"Oh, it went all right!" chuckled Mr. Tolman. "The trouble was not with its _going_. The difficulty was that as it flew along the rails a cow suddenly loomed in its pathway and as she did not move out of the way of the approaching car she and the railroad pioneers came into collision. With a crash the car toppled over and the editors, together with the enraged Peter Cooper, were thrown out into the mud. Of course the affair caused the public no end of laughter but to Cooper and his guests it proved convincingly that sails were not a desirable substitute for steam power." "I suppose Cooper then went to work to build some other kind of a railroad," mused Steve. "That is exactly what he did," was the rejoinder. "He did not, however, do this deliberately but rather fell into a dilemma that left him no other choice. You see a group of men coaxed him to buy some land through which it was expected the new Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was to pass. These prospectors figured that as the road was already started and a portion of the wooden track laid the railroad was a sure thing, and by selling their land to the railroad authorities they would be enabled to turn quite a fortune for themselves. In all good faith Cooper had joined the company and then, after discovering that the railroad men had apparently abandoned their plan to build, in dastardly fashion, one after another of the promoters wriggled out of the enterprise and left poor Peter Cooper with a large part of his money tied up in a worthless, partially constructed railroad." "What a rotten trick!" cried Steve. "Yes; and yet perhaps Cooper deserved a little chastisement," smiled Mr. Tolman. "Instead of making money out of other people as he had intended--" "He got stung himself!" burst out the boy. "Practically so, yes," was the reply. "Well, at any rate, there he was and if he was ever to get back any of his fortune he must demonstrate that he had profound faith in the partly constructed railroad. Accordingly he bought a small engine weighing about a ton--" "One ton!"