"What do you mean, you red-headed lubber?" he shouted, with much the lungs of his father. "What are you doing switching coal here on the main line?"
In fact, Georgie called the astonished fireman everything he could think of, until his father, who was blundering forward on his side of the engine, hearing the voice, turned, and ran around behind the tender to take a hand himself.
"Mean?" he roared above the blow of his safety. "Mean?" he bellowed in the teeth of the wind. "Mean? Why, you impudent, empty-headed, ungrateful rapscallion, what do you mean coming around here to abuse a man that's saved you and your train from the scrap?"
And big Dick Burns, standing by with his torch, burst into an Irish laugh, fairly doubled up before the nonplussed boy, and listened with great relish to the excited father and excited son. It was not hard to understand Georgie's amazement and anger at finding Soda-Water Sal behind three cars of coal half-way between stations on the main line and on his time—and that the fastest time on the division. But what amused Burns most was to see the imperturbable old Dad pitching into his boy with as much spirit as the young man himself showed.
It was because both men were scared out of their wits; scared over their narrow escape from a frightful wreck; from having each killed the other, maybe—the son the father, and the father the son.
For brave men do get scared; don't believe anything else. But between the fright of a coward and the fright of a brave man there is this difference: the coward's scare is apparent before the danger, that of the brave man after it has passed; and Burns laughed with a tremendous mirth, "at th' two o' thim a-jawin'," as he expressed it.
No man on the West End could turn on his pins quicker than Georgie Sinclair, though, if his hastiness misled him. When it all came clear he climbed into the old cab—the cab he himself had once gone against death in—and with stumbling words tried to thank the tall Irishman, who still laughed in the excitement of having won.
And when Neighbor next day, thoughtful and taciturn, heard it all, he very carefully looked Soda-Water Sal all over again.
"Dad," said he, when the boys got through telling it for the last time, "she's a better machine than I thought she was."
"There isn't a better pulling your coaches," maintained Dad Sinclair, stoutly.