“Oh, go back to your dog-house an’ go to sleep,” retorted Michaels, whose temper was beginning to give way under the strain.
“I can’t sleep more’n eight hours at a stretch. Think we’ll be to Athens by then?”
The engineer picked up a lump of coal, and the conductor hastily retreated.
“Say,” he sung out over his shoulder, “don’t fergit there’s a pen-stock at Stewart. Don’t pass it—it might feel slighted,” and he dodged the lump of coal, as it whizzed past his head.
“Blamed fool!” muttered Michaels, and settled into his seat.
But the four men in the cab were strangely silent as the train started westward again. There was something mysterious and alarming about all this—something positively supernatural in the disappearance of fourteen thousand gallons of water within an hour. The engineer tried his injector nervously from time to time, but for half an hour or so it worked properly, and squirted the water into the boiler as required. Then, suddenly, came the spurt of steam which told that there was no more water to squirt.
“Well,” said the engineer, in an awed voice, “that beats me. Even with th’ injector open all th’ time, no engine could drink water that way—why, it ’d flood her an’ flow out of her cupolo! Besides, her boiler ain’t more ’n half-full!”
Pinkey mechanically tried the cock again, and with the same result—the tank was nearly empty. Then, in a sort of trance, he turned to shovel in some more coal, but finding there was none lying loose within easy reach, took his rake, and climbed up the pile at the back of the tender, like a man walking in his sleep, and started to pull some coal down into the gangway.
An instant later, his companions heard a shriek of utter horror, audible even above the rattle of the engine, and the fireman rolled in a limp heap down the pile of coal, his face white as death, his eyes fairly starting from his head. If any man ever looked as though he had seen a ghost, Pinkey Jones was that man, and his terror was communicated in some degree to his companions.
“For God’s sake!” cried the brakeman, at last, seizing Pinkey by the collar and pulling him to an upright position. “What’s the matter?”