.007
saying is, for he asked what sort of thing a hot-box might be?
"Paint my bell sky-blue!" said Poney, the switcher. "Make me a surface-railroad loco with a hard-wood skirtin'-board round my wheels. Break me up and cast me into five-cent sidewalk-fakirs' mechanical toys! Here's an eight-wheel coupled 'American' don't know what a hot-box is! Never heard of an emergency-stop either, did ye? Don't know 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
[248]
