“Don’t,” clicked Frisbie, from the other end of the long wire.  And then at the risk of giving it away to every operator on the line:  “You’re doing yourself up.  Let the president see for himself what he has let us in for.”

Ford’s reply was short and to the point.  “The order stands.  There are others besides the president to be considered.  Good night.”

“Well, we go to this here Siding Number Twelve, do we?” said Hector, when they were clambering once more to the foot-plate of the 1012.

“Safely, I think,” said the chief, adding:  “You can’t run fast enough over this track to get into trouble anyway.”

That was the way it appealed to Hector for the succeeding twenty miles.  When the track was not too rough to forbid speed, the cuts were too numerous, and the big flyer had to be bitted and held down until some of Hector’s impatience began to get into the machinery.  This shall account as it may for what happened.  A mile or two below Riley’s, where the lights were all out and the turmoil of the day of strikes had apparently subsided, the canyon opened out into a winding valley, and when Ford called across to Hector:  “There are no rock cuts on this section, and we are partly surfaced.  You can let her out a little for a few miles,” the engineer took the permission for all it was worth and sent the eight-wheeler flying down the newly-ballasted stretch.

Two long curves were rounded in safety, and the special was approaching a third, when to Ford, track-watching even more anxiously than Hector, a dull red spot appeared in the exact center of the white field of the electric.  For a moment it puzzled him, but the explanation came with a vigorous shock an instant later.  It was the oil-lamp headlight of the freight!

Hector was huge enough to be slow, if bigness were a bar to celerity.  But no drill-master of the foot-plates could have brought the flying train to a stand with the loss of fewer seconds.  Happily, too, the 1012’s electric headlight served as a danger signal seen from afar by the engineer of the freight.  So it chanced that the two great engines merely put their noses together; and by the time Penfield came scrambling over the coal with the inevitable query from the president, the jolting stop was a thing of the past, and the train was in motion again, following the freight, which was backing, at Ford’s order, to the nearest siding.

“No more hurry for us to-night, Hector,” was the boss’s dictum, when the obstructing string of empties was safely passed.  “We take it slow and sure from this on, with your fireman to flag us around the curves and through the cuts.  This was only the first section of the train that left Horse Creek at eight o’clock—­the section that was broken down at Siding Twelve.  We’re due to pick up the second section anywhere between here and the end-of-track.”

“Slow it is,” said Hector.  “I’m no hog, if I do take a little swill now and then:  I know when I’ve got enough.”