inspecting every inch of her, torch in hand, and he assured
me he would take her through all right, grip or no grip.

And take her through he did. At 1.16 A.M. my old friend, locomotive 590,
brought the flier up from Chicago, six minutes ahead of the schedule.
Kelly had done himself proud this time. And six minutes later, on time
to the minute, we drew out behind 1201, with Byron handling her and
seventy tons of mail following after.

Our fireman was named Bellamy. He wore isinglass goggles against the
heat, and, in his way, he was a humorist, as I discovered presently,
when he came close to me (we were running at a sixty-mile gait), and,
grinning like a Dante demon, remarked slowly:
"Say--if--we--go--in--the--ditch--will--you--come--along?"

The first feature of this run was some trouble with a feed-pipe from the
tank, which brought us to a sudden standstill in the open night with a
great hissing of steam.

"What is it?" I asked of Bellamy, while Byron, grumbling maledictions,
hammered under the truck.

"Check-valve stuck; water can't get into the boiler."

"How did he know it?"

"Water-gage."

"What if he hadn't noticed it?"

Bellamy smiled in half contempt. "Say, if he hadn't noticed it for
fifteen minutes, we'd have been sailing over them trees about this
time--in pieces. She'd have bust her boiler."

Five minutes lost here, and we were off again, running presently into a
thick fog, then into rain, and, finally, into a snow-storm. Never shall
I forget the illusion, due to our great speed, that the flakes were
rushing at us horizontally, shooting upward in sharp curves over the
engine's headlight. And, as we swept on, the shadow of 1201 advanced
beside us on the stretch of white snow as smoothly and silently as the
tail of an eclipse. The engine itself was a noisy, hurrying affair, but
the engine's shadow was as calm and quiet as a cloud. And I recall that
the swiftness of our rush this night caused in me neither fear nor any
particular emotion, although this was practically the same experience
that had stirred me so the night before on 590. And I realized that
riding on a swift locomotive may become a matter of course like other
strange things.

III

SOME MEMORIES OF THE GREAT RECORD-BREAKING RUN FROM CHICAGO TO BUFFALO

THERE is a place in New York--the very last place one would think
of--where stories without end may be heard about locomotives and the men
who drive them; it is not a place