"Check-valve stuck; water can't get into the boiler."
"How did he know it?"
"Water-gage."
"What if he hadn't noticed it?"
Bellamy smiled in half contempt. "Say, if he hadn't noticed it for fifteen minutes, we'd have been sailing over them trees about this time—in pieces. She'd have bust her boiler."
Five minutes lost here, and we were off again, running presently into a thick fog, then into rain, and, finally, into a snow-storm. Never shall I forget the illusion, due to our great speed, that the flakes were rushing at us horizontally, shooting upward in sharp curves over the engine's headlight. And, as we swept on, the shadow of 1201 advanced beside us on the stretch of white snow as smoothly and silently as the tail of an eclipse. The engine itself was a noisy, hurrying affair, but the engine's shadow was as calm and quiet as a cloud. And I recall that the swiftness of our rush this night caused in me neither fear nor any particular emotion, although this was practically the same experience that had stirred me so the night before on 590. And I realized that riding on a swift locomotive may become a matter of course like other strange things.