Ralph had reason for the remark. The young inventor had been very little care to his sponsor and friend during the past week. Given free access to the roundhouse, Archie had just about lived there. Quiet and inoffensive, he at first had been a butt for the jokes of the wipers and the extras, but his good-natured patience disarmed those who harmlessly made fun of him, and those who maliciously persecuted him had one warning from his sledge-hammer fists, and left him alone afterwards. On this especial morning Archie was stirred with an unusual animation. Ralph noticed this when he first came down to the roundhouse. The young inventor hung around the locomotive suspiciously. He even rode on the pilot of No. 999 to the depot, and for the past five minutes he had paced restlessly up and down the platform as though the locomotive held some peculiar fascination for him. As he now came up to the cab at Ralph's hail, his eye ran over the locomotive in the most interested way in the world, and Ralph wondered why. "Call me, Fairbanks?" mumbled Archie, and Ralph could not catch his eye. "I did, Graham," responded Ralph. "What's stirring you?" "Why?" "Chasing up 999." "Am I?" "It looks that way; it looks to me as if you were watching the locomotive." "She's worth watching, isn't she?" "Yes, but you act as if you expect her to do something." "Ha! ha!--that's it, h'm--you see--say, wish I could run down the line with you this morning." "We're crowded in the cab, as you see," explained Ralph, "but if you want the discomfort of balancing on the tank cover back there----" "I'd dote on it--thanks, thanks," said Archie with a fervor that increased Ralph's curiosity as to his strange actions this particular morning. "Got some new bee in his head?" suggested Fogg, as Archie scrambled up over the coal. "He'll have a new kind of locomotive built by the time we clear the limits--that is, in his mind." Lord Lionel Montague warmed up to Ralph the next few minutes before starting time. He asked a few casual questions about the mechanisms of No. 999, and then seemed tremendously interested in the young engineer himself. "I've taken a fawncy to you, Mr. Fairbanks, don't you know," he drawled out. "I'd like to cultivate you, quite. I must call on you at Stanley Junction. There's a great deal you might tell me of interest, don't you see." "I shall be happy to be of service to you, Lord Montague," responded Ralph courteously. He did not like the man. There was something untrue about his shifty eye. There was a lot of "put on" that did not strike Ralph as natural. "His ludship" harped on the youth of Ralph. Only veterans were intrusted with important railroad positions in England--"didn't he know." He was asking many questions about Ralph's juvenile friends, as if with some secret purpose, when the train started up. "Hi, up there!" Fogg challenged Archie, seated on the tank tender top, "don't get moving up there and tumble off."