dropping instinctively to the air; and the superintendent shrank into his
corner and gripped the window ledge when the special roared past the
warning signals and on through the town beyond. He had maintained a dazed
silence since the episode of the flourished hammer, but now he was moved
to yell across the cab.

"I suppose you know what you're in for, if you live to get out of this!
It's twenty years, in this State, to pass a danger signal!" This is not
all that the superintendent said: there were forewords and interjections,
emphatic but unprintable.

Callahan's reply was another flourish of the hammer, and a sudden
outpulling of the throttle-bar; and the superintendent subsided again.

But enforced silence and the grindstone of conscious helplessness will
sharpen the dullest wit. The swerving lurch of the 1010 around the next
curve set Halkett clutching for hand-holds, and the injector lever fell
within his grasp. What he did not know about the working parts of a modern
locomotive was very considerable; but he did know that an injector, half
opened, will waste water as fast as an inch pipe will discharge it. And
without water the Irishman would have to stop.

Callahan heard the chuckling of the wasting boiler feed before he had gone
a mile beyond the curve. It was a discovery to excuse bad language, but
his protest was lamb-like.

"No more av that, if ye plaze, Misther Halkett, or me an' Jimmy Shovel'll
have to--Ah! would yez, now?"

Before his promotion to the superintendency Halkett had been a ward boss