All the while the station-agent, panic-stricken, rattled on Sinclair was looking at his watch—casting it up—charting it all under his thick, gray, grizzled wool, fast as thought could compass.
No. 1 headed for Acton, and her pace was a hustle every mile of the way; three cars of coal blowing down on her, how fast he dared not think; and through it all he was asking himself what day it was. Thursday? Up! Yes, Georgie, his boy, was on the Flyer No. 1. It was his day up. If they met on a curve—
"Uncouple her!" roared Dad Sinclair, in a giant tone.
"What are you going to do?"
"Burns," thundered Dad to his fireman, "give her steam, and quick, boy! Dump in grease, waste, oil, everything! Are you clear there?" he cried, opening the throttle as he looked back.
The old engine, pulling clear of her coaches, quivered as she gathered herself under the steam. She leaped ahead with a swish. The drivers churned in the sand, bit into it with gritting tires, and forged ahead with a suck and a hiss and a roar. Before Reynolds had fairly gathered his wits, Sinclair, leaving his train on the main track in front of the depot, was clattering over the switch after the runaways. The wind was a terror, and they had too good a start. But the way Soda-Water Sal took the gait when she once felt her feet under her made the wrinkled engineer at her throttle set his mouth with the grimness of a gamester. It meant the runaways—and catch them—or the ditch for Soda-Water Sal; and the throbbing old machine seemed to know it, for her nose hung to the steel like the snout of a pointer.
He was a man of a hundred even then—Burns; but nobody knew it, then. We hadn't thought much about Burns before. He was a tall, lank Irish boy, with an open face and a morning smile. Dad Sinclair took him on because nobody else would have him. Burns was so green that Foley said you couldn't set his name afire. He would, so Foley said, put out a hot box just by blinking at it.
But every man's turn comes once, and it had come for Burns. It was Dick Burns's chance now to show what manner of stuff was bred in his long Irish bones. It was his task to make the steam—if he could—faster than Dad Sinclair could burn it. What use to grip the throttle and scheme if Burns didn't furnish the power, put the life into her heels as she raced the wind—the merciless, restless gale sweeping over the prairie faster than horse could fly before it?
Working smoothly and swiftly into a dizzy whirl, the monstrous drivers took the steel in leaps and bounds. Dad Sinclair, leaning from the cab window, gloatingly watched their gathering speed, pulled the bar up notch after notch, and fed Burns's fire into the old engine's arteries fast and faster than she could throw it into her steel hoofs.
That was the night the West End knew that a greenhorn had cast his chrysalis and stood out a man. Knew that the honor-roll of our frontier division wanted one more name, and that it was big Dick Burns's. Sinclair hung silently desperate to the throttle, his eyes straining into the night ahead, and the face of the long Irish boy, streaked with smut and channelled with sweat, lit every minute with the glare of the furnace as he fed the white-hot blast that leaped and curled and foamed under the crown-sheet of Soda-Water Sal.