AN ERROR IN
damn 'em!—would protect me if I got into trouble. But for a little thing like nagging a dirty little sawed-off train,—running through my own grounds, too,—I get the whole British Constitution down on me as if I sold bombs. I don't understand it."
"No more does the Great Buchonian—apparently." I was turning over the letters. "Here 's the traffic superintendent writing that it 's utterly incomprehensible that any man should . . . Good heavens, Wilton, you have done it!" I giggled, as I read on.
"What 's funny now?" said my host.
"It seems that you, or Howard for you, stopped the three-forty Northern down."
"I ought to know that! They all had their knife into me, from the engine-driver up."
"But it 's the three-forty—the Indunasurely you 've heard of the Great Buchonian 's Induna!"
"How the deuce am I to know one train from another? They come along about every two minutes."
"Quite so. But this happens to be the Induna—the one train of the whole line. She 's timed for fifty-seven miles an hour. She was put on early in the Sixties, and she has never been stopped—"
"I know! Since William the Conqueror came over, or King Charles hid in her smoke-stack. You 're as bad as the rest of these Britishers. If she 's been run all that while, it 's time she was flagged once or twice."
The American was beginning to ooze out all over Wilton, and his small-boned hands were moving restlessly.
"Suppose you flagged the Empire State Express, or the Western Cyclone?"
[346]
