Eight several times were the jack-screws adjusted and the frogs clamped into position; but not until the ninth trial could the perverse wheels be induced to roll workmanlike up the inclined planes and into place on the rails.  Ford looked at his watch when his special was free of the switches and Olson was speeding up on the first long tangent.  With the chase still in its opening mile, Mr. North’s lead had been increased from seven hours to eight.

Leaving Denver on the spur of the moment, Ford had necessarily left many things at a standstill; and his first care, after he had assured himself that the race was fairly begun, was to write out a handful of telegrams designed to keep the battle alive during his enforced absence from the firing line.  The superintendent’s desk was hospitably unlocked, and for a busy half-hour Ford filled blank after blank, steadying himself against the pounding swing of the heavily ballasted car with a left-handed grip on the desk end.  When there remained no one else to remind, he wrote out a message to Adair, forecasting the threatened disaster, and urging the necessity of rallying the reconstructionists on the board of directors.

“That ought to stir him up,” he said to himself, bunching Adair’s telegram with the others to be sent from the first stop where the Western Union wires could be tapped.  Then he whirled around in the swing chair and scowled up at the little dial in the end of the car; scowled at the speed-recorder, and went to the door to summon the flagman.

“What’s the matter with Olson?” he demanded.  “Has he forgotten how to run since he left the Plug Mountain?  Climb up over the coal and tell him that forty miles an hour won’t do for me to-night.”

The flagman picked up his lantern and went forward; and in a minute or two later the index finger of the speed-recorder began to mount slowly toward the fifties.  At fifty-two miles to the hour, Ford, sitting in the observation end of the car where he could see the ghostly lines of the rails reeling backward into the night, smelled smoke—­the unmistakable odor of burning oil.  In three strides he had reached the rear platform, and a fourth to the right-hand railing showed him one of the car-boxes blazing to heaven.

He pulled the cord of the air-whistle, and after the stop stood by in sour silence while the crew repacked the hot box.  Since he had made the car inspectors carefully overhaul the truck gear in the Denver station, there was no one to swear at.  Olson bossed the job, did it neatly and in silence, and no one said anything when the fireman, in his haste to be useful, upset the dope-kettle and got its contents well sanded before he had overtaken it in its rolling flight down the embankment.

Ford turned away and climbed into his car at the dope-kettle incident.  There are times when retreat is the only recipe for self-restraint; and in imagination he could see the general manager’s special ticking off the miles to the eastward while his own men were sweating over the thrice-accursed journal-bearing under the “01.”