It was small wonder that Dickie Maxwell lost his nerve for just one flickering instant.
“Stop her, Larry—stop her!” he yelled. “If we keep on, the smash’ll catch us, too!”
But Larry Donovan was grimly hanging on to that priceless gift so lately discovered; namely, the gift which enables a fellow to hang on.
“No!” he yelled back. “We’ve got to stop that runaway. Clamp onto something—I’m giving her all she’s got!”
It was all over—that is, the racing part of it was—in another half-minute. As the gap was closing between the big fugitive and its tiny pursuer, Larry shouted his directions to Dick.
“Listen to me, Dick: there’s no use in two of us taking the chance of a head-ender with Eleven. When we touch I’m going to climb the ’Thirty-one. As I jump, you shut off and reverse and get back out of the way, quick! Do you hear?”
The Brewster High School ex-first-baseman heard, but he had a firm grip on his nerve, now, and had no notion of heeding.
“I won’t!” he shouted back. “Think I’m going to let you hog all the risk? Not if I know it!”
Circumstances, and the quick wit of one Larry Donovan, cut the protest—and the double risk—as the poor dog’s tail was cut off; close up under the ears. As the motorized hand-car surged up under the “goose-neck” coupling buffer on the rear of the 331’s tender, Larry did two separate and distinct things at the same instant, so to speak; snapped the motor car’s magneto spark off and so killed it, and leaped for a climbing hold on the goose-neck.
With his hold made good he permitted himself a single backward glance. True to form, the Bug, with its power cut off, was fading rapidly out of the zone of danger. Larry gathered himself with a grip on the edge of the tender flare, heaved, scrambled, hurled himself over the heaped coal and into the big compound’s cab and grabbed for the throttle and the brake-cock handle.