"But you know the fireman's story?"
"No."
"Well, he claims that they were running at a maddening rate of speed, that he and the engineer had quarrelled as to their relative positions in the estimation of the public in general, the strikers in particular. Cowels threw a hammer at the fireman, whereupon Guerin, as he claims, caught the man by the left arm and by the back of the neck and shoved his head out of the window. The engineer resisted, but Guerin, who is something of an athlete, held him down and in a few moments the man collapsed."
"How fast were they going?"
"Well, that is a question to be settled by experts. How fast will Blackwings go with four cars empty?"
"Ninety miles an hour."
"How fast would she go, working 'wide open in the first notch,' as you people say, down Zero Hill?"
"She would go in the ditch—she could hardly be expected to hold the rail for more than two minutes."
"But she did hold it."
"I don't believe it," said the old driver; "but if she did, she must have made a hundred miles an hour, and in that case the mystery of Cowels's death is solved—he was drowned."