Chapter XIV. Speed - Page 2

Three-Oughts-One?" cried Tom.

"It's just what I want to do. Bless my traveling bag, Tom! I mean to be present at your final triumph."

"What will happen to your buff Orpingtons while you are gone?" asked the young inventor, gravely.

"I have got my servant trained to look after those chickens," declared Mr. Damon. "And this invention of yours is really more important than even my buff Orpingtons."

"Just the same," remarked Tom to his eccentric friend, when Rad had left the room,. "I've got to fix it so that Eradicate stays at home with father. He doesn't really know how old and broken he is--poor fellow."

"His heart is green, Tom. That's what is the matter with Rad."

"He is a loyal old fellow. But I shall take Koku with me, not Rad," and the young inventor spoke decidedly. "And that is going to trouble poor Rad a lot."

The prospect of going West, however, was not the main subject of Tom's thoughts at this time. As the weeks passed and the end of the six months of experiment came nearer, the inventor was more and more troubled by the principal difficulty which had from the first confronted him. Speed.

That was the mark he had set himself. A maximum speed of two miles a minute on a level track for the Hercules 0001. With the speed already attained by both steam and electric locomotives in the more recent past, this was by no means an impossible attainment, as Tom quite well knew.

But he became convinced that the conditions under which he labored made it impossible for him to be positive of just how great a speed on a straight, level track his invention would attain.

There was no electrified stretch of railroad near Shopton on which the Hercules 0001 might be tested. The track inside the Swift Company's enclosure did not offer the conditions the inventor needed. He felt balked.

"I believe I have hit the right idea in my improvements on the Jandel patents," he told Ned Newton when they were discussing the matter. "But believing is one thing. Knowing is another!"

"Theoretically it works out all right, I suppose?" questioned Ned.

"Quite. I can prove on paper that I've got the speed. But that isn't enough. You can see that."

"Impossible to be sure on the trackage already built here, Tom?"

"I haven't dared give her all she'll take," grumbled Tom. "If I did, I fear she'd jump the rails and I'd have a wreck on my hands."

"And maybe kill yourself!" exclaimed Ned. "You want to have a care."

"Oh, that's all right! I've taken risks before. I don't want to risk the safety of the locomotive, which is more important. That machine has cost us a lot of money."

"I'll say so!" agreed