"Perhaps you reported the case for your paper, that we saw each other from day to day during the long trial, and that I remembered your face faintly, as you remembered mine. Wouldn't that be a better explanation?"
"No," said the journalist cheerfully. "I must decline to yield to your argument, and stick to my decision. What I want to talk to you about, Mr. Moran, is not your own case, save as it may please you, but about the mysterious death of Engineer Cowels."
"I know less about that, perhaps, than any man living," said Moran frankly.
"Well, he claims that they were running at a maddening rate of speed, that he and the engineer had quarrelled as to their relative positions in the estimation of the public in general, the strikers in particular. Cowels threw a hammer at the fireman, whereupon Guerin, as he claims, caught the man by the left arm and by the back of the neck and shoved his head out of the window. The engineer resisted, but Guerin, who is something of an athlete, held him down and in a few moments the man collapsed."
"Well, that is a question to be settled by experts. How fast will Blackwings go with four cars empty?"
"How fast would she go, working 'wide open in the first notch,' as you people say, down Zero Hill?"
"She would go in the ditch--she could hardly be expected to hold the rail for more than two minutes."
"I don't believe it," said the old driver; "but if she did, she must have made a hundred miles an hour, and in that case the mystery of Cowels's death is solved--he was drowned."
"But his clothes were not wet, and he was still in the window when they reached Galesburg."
"I do not mean," said Moran, "that he was drowned in the engine-tank, but in the cab window--in the air."
"Try it," said the prisoner. "Get aboard of Blackwings, strike the summit at Zero Hill with her lever hooked back and her throttle wide open, let a strong man hold your head out at the window, and if she hangs to the rail your successor will have the rare opportunity of writing you up."
"I do. If what you tell me is true, there can be no shade of doubt as to the cause of Cowels's death."
"I believe," said the reporter, "that you predicted his death, or that the train would go in the ditch, did you not?"