Before he knew well what had happened, ･007 was flying up the track into the dumb, dark world. Then fears of the night beset him. He remembered all he had ever heard of landslides, rain-piled boulders, blown trees, and strayed cattle, all that the Boston Compound had ever said of responsibility, and a great deal more that came out of his own head. With a very quavering voice he whistled for his first grade-crossing (an event in the life of a locomotive), and his nerves were in no way restored by the sight of a frantic horse and a white-faced man in a buggy less than a yard from his right shoulder. Then he was sure he would jump the track; felt his flanges mounting the rail at every curve; knew that his first grade would make him lie down even as Comanche had done at the Newtons. He whirled down the grade to Jackson’s crossing, saw the windmill west of the maples, felt the badly laid rails spring under him, and sweated big drops all over his boiler. At each jarring bump he believed an axle had smashed, and he took the eighty-foot bridge without the guard-rail like a hunted cat on the top of a fence. Then a wet leaf stuck against the glass of his headlight and threw a flying shadow on the track, so that he thought it was some little dancing animal that would feel soft if he ran over it; and anything soft underfoot frightens a locomotive as it does an elephant. But the men behind seemed quite calm. The wrecking-crew were climbing carelessly from the caboose to the tender—even jesting with the engineer, for he heard a shuffling of feet among the coal, and the snatch of a song, something like this: Oh, the Empire State must learn to wait, And the Cannon-ball go hang! When the West-bound’s ditched, and the tool-car’s hitched, And it’s ’way for the Breakdown Gang (Tare-ra!) ’Way for the Breakdown Gang! “Say! Eustis knew what he was doin’ when he designed this rig. She’s a hummer. New, too.” “Snff! Phew! She is new. That ain’t paint, that’s—” A burning pain shot through ･007’s right rear driver—a crippling, stinging pain. “This,” said ･007, as he flew, “is a hot-box. Now I know what it means. I shall go to pieces, I guess. My first road-run, too!” “Het a bit, ain’t she?” the fireman ventured to suggest to the engineer. “She’ll hold for all we want of her. We’re ’most there. Guess you chaps back had better climb into your car,” said the engineer, his hand on the brake lever. “I’ve seen men snapped off—” But the crew fled back with laughter. They had no wish to be jerked on to the track. The engineer half turned his wrist, and ･007 found his drivers pinned firm. “Now it’s come!” said ･007, as he yelled aloud, and slid like a sleigh. For the moment he fancied that he would jerk bodily from off his underpinning. “That must be the emergency-stop that Poney guyed me about,” he gasped, as soon as he could think. “Hot-box-emergency-stop. They both hurt; but now I can talk back in the round-house.”