“Murder!” he yelled, and grasped his head in his hands to brush away the hot ashes that were searing his face.
As he did so he became a new personality. His mustache was brushed from his lip and fell to the bottom of the cab, while its former possessor made a mad dive to one side.
“Here, you chump!” cried Fogg; “do you want to kill yourself?” and grabbing the singed and frightened passenger, he pinned him against the coal and held him there. In doing this he brushed one whisker from the side of his captive’s face, and the latter lay panting and groaning with nearly all his fictitious make-up gone and quite all of his nerve collapsed.
“What’s happened?” asked Ralph, as they slowed down.
“It felt like a powder blast,” declared Fogg.
Archie Graham had uttered a cry of dismay—of discovery, too, it seemed to Ralph. The young engineer glanced at his friend perched on the top of the tender tank. The face of the young inventor was a study.
Archie acted less like a person startled than as one surprised. He appeared to be neither shocked 181 nor particularly interested. His expression was that of one disappointed. It suddenly flashed across Ralph, he could scarcely have told why, that the young inventor had indeed been “inventing” something, that something had slipped a cog, and that he was responsible for the catastrophe of the moment. Now Archie looked about him in a stealthy, baffled way, as though he was anxious to sneak away from the scene.
Half-blinded, sputtering and a sight, “his ludship” struggled out of the grasp of the fireman. His monocle was gone. His face, divested of its hirsute appendages, Ralph observed, was a decidedly evil face. As the train came to a halt the dismantled passenger stepped from the cab, and wrathfully tearing the remaining false whiskers from place, sneaked down the tracks, seeking cover from his discomfiture.
“Hi! you’ve left that nobleman face of yours behind you,” shouted Fogg after him. “What’s his game, Fairbanks?”
“It staggers me,” confessed Ralph. “Hello, there, Graham!”