When they had finished their meal he got Boroski and Orloff to take him to the station master and, producing his famous order once again, he demanded that the train ahead should be held until the train in which they were travelling could catch up with it; but here, for the first time, he met with determined opposition.
TO hold a train for an hour or so was one thing, said the man, but to hold it for three hours was quite another. In peacetime Perguba was a quiet little town where officials led a pleasant life and were not bothered with such mad requests, and a couple of trains a day were quite sufficient to satisfy everybody. But now that there was a war on things were very different; everyone had to work night and day; the traffic on the line was chaotic; military officers were always demanding impossibilities. To do as Gregory suggested would upset all the traffic and make bad infinitely worse.
"It is by the order of the Marshal and my business is most urgent," Gregory snapped with a cold authority which he had often found extremely efficacious when forced to browbeat petty officials; but the man was obdurate. He pointed out that the order said that Gregory should be given every assistance to facilitate his journey, but not that trains should be held up for him unnecessarily; and that in this case it was not necessary to hold up the train ahead, because it would have to wait until Gregory could reach it and, therefore, would not get to Kandalaksha any quicker than the train he was on at the moment.
Seeing that it was useless to argue further Gregory began to insist that his train must put on more speed in order to get him to Kandalaksha as soon after the other train as possible. In consequence, the engine driver was summoned.
He shrugged his shoulders a great deal and waved his hands, asking if they thought that his engine was an aeroplane. They knew quite well, he said, that it dated from pre Revolution days and was held together only y bits of wire and his own brilliance as an engineer. Moreover, how could anyone get more than twenty five miles an hour out of an engine when they had only wood fuel on which to stoke it? and that was all that was procurable in this part of the country.
Gregory produced his order again and told the driver that whatever his difficulties might be he had got to catch up the other train because, if he did not, Marshal Voroshilov would have him shot as a saboteur and an enemy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The engine driver's mouth fell open in comical dismay and promising to do his best he hurried out to get his ramshackle engine going. Five minutes later they started off at a pace quite unprecedented and with such suddenness that a number of the passengers were left shouting indignantly on the platform.
It was now past one o'clock and Gregory was very nearly all in. He had done everything conceivable to expedite his journey, so he lay down on one of thee seats in his carriage while Boroski took the other and Orloff the floor, and they all went to sleep.
Although the two Russians had had four hours' sleep apiece during the morning they slept like the troopers they were, and Gregory was so fagged out that he, too, slept heavily, so it was getting on for midnight when they were awakened by a particularly violent series of jolts. The train had come to a halt in another station, which they soon discovered to be Kem.
Directly they had roused up they went along to see the engine driver to find out how much tune he had managed to make up, and they caught him just going off duty. He protested that he had done his very best, but he had succeeded in making up only an hour. His relief arrived while they were still discussing the matter, so the new man was questioned as to whether he thought he could catch the train ahead before it arrived at Kandalaksha. He proved as pessimistic as his colleague but Gregory cut short his complaints about the engine and asked, through Boroski, for a definite answer as to whether or not they could catch up the other train.
The reply was, "No". From Kem to Kandalaksha was under two hundred miles and the new driver said that it was quite impossible to make up the best part of two hours in that distance. Gregory then ordered the whole party to the stationmaster's office and on the way told Boroski of a new decision he had taken. If the second train could not catch up the first, its engine could; so they were going to abandon the whole string of coaches and proceed on the engine with every ounce of speed that it could muster.
The station master argued and protested. It would take at least two hours to get another engine out of the yard and ready to carry on the abandoned train; and. where, at this time of night, could he be expected to find another driver? But Gregory flung discretion to the winds and sternly pronounced an ultimatum. Either they let him have the engine or he would go straight to the local G.P.U. and have both station master and driver arrested pending the time when he could see Marshal Voroshilov again and make it his personal business to have them both hanged, drawn and quartered. Under this dire threat, with many gesticulations and expostulations,, they at last gave way and Gregory was at last allowed to have his engine.
Once it was going, with only a single coach behind it as ballast to keep it on the rails, their speed was more than doubled and on straight stretches of the line the driver managed to rev it up to the incredible speed of fifty miles an hour. Gregory rode with Boroski and Orloff in the bunker to make certain that the driver did not slacken in his efforts, and as he sat there on the pile of logs he cursed himself for not having thought of this excellent expedient before; since if he had commandeered the engine to start off with, at Baylik, they would easily have overhauled the train ahead by now.
The glowing furnace of the engine gave them some heat, but the bunker was open to the icy wind so from time to time they took a hand in heaving wood to keep themselves warm, as the solitary engine roared on through the dark night, a cascade of sparks streaming from its funnel.
They had left Kern at half past twelve and covered the next hundred miles in two and a half hours; so by three o'clock in the morning they were keeping a sharp look out for the rear lights of the train they were pursuing, expecting to catch it up at any moment Gregory was now satisfied that even if the Gestapo men were on the train ahead they could not reach Kandalaksha before him; but he was feverish with impatience
to board it at its next halt so as to place the matter beyond all possible doubt.
They had been travelling south west for the last twenty miles, as a creek running inland from the White Sea necessitated the line making a huge hairpin bend and they had just reached its extremity, where the track curved back towards the north, when the engine driver shouted something to his stoker and grabbed the brake lever. Peering anxiously from the cab Gregory saw that a red light was being waved on the line ahead of them; with a scream of ill oiled brakes the engine slowed down over the next quarter of a mile and came jerking to a halt within twenty yards of the light.
A man who was holding a red lamp approached and called out to them; upon which Boroski and Orloff, who had now entered into the excitement of the chase with as much enthusiasm as Gregory, exclaimed simultaneously:
"He says the bridge is down."
Gregory used an Italian oath which in the imagination of man has never been exceeded for it’s blasphemy, and asked them to get details. After an excited conversation, in which Boroski, Orloff, the driver, the stoker and the man with the lamp all joined, his guides told him.