Now, as every one knows, hot boxes, besides being perversely incurable, are the sworn enemies of high speed.  At forty miles to the hour the journal was smoking again.  At forty-five it burst into flames.  Once more it was patiently cooled by bucketings of water drawn from the engine tank; after which necessary preliminary Olson spoke his mind.

“Ay tank ve never get someveres vit dat hal-fer-damn brass, Meester Ford.  Ay yust see if Ay can’t find ’noder wone.”  And he rummaged in the car lockers till he did find another.

Unfortunately, however, the spare brass proved to be of the wrong pattern; a Pullman, instead of a P. S-W. standard.  Olson was a trained mechanic and a man of resources, and he chipped and filed and scraped at the misfit brass until he made it serve.  But when he climbed again to the cab of his engine, and Ford swung up to the steps of the car, the white headlight eye of an east-bound freight, left at a siding a full hour’s run to the rear, came in sight from the observation platform of the laboring special.

These were the inauspicious beginnings of the pursuit; and the middle part and the ending varied only in degree.  All the way up to midnight, at which hour a station of a bigness to supply a standard brass was reached, the tinkered journal-bearing gave trouble and killed speed.  Set once more in running order upon its full quota of sixteen practicable wheels, the special had fallen so far behind its Denver-planned schedule as not only to be in the way of everything else on the division, but to find everything else in its way.  Ford held on stubbornly until the lead of the train he was trying to outrun had increased to twelve hours.  Then he gave it up, directing his crew to turn the train on the nearest “Y,” and to ask for retracing orders to Denver.  After which he went to bed in the state-room of the borrowed car, and for the first time in his experience was a man handsomely beaten by the perversity of insensate things.

The request for the retracing orders was sent from Coquina; and when it came clicking into the despatcher’s office at Denver, a sleep-sodden young man with an extinct cigar between his teeth rose up out of his chair, stretched, yawned, and pointed for the door.

“Going to leave us, Mr. Eckstein?” said the trick despatcher who was sitting at the train table.

“Yes.  If Mr. Ford has changed his mind, I may as well go home and go to bed.”

“Reckon he forgot something, and has to come back after it?” laughed the operator.

“Maybe,” said the private secretary, and he went out, shutting the door behind him with the bat-like softness and precision that was his distinguishing characteristic.

The sounders were clicking monotonously when the trick man turned to the relief operator who was checking Darby’s transfer sheet.

“What do you suppose Eckstein was up to, sitting here all night, Jim?”

“Give it up,” said the relief man.  “Ask me something easy.”