"Bless my roving nature! I am glad to hear you say that. For I tell you right now, Tom, I want to be out there when you make your final test of the locomotive."
"Do you mean that you will go West when I take out the Hercules Three-Oughts-One?" cried Tom.
"It's just what I want to do. Bless my traveling bag, Tom! I mean to be present at your final triumph."
"What will happen to your buff Orpingtons while you are gone?" asked the young inventor, gravely.
"I have got my servant trained to look after those chickens," declared Mr. Damon. "And this invention of yours is really more important than even my buff Orpingtons."
"Just the same," remarked Tom to his eccentric friend, when Rad had left the room. "I've got to fix it so that Eradicate stays at home with father. He doesn't really know how old and broken he is—poor fellow."
"His heart is green, Tom. That's what is the matter with Rad."
"He is a loyal old fellow. But I shall take Koku with me, not Rad," and the young inventor spoke decidedly. "And that is going to trouble poor Rad a lot."
The prospect of going West, however, was not the main subject of Tom's thoughts at this time. As the weeks passed and the end of the six months of experiment came nearer, the inventor was more and more troubled by the principal difficulty which had from the first confronted him. Speed.
That was the mark he had set himself. A maximum speed of two miles a minute on a level track for the Hercules 0001. With the speed already attained by both steam and electric locomotives in the more recent past, this was by no means an impossible attainment, as Tom quite well knew.