"Don't you let it come to that, as long as you have a leg to stand on, David," he said impressively. "An interregnum of ten days might make it exceedingly difficult for us to prove anything." Then, as the telegraph office watcher came to the door and shook his head as a sign that Boston was still silent: "Your time is up. Off with you, and don't let Oleson scare you when he gets 219 in motion. He is a good runner, and you have a clear track."
Kent clambered to the footplate of the smart eight-wheeler.
"Can you make it by two o'clock?" he asked, when the engineer, a big-boned, blue-eyed Norwegian, dropped the reversing lever into the corner for the start.
"Ay tank maybe so, ain'd it? Yust you climb opp dat odder box, Mester Kent, and hol' you' hair on. Ve bane gone to maig dat time, als' ve preak somedings, ja!" and he sent the light engine spinning down the yards to a quickstep of forty miles an hour.
Kent's after-memory of that distance-devouring rush was a blurred picture of a plunging, rocking, clamoring engine bounding over mile after mile of the brown plain; of the endless dizzying procession of oncoming telegraph poles hurtling like great side-flung projectiles past the cab windows; of now and then a lonely prairie station with waving semaphore arms, sighted, passed and left behind in a whirling sand-cloud in one and the same heart-beat. And for the central figure in the picture, the one constant quantity when all else was mutable and shifting and indistinct, the big, calm-eyed Norwegian on the opposite box, hurling his huge machine doggedly through space.
At 12:45 they stopped for water at a solitary tank in the midst of the brown desert. Kent got down stiffly from his cramped seat on the fireman's box and wetted his parched lips at the nozzle of the tender hose.
"Do we make it, Jarl?" he asked.
The engineer wagged his head.
"Ay tank so. Ve maig it all right iff dey haf bane got dose track clear."
"There are other trains to meet?"