“N-no; not exactly. It is merely a bit of good advice.”
“If it isn’t an order, I’ll go with Larry. The job may need somebody to do the talking act, and that’s a long ways my best hold.”
When the conference adjourned some few things were done to lull suspicion on the part of the blockading force—if there were any suspicions to be lulled. Three of the Short Line gangs were set at work straightening and leveling the track so hastily put down in the night; but most of the men were told to take it easy, which they did, sitting around the dying breakfast fires and idling as though they had been given orders to rest until the messenger from the Brewster court should come on the scene with the majesty of the law in his pocket.
Meanwhile Larry and Dick strolled up to the crossing as a couple of fellows with less than nothing to do and sat down on a pile of cross-ties within a few feet of the O. C. track. Every time the blocking train jingled past in its slow, back-and-forth sentry beat the O. C. engineer, a big, stubbly-bearded man who looked, as Dick said, like a twinkly-eyed bandit, leaned out of his cab window and had something to say to them. Each time Dick grinned up at him and handed back joke for joke; but at such moments Larry appeared to be studying the under parts of the locomotive—especially those directly under the cab floor, or foot-plate.
“It’s exactly as I hoped it would be,” he said in low tones to Dick, after the train had passed for the third time; “just a plain, ordinary stop-cock, the same as we have on our engines. Opens with a rod running up through the foot-plate, like one of the water hydrants on your lawn—you know; you pull on the rod and she opens. If it’s opened with a quick, hard jerk, the crank handle will most likely pull past the center, and if it does, it can’t be shut off unless somebody crawls down under her. And nobody’s going to do that while she’s in action, believe me!”
“Um,” Dick grunted; “strikes me it’s sort of lucky that you had to earn your way through school by working nights on engines in the Brewster shops—lucky for the Short Line, I mean. I wouldn’t have found out all that if I’d sat here studying her for a week.”
“Say; you two kids look mighty lonesome—hangin’ ’round here with nothin’ stirrin’,” joked the burly engineer at his next time of passing. “Why don’t you swing up and be sociable and tell us what you-all’re aimin’ to do?”
“You’d better be careful about taking us on,” laughed Dick, as they climbed to the cab in response to the repeated invitation. “We’ll do you up if we can, you know.”
“Ho! ho!” chuckled the giant on the driver’s seat. “I reckon we can take a li’l’ chance on that. What are you, anyway?—water boys for that big gang of yours?”
“Well, you might call us that,” said Dick pleasantly. “In some ways you might almost call us water specialists: we use a lot of it, anyhow; some hot and some cold.”