Burke’s grin didn’t last long, for at that moment came Number One’s long, clear siren note, and back over the tender a streak of light shot out in a wide circle from around a butte and then danced along the rails and began to light up the platform, as the Limited thundered, five minutes late, into the straight stretch. “Holy fishplates!” yelled Burke. “I’ve got to get a man to fire. Spitzer, you run like hell to the roundhouse and----” Burke stopped. Spitzer stopped him. There are moments in everybody’s life when they rise above themselves, above habit, above environment, above everything, if even for only a brief instant. A chance like this would never come again. If he could fire one trip maybe Regan would change his mind. Spitzer grasped at it frantically, despairingly. “Burke, I _can_ fire,” he fairly screamed. “Give me a chance, Burke. I’ll never get one if you don’t.” Burke gasped for a moment like a man with his breath knocked out of him, then something like a dry chuckle sounded in his throat. No one knows but Burke what decided him. It might have been either of two things, or a combination of them both--Spitzer’s pleading face, or the desire to take a rise out of Regan--Burke and Regan not having been on the best of terms since the last general elections. Be that as it may, Burke pointed at the squirming fireman. “Take his feet,” he grunted. Together they lifted and dragged the stricken Mac-Aloon out of the cab and to the ground. 1108, pulling Number One, had come to a stop abreast of them by now, and Burke shouted at the engine crew. “Here!” he bawled. “Lend a hand!” And as both men stuck their heads out of the gangway, he and Spitzer boosted the fireman up to them. “Got cramps,” explained Burke tersely. “You’ll be able to fix him up in the roundhouse. Five minutes late, h’m? Well, hurry, you’re clear. There’s your ‘go-ahead.’ Pull out and let me get hold.” Burke turned to Spitzer, as 1108 slipped away from the baggage-car and moved up the track, and pointed to the gangway of his own engine. “Get in,” he said grimly. “You’ll get a chance to fire, and, take it from me, you’ll never get a chance to do that or anything else again this side of the happy hunting-grounds, my bucko, if you throw me down.” And while Regan quarreled amiably over a game of pedro upstairs in the station with Carleton, 503, with Spitzer, touzled-haired, mild-eyed, heart-beating-like-a-trip-hammer Spitzer, in the cab, backed down on the Imperial Limited and coupled on for the mountain run. There was a quick testing of the “air,” a hurried running up and down the platform, and then Burke, leaning from the window with his arms stretched out inside the cab and fingers on the throttle, opened a notch, and the platform began to slide past them.