12:45
and he sent the light engine spinning down the yards to a quickstep of forty miles an hour . Kent 's after-memory of that distance-devouring rush was a blurred picture of a plunging , rocking , clamoring engine bounding over mile after mile of the brown plain ; of the endless dizzying procession of oncoming telegraph poles hurtling like great side-flung projectiles past the cab windows ; of now and then a lonely prairie station with waving semaphore arms , sighted , passed and left behind in a whirling sand-cloud in one and the same heart-beat . And for the central figure in the picture , the one constant quantity when all else was mutable and shifting and indistinct , the big , calm-eyed Norwegian on the opposite box , hurling his huge machine doggedly through space . At 12:45 they stopped for water at a solitary tank in the midst of the brown desert . Kent got down stiffly from his cramped seat on the fireman 's box and wetted his parched lips at the nozzle of the tender hose . `` Do we make it , Jarl ? '' he asked .