“Do we send back?” he asked.

“No,” said Ford sourly.  “Let him send forward.”

Penfield was the bearer of the president’s question.  Would it be necessary to discharge somebody in order to have his commands obeyed?

Ford answered the petulant demand as one bears with a spoiled child.  They were returning to Saint’s Rest for water.  Let the president be assured that his orders would be obeyed in due course.

“He’s a piker, the old man is,” said the big engineer, once more giving the 1012 the needful inch of release to send it grinding down the hill.  “I’d ruther pull freight thirty-six hours on end than run his car for a hundred miles.”

There was trouble getting at the water-tank in the Saint’s Rest yard.  Leckhard, acting as division engineer, telegraph superintendent, material forwarder and yardmaster, found it difficult at limes to bring order out of chaos in the forwarding yard.  It was a full hour before the jumble of material trains could be shunted and switched and juggled to permit the 1012 to drop down to the water tank; and four times during the hour Penfield climbed dutifully over the coal to tell Ford and the engineer what the president thought of them.

“Durn me! but you can take punishment like a man, Mr. Ford!” said Hector, on the heels of the fourth sending, sinking rank distinctions in his admiration for a cool fighter.  “These here polite cussin’s-out are what I can’t stand.  Reckon we’ll get away from here before the old man throws a sure-enough fit?”

“That’s entirely with the yard crew,” said Ford, calmly making himself comfortable on the fireman’s box.  “We’ll go when we can get water; and we’ll get water when the tank track is cleared.  That’s all there is to it.”  Whereupon he found his cigar case, passed it to Hector, lighted up, and waited patiently for another second-hand wigging from the Nadia.

As it chanced the tank track was cleared a few minutes later; the 1012 was backed down and supplied, and Ford instructed Leckhard to do what he could with the single, poorly manned construction wire toward giving the president’s special a clear track.

“That won’t be much,” said the hard-worked base-of-supplies man.  “We’ve got our own operator at Ten Mile, and Brissac and Frisbie have each a set of instruments which they cut in on the line with wherever they happen to be.  I don’t know where Brissac is, but Frisbie is down about Riley’s to-night, I think.  After you pass him you’ll have no help from the wires.”

“I’ll have what I can get,” asserted Ford.  “Now tell me what we’re likely to meet.”

Leckhard laughed.  “Anything on top of earth, from Brissac or Jack Benson or Frisbie chasing somewhere on a light engine, to Gallagher or Folsom coming out with a string of empties.  Oh, you’re not likely to find much dead track anywhere after you get over the mountain.”

Ford swung up beside Hector, who had been listening.  “You see what we’re in for, Hector.  Start your headlight dynamo and let’s go,” he said; and five minutes farther on, just as Penfield was about to make his fifth scramble over the coal in the tender, the 1012 took the upward road with a deafening whistle shriek as its farewell to Saint’s Rest.