With a glance at the indicator and the guages, the fireman jerked a blackened thumb over his shoulder towards the coal-tank. Macdonald shook his head.
"We'll fill her at Number Seven," he shouted.
They were bearing down upon the switch lights opposite Thorlakson. But Macdonald was in a hurry and too anxious to take advantage of the grade to stop for water there. The few scattered lights flicked by and they were off again into the blackness ahead.
On the time-card No. 7 was a "blind" water tank farther on up the line, the loneliest tank on the division. The surrounding country was wild and uninhabited save for the isolated groups of loyal track-men who stuck to their lonely but important posts during the blizzard months with the same persistence that carried them through the fly season. Engine 810 would take water there.
Fifteen minutes' run and Macdonald drew in his head, shut off steam, opened the sander, threw the brakeshoes against the drivers and brought everything to a shuddering standstill with the pilot slipping just past the tank, while his fireman was scrambling back amongst the coal to haul down the overhanging spout. And all of this was quite within the prosaics of the night's work.
What immediately followed was not. There was nothing in the locality to prepare them for it, while the hour was late and the night damp and disagreeable—nothing to account for the flying figure of a girl dashing wildly up the headlight's path, straight for the engine, arms waving frantic signals.
The engineer's wondering profanity scarcely had begun to flow freely before she was on top of them. Panting, wild-eyed, hair in riotous disorder, this beautiful young woman climbed up into the cab with the agility of an overpowering excitement, pouring out upon the astonished enginemen a wonderful stream of incoherent "explanations."
Evans, who never before had seen a girl on the verge of hysteria, swore deep and long under his breath, staring as if in a trance. He came to himself only when the water overflowed the manhole, and he let go of the spout with a carelessness that earned him a wetting as it lifted, dripping, back into place.
No sooner had the girl set foot on the deck than she clambered into the head brakeman's seat, nestling in alongside the boiler-head as far forward as she could get, her feet on the fireman's lunch-pail, her knees drawn up in clasped fingers and her eyes looking straight ahead out of the narrow cab window. That it might be against the rules of the road for strangers to ride on an engine apparently had not occurred to her, for she seemed to take it for granted that she was entirely welcome as long as she did not get in their way.
The fireman stared across at Macdonald and surreptitiously tapped his forehead; the engineer stared back at Evans and winked knowingly. The whole thing had taken but a few moments. A light was swinging out from the top of the cars at the rear and Macdonald opened the throttle. They were moving ahead before either of the two men could think of anything but several variations of the word "damn."