s thing lame," said Kent, dubiously. "Of course, what Boston can
send us will be only corroborative; unfortunately we can't wire
affidavits. But it will help. What we have secured here lacks directness."

"Necessarily," said Loring. "But I'm banking on the Board. If we don't get
the ammunition before you have to start, I can wire it to you at Gaston.
That gives us three hours more to go and come on."

"Yes; and if it comes to the worst--if the decision be unfavorable--it can
only embarrass us temporarily. This is merely the preliminary hearing, and
nothing permanent can be established until we have had a hearing on the
merits, and we can go armed to that, at all events."

The general manager was looking at his watch, and he shut the case with a
snap.

"Don't you let it come to that, as long as you have a leg to stand on,
David," he said impressively. "An interregnum of ten days might make it
exceedingly difficult for us to prove anything." Then, as the telegraph
office watcher came to the door and shook his head as a sign that Boston
was still silent: "Your time is up. Off with you, and don't let Oleson
scare you when he gets 219 in motion. He is a good runner, and you have a
clear track."

Kent clambered to the footplate of the smart eight-wheeler.

"Can you make it by two o'clock?" he asked, when the engineer, a
big-boned, blue-eyed Norwegian, dropped the reversing lever into the
corner for the start.

"Ay tank maybe so, ain'd it? Yust you climb opp dat odder box, Mester
Kent, and hol' you' hair on. Ve bane gone to maig dat time, als' ve preak
somedings, _ja_!" and he sent the light engine spinning down the yards to
a quickstep of forty miles an hour.

Kent's after-memory of that distance-devouring rush was a blurred picture
of a plunging, rocking, clamoring engine bounding over mile after mile of
the brown plain; of the endless dizzying procession of oncoming telegraph
poles hurtling like great side-flung projectiles past the cab windows; of
now and then a lonely prairie station with waving semaphore arms, sighted,
passed and left behind in a whirling sand-cloud in one and the same
heart-beat. And for the central figure in the picture, the one constant
quantity when all else was mutable and shifting and indistinct, the big,
calm-eyed Norwegian on the opposite box, hurling his huge machine doggedly
through space.

At 12:45 they stopped for water at a solitary tank in the midst of the
brown desert. Kent got d