his hammer.

“Run ahead an’ take a siding, is ut?” he shouted, glaring down on the messenger.  “I have me ordhers fr’m betther men than thim that sint you.  Go back an’ tell thim so.”

“You’ll be paid if you do, and you’ll be shot if you don’t,” yelled the secretary, persuasively.

“Tell the boss he can’t shoot two av us to wanst; an’ the wan that’s left’ll slap on the air,” was Callahan’s answer; and he slacked off a little to bring the following train within easy striking distance.

Danforth went painfully and carefully back with this defiance, and while he was bridging the nerve-trying gap, another station with the stop-board down and red lights frantically swinging was passed with a roar and a whistle shriek.

“Fwhat are they doing now?” called Callahan to his fireman.

“They’ve gone inside again,” was the reply.

“Go back an’ thry the tank,” was the command; and Jimmy Shovel climbed over the coal and let himself down feet foremost into the manhole.  When he slid back to the footplate his legs were wet to the mid shin.

“It’s only up to there,” he reported, measuring with his hand.

Callahan looked at his watch.  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?  He had once made one hundred and seventy miles on a special run with the 1010 without refilling his tank; but that was with the light engine alone.  Now he had the private car behind him, and it seemed at times to pull with all the drag of a heavy train.

But one expedient remained, and that carried with it the risk of his life.  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.