assenger-agent's department
were the only ones who weren't enthusiastic about the double-loop
tunnel--it spoiled the scenic effect.

This is Beezer's story. Beezer has "rights" through to the terminal,
and pictures of scenery however interesting, and a description of how
Harvey bored his holes into the mountain sides however instructive,
should naturally be relegated to the sidings; but there's just a word
or two necessary before Beezer pulls out into the clear.

One thing the electrotypes didn't show was the approach to the Devil's
Slide. It came along the bottoms fairly straight and level, the track
did, for some five miles from the Bend, until about a mile from the
summit where it hit a long, stiff, heavy climb, that took the breath
out of the best-type engine that Regan, representing the motive-power
department, had to offer. And here, the last few hundred yards were
taken with long-interval, snorting roars from the exhaust, that echoed
up and down the valley, and back and forward from the hills like a
thousand thunders, or the play of a park of artillery, and the pace was
a crawl--you could get out and walk if you wanted to. That was the
approach of the Devil's Slide--on a westbound run, you understand?
Then, once over the summit, the Devil's Slide stretched out ahead, and
in its two reeling, drunken, zigzag miles dropped from where it made
you dizzy to lean out of the cab window and see the Glacier River
swirling below, to where the right of way in a friendly, intimate
fashion hugged the Glacier again at its own bed level. How much of a
drop in that two miles? Grade percentages and dry figures don't mean
very much, do they? Take it another way. It dropped so hard and fast
that that's what the directors were spending three million dollars
for--to divide that drop by two! It just _dropped_--not an incline,
not by any means--just a drop. However----

When it was all over the cause of it figured out something like
this--we'll get to the effect and Beezer in a second. Engine 1016 with
Number One, the Imperial Limited, westbound, and with MacAllister in
the cab, blew out a staybolt one afternoon about two miles west of the
Bend. And quicker than you could wink, the cab was all live steam and
boiling water. The fireman screamed and jumped. MacAllister, blinded
and scalded, his hands literally torn from the throttle and "air"
before he could latch in, fell back half unconscious to the floor,
wriggled to t