now what ye
carry jack-screws for? You're too innocent to be left alone with your
own tender. Oh, you--you flatcar!"

There was a roar of escaping steam before any one could answer, and .007
nearly blistered his paint off with pure mortification.

"A hot-box," began the Compound, picking and choosing her words
as though they were coal, "a hotbox is the penalty exacted from
inexperience by haste. Ahem!"

"Hot-box!" said the Jersey Suburban. "It's the price you pay for going
on the tear. It's years since I've had one. It's a disease that don't
attack shorthaulers, as a rule."

"We never have hot-boxes on the Pennsylvania," said the Consolidation.
"They get 'em in New York--same as nervous prostration."

"Ah, go home on a ferry-boat," said the Mogul. "You think because you
use worse grades than our road 'u'd allow, you're a kind of Alleghany
angel. Now, I'll tell you what you... Here's my folk. Well, I can't
stop. See you later, perhaps."

He rolled forward majestically to the turn-table, and swung like a
man-of-war in a tideway, till he picked up his track. "But as for you,
you pea-green swiveling' coffee-pot (this to.007'), you go out and learn
something before you associate with those who've made more mileage in
a week than you'll roll up in a year. Costly-perishable-fragile
immediate--that's me! S' long."

"Split my tubes if that's actin' polite to a new member o' the
Brotherhood," said Poney. "There wasn't any call to trample on ye like
that. But manners was left out when Moguls was made. Keep up your fire,
kid, an' burn your own smoke. 'Guess we'll all be wanted in a minute."

Men were talking rather excitedly in the roundhouse. One man, in a
dingy jersey, said that he hadn't any locomotives to waste on the yard.
Another man, with a piece of crumpled paper in his hand, said that the
yard-master said that he was to say that if the other man said anything,
he (the other man) was to shut his head. Then the other man waved his
arms, and wanted to know if he was expected to keep locomotives in his
hip-pocket. Then a man in a black Prince Albert, without a collar, came
up dripping, for it was a hot August night, and said that what he
said went; and between the three of them the locomotives began to go,
too--first the Compound; then the Consolidation; then.007.

Now, deep down in his fire-box, .007 had cherished a hope that as soon as
his trial was done, he would be led forth with songs and shoutings, and
attache