This to the fireman, who nodded in assent, but said nothing.
"You made a record, didn't you?"
"Well, we went one hundred and thirty-eight miles in one hundred and forty-three minutes; that included three stops and two slow-downs. I don't know as anybody has beat that—much."
A PLACE WHERE YELLOW EYES GLARE OUT OF DEEP SHADOWS.
By dint of questioning, I drew from this modest man some details of his achievement. The curve-bent stretch of seventeen miles between Franklin Grove and Nelson they did in fourteen minutes, and a part of this, beyond Nachusa, they took at an eighty-mile pace. They covered five miles between Clarence and Stanwood in three minutes and a half, and they made two miles beyond Dennison at over a hundred miles an hour. As the mail rushed west, word was flashed ahead, and crowds gathered at the stations to cheer and marvel.
"There must have been five hundred people on the platform at Dixon," said White, telling the story, "and they looked to me like a swarm of ants, just a black, wriggling mass, and then they were gone. We came on to a bridge there after a big reverse curve with a down grade, and I guess no one will ever know how fast we were going, as we slammed her around one way and then slammed her around the other way. It was every bit of ninety miles an hour. You got all you wanted, didn't you, Fred?"
The fireman looked up, torch in hand, and remarked, in a dry monotone: "Goin' through Dixon I said my prayers and hung on, stretched out flat. That's what I done."
"Fred and I," continued White, "both got letters about the run from the superintendent. Here's mine, if you'd like to read it."