Nine hours of sharp work lay between the hurried conference in Loring’s bedroom and the drive to the station at a quarter before eleven.  Boston had been wired; divers and sundry friends of the railway company had been interviewed; some few affidavits had been secured; and now they were waiting to give Boston its last chance, with a clerk hanging over the operator in the station telegraph office to catch the first word of encouragement.

“If the Advisory Board doesn’t send us something pretty solid, I’m going into this thing lame,” said Kent, dubiously.  “Of course, what Boston can send us will be only corroborative; unfortunately we can’t wire affidavits.  But it will help.  What we have secured here lacks directness.”

“Necessarily,” said Loring.  “But I’m banking on the Board.  If we don’t get the ammunition before you have to start, I can wire it to you at Gaston.  That gives us three hours more to go and come on.”

“Yes; and if it comes to the worst—­if the decision be unfavorable—­it can only embarrass us temporarily.  This is merely the preliminary hearing, and nothing permanent can be established until we have had a hearing on the merits, and we can go armed to that, at all events.”

The general manager was looking at his watch, and he shut the case with a snap.

“Don’t you let it come to that, as long as you have a leg to stand on, David,” he said impressively.  “An interregnum of ten days might make it exceedingly difficult for us to prove anything.”  Then, as the telegraph office watcher came to the door and shook his head as a sign that Boston was still silent:  “Your time is up.  Off with you, and don’t let Oleson scare you when he gets 219 in motion.  He is a good runner, and you have a clear track.”

Kent clambered to the footplate of the smart eight-wheeler.

“Can you make it by two o’clock?” he asked, when the engineer, a big-boned, blue-eyed Norwegian, dropped the reversing lever into the corner for the start.

“Ay tank maybe so, ain’d it?  Yust you climb opp dat odder box, Mester Kent, and hol’ you’ hair on.  Ve bane gone to maig dat time, als’ ve preak somedings, ja!” and he sent the light engine spinning down the yards to a quickstep of forty miles an hour.

Kent’s after-memory of that distance-devouring rush was a blurred picture of a plunging, rocking, clamoring engine bounding over mile after mile of the brown plain; of the endless dizzying procession of oncoming telegraph poles hurtling like great side-flung projectiles past the cab windows; of now and then a lonely prairie station with waving semaphore arms, sighted, passed and left behind in a whirling sand-cloud in one and the same heart-beat.  And for the central figure in the picture, the one constant quantity when all else was mutable and shifting and indistinct, the big, calm-eyed Norwegian on the opposite box, hurling his huge machine doggedly through space.