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how he had built a "pretend" track in the yard with curves and grades,
over which his little express cart ran "bully." "And 'round the curves
we just signal to the other train and have whistles with real meanings
to them, like a really big train."

"Oho! getting up the signal system, are you, now?" his father would
grin. "Why, you'll be big enough and wise enough soon to come on Number
27 and wipe the engine or 'fire' for daddy. Won't that be nice?" Then
the big man would set the chubby child of six years down on the floor
to play, as he winked knowingly at Benny's mother, who nodded a smiling
reply.

But it did not take many years to make Benny a pretty big boy, and
one of the boy-kind who always start schemes and devices among their
schoolfellows. He seemed to be a born leader, with a crowd of other boys
always at his heels ready to follow where he ventured, or to mimic what
he did. No one ever walked ahead of him, no one ever suggested things to
do or places to go, when the engineer's son was around. He was always
the vanguard, but fortunately was the kind of boy who rarely, if ever,
led his followers into trouble. Finally someone nicknamed him "the Con,"
as short for "Conductor," for he still played at railroading, and had
long since decided that when school days were over he would go as a
train hand, and perhaps be lucky enough to be sometimes in his father's
crew. It was about this time, when Benny was twelve, that he invented
the signal code, and more than once it got "the gang" out of serious
trouble. The little divisional town where he lived was shut in between
hills so closely that it was a veritable furnace in summer, and all who
could went out camping, or built shacks on the Three Islands in the
little lake two miles farther down the track. So Benny and his little
brother and sister went with their mother to join some neighbors
camping, and dad would come down on a hand-car on off nights to get a
breath of air, and the coal dust blown out of his keen eyes. It did not
take the shrewd engineer long to discover that the boys on the islands
had a signal code. One would stand on his boat landing and wave a strip
of white cotton into a lot of grotesque figures, and far off on another
island some other boy would reply with similar figures, and after much
"talking," the various boys would act with perfect understanding, either
meeting out on the lake, in the boats, or going swimming, or building
camp fires--it d