pur of the moment. Felix
Kennedy said it was worth going miles to hear. "That's the coldest deal
I ever struck on the plains, boys," declared the editor. "Talk about
your bereaved parents. If the boy doesn't have a chill when that man
reaches him, I miss my guess. He acts to me as if he was afraid his
grief would get away before he got to Denver."

Meantime Georgie Sinclair was tying a silk handkerchief around his
neck, while Neighbor gave him parting injunctions. As he put up his foot
to swing into the cab the boy looked for all the world like a jockey toe
in stirrup. Neighbor glanced at his watch.

"Can you make it by eleven o'clock?" he growled.

"Make what?"

"Denver."

"Denver or the ditch, Neighbor," laughed Georgie, testing the air. "Are
you right back there, Pat?" he called, as Conductor Francis strode
forward to compare the Mountain Time.

"Right and tight, and I call it five-two-thirty now. What have you,
Georgie?"

"Five-two-thirty-two," answered Sinclair, leaning from the cab window.
"And we're ready."

"Then go!" cried Pat Francis, raising two fingers.

"Go!" echoed Sinclair, and waved a backward smile to the crowd, as the
pistons took the push and the escapes wheezed.

A roar went up. The little engineer shook his cap, and with a flirting,
snaking slide, the McWilliams Special drew slipping away between the
shining rails for the Rockies.

Just how McWilliams felt we had no means of knowing; but we knew our
hearts would not beat freely until his infernal Special should slide
safely over the last of the 266 miles which still lay between the
distressed man and his unfortunate child.

From McCloud to Ogalalla there is a good bit of twisting and slewing;
but looking east from Athens a marble dropped between the rails might
roll clear into the Ogalalla yards. It is a sixty-mile grade, the
ballast of slag, and the sweetest, springiest bed under steel.

To cover those sixty miles in better than fifty minutes was like picking
them off the ponies; and the Five-Nine breasted the Morgan divide,
fretting for more hills to climb.

The Five-Nine--for that matter any of the Sky-Scrapers are built to
balance ten or a dozen sleepers, and when you run them light they have a
fashion of rooting their noses into the track. A modest up-grade just
about counters this tendency; but on a slump and a stiff clip and no
tail to speak of, you feel as if the drivers were going to buck up on
the ponies every once in a