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."

He was halted, all hissing hot, a few feet in the rear of what doctors
would call a compound-comminuted car. His engineer was kneeling down
among his drivers, but he did not call.007 his "Arab steed," nor
cry over him, as the engineers did in the newspapers. He just bad
worded.007, and pulled yards of charred cotton-waste from about the
axles, and hoped he might some day catch the idiot who had packed it.
Nobody else attended to him, for Evans, the Mogul's engineer, a little
cut about the head, but very angry, was exhibiting, by lantern-light,
the mangled corpse of a slim blue pig.

"T were n't even a decent-sized hog," he said. "'T were a shote."

"Dangerousest beasts they are," said one of the crew. "Get under the
pilot an' sort o' twiddle ye off the track, don't they?"

"Don't they?" roared Evans, who was a red-headed Welshman. "You talk as
if I was ditched by a hog every fool-day o' the week. I ain't friends
with all the cussed half-fed shotes in the State o' New York. No,
indeed! Yes, this is him--an' look what he's done!"

It was not a bad night's work for one stray piglet. The Flying Freight
seemed to have flown in every direction, for the Mogul had mounted the
rails and run diagonally a few hundred feet from right to left, taking
with him such cars as cared to follow. Some did not. They broke their
couplers and lay down, while rear cars frolicked over them. In that
game, they had ploughed up and removed and twisted a good deal of the
left-hand track. The Mogul himself had waddled into a corn-field, and
there he knelt--fantastic wreaths of green twisted round his crankpins;
his pil