e Flyer!
How's that for ten miles an hour in the city limits?"

It was a foot-note commentary on the way the service was going to pieces.
Halkett, the "political" general superintendent, had called Dixon on the
carpet for not making time with his train. "If you're afraid to run, say
so, and we'll get a man that isn't," Halkett had said; and here was Dixon
coming down a borrowed track in a busy yard at the speed which presupposes
a ninety-pound rail and nothing in the way.

The conclave had gathered at the wiper's window.

"The dum fool!" said Brodrick. "If anything gets in front of him----"

There was a suburb street-crossing three hundred yards townward from the
"yard limits" telegraph office, which stood in the angle formed by the
diverging tracks of the two divisions. Beyond the yard the street became a
country road, well traveled as the principal southern inlet to the city.
When Dixon was within two train-lengths of the crossing, a farm wagon
appeared, driven between the cut freight trains on the sidings directly in
the path of the Flyer. The men at the roundhouse window heard the crash of
the splintering wagon above the roar of the train; and the wiper on the
window seat yelped like a kicked dog and went sickly green under his mask
of grime.

"There it is again," said Scott, when Dixon had brought his train to a
stand two hundred yards beyond the "limits" office where he should have
stopped for orders. "We're all hoodooed, the last one of us. I'll get that
committee together this afternoon and go and buzz Mr. Loring."

Now it fell out that these things happened on a day when the tide of
retrieval was at its lowest ebb; the day, namely, in which Kent had told
Loring that he was undecided as to his moral right to use the evidence
against Bucks as a lever to pry the Trans-Western out of the grip of the
junto. It befell, also, that it was the day chosen by two other men, not
members of the labor unions, in which to call upon the ex-manager; and
Loring found M'Tosh, the train-master, and Durgan, the master-mechanic,
waiting for him in the hotel corridor when he came in from a late luncheon
at the Camelot Club.

"Can you give us a few minutes, Mr. Loring?" asked M'Tosh, when Loring had
shaken hands with them, not as subordinates.

"Surely. My time is not very valuable, just at present. Come in, and I'll
see if Mr. Kent has left me any cigars."

"Humph!" said Durgan, when the ex-manager had gone into Kent's room