“I’d like to push it off the track,” muttered Jimmy. “If it hadn’t been for that we wouldn’t be in this fix.”
After another ten minutes conversation ceased altogether. They were too hot and tired for talking. The track, with strange perversity, ran for a long way through a cut and what breeze there was failed to reach them. They watched eagerly for the mile-posts at first, but they were unusually far apart, they concluded, and they soon got tired of looking for them. A wooden trestle made the going easier while it lasted, for there were planks to walk on, but it ended all too soon and they were back on cinders and broken stone again. Near the end of the third mile they retired to the ditch at one side to let a long freight trundle past. Jimmy morosely observed that, of course, the pesky thing had to be going in the wrong direction!
They reached a small station at about half-past two and made an assault on the water tank in the little room. Perhaps fortunately, the water had not seen any ice that day. They rested a few minutes and then went on again. A hundred yards down the track Jimmy uttered an exclamation and Dud turned to find him pointing dramatically at a hand-car reposing on a couple of ties laid at right angles to the rails at one side of the way.
“What do you know about that?” asked Jimmy in awed tones.
“What about it?” asked Dud.
“Why, you chump, all we’ve got to do is slide that on the track and get to Greenbank in no time at all!”
“And get arrested for swiping railroad property!”
“We won’t swipe it; we’ll just borrow it,” said the other indignantly.
“I guess,” responded Dud dubiously, “it’s harder to work one of those things than it is to walk. Besides, we couldn’t lift it onto the rails.”
“I’ll bet we could. And all you have to do is just work those handles up and down like a pump, you on one side and I on the other. It may be hard, but it’ll be a mighty pleasant change!”