The Compound sighed pityingly, and said no more.
“Git ’em all shapes in this world, don’t ye?” said Poney, “that’s Mass’chusetts all over. They half start, an’ then they stick on a dead-centre, an’ blame it all on other folk’s ways o’ treatin’ them. Talkin’ o’ Boston, Comanche told me, last night, he had a hot-box just beyond the Newtons, Friday. That was why, he says, the Accommodation was held up. Made out no end of a tale, Comanche did.”
“If I’d heard that in the shops, with my boiler out for repairs, I’d know ’t was one o’ Comanche’s lies,” the New Jersey commuter snapped. “Hot-box! Him! What happened was they’d put an extra car on, and he just lay down on the grade and squealed. They had to send 127 to help him through. Made it out a hotbox, did he? Time before that he said he was ditched! Looked me square in the headlight and told me that as cool as—as a water-tank in a cold wave. Hot-box! You ask 127 about Comanche’s hot-box. Why, Comanche he was side-tracked, and 127 (he was just about as mad as they make ’em on account o’ being called out at ten o’clock at night) took hold and snapped her into Boston in seventeen minutes. Hot-box! Hot fraud! that’s what Comanche is.”
Then ･007 put both drivers and his pilot into it, as the saying is, for he asked what sort of thing a hot-box might be?
“Paint my bell sky-blue!” said Poney, the switcher. “Make me a surface-railroad loco with a hard-wood skirtin’-board round my wheels. Break me up and cast me into five-cent sidewalk-fakirs’ mechanical toys! Here’s an eight-wheel coupled ’American’ don’t know what a hot-box is! Never heard of an emergency-stop either, did ye? Don’t know what ye carry jack-screws for? You’re too innocent to be left alone with your own tender. Oh, you—you flatcar!”
There was a roar of escaping steam before any one could answer, and ･007 nearly blistered his paint off with pure mortification.
“A hot-box,” began the Compound, picking and choosing her words as though they were coal, “a hotbox is the penalty exacted from inexperience by haste. Ahem!”
“Hot-box!” said the Jersey Suburban. “It’s the price you pay for going on the tear. It’s years since I’ve had one. It’s a disease that don’t attack shorthaulers, as a rule.”
“We never have hot-boxes on the Pennsylvania,” said the Consolidation. “They get ’em in New York—same as nervous prostration.”
“Ah, go home on a ferry-boat,” said the Mogul. “You think because you use worse grades than our road ’u’d allow, you’re a kind of Alleghany angel. Now, I’ll tell you what you... Here’s my folk. Well, I can’t stop. See you later, perhaps.”