faced death. He
answered only in the quietest way:

"I am the night operator."

"The deuce you are!" exclaimed the man bending over him.

"Who are you?" demanded the operator, in turn.

"I am Callahan, the night yardmaster."

"I have an order for you to send a car of spikes on No. 7, Callahan. I
was trying to find you when I got caught in the frog." The pain in his
foot overcame Bucks as he spoke. Another dread was in his mind and he
framed a question to which he dreaded to hear the answer. "Is my foot
gone?" he faltered.

The yardmaster hesitated a moment and turned to an older man at his
side wearing a heavy cap. "How about it, doctor?" he asked.

Doctor Arnold, the railway surgeon, a kindly but stern man, answered
briefly, "We won't take it off this time. But if he is that careless
again we will take his head off."

"How old are you, boy?" demanded Callahan.

"Seventeen."

"Well, your foot isn't hurt," he continued gruffly. "But it's only
God's mercy that I got here in time to pull you out of the frog."

The operator was already up. "I hope I shan't forget it," he said,
putting out his hand. "Will you remember the spikes?"

"I will," responded Callahan grimly. "And I guess----"

"Say it," said the operator gamely, as the yardmaster hesitated.

"I guess you will."

CHAPTER III

Bucks, after his eventful first night on duty, slept so heavily that
on the following afternoon he had only time to eat his supper, walk
haltingly up the main street of Medicine Bend and back to the square,
when it was time to relieve the day man at the station.

But the few minutes in the narrow business street filled him with
interest and at times with astonishment. Medicine Bend, still very
young, was a mushroom railroad town of frame store buildings hastily
thrown together, and houses, shanties, and tents. It was already
the largest and most important town between the mountains and the
Missouri River. The Union Pacific Railroad, now a double-tracked,
transcontinental highway, laid with ninety and one hundred pound
steel rails, and ballasted with disintegrated granite, a model of
railroad construction, equipment, and maintenance, was, after the
close of the Civil War, being pushed with light iron rails and heavy
gradients across what was then known to geographers as the Great
American Desert, and the project of a transcontinental railroad was
meant at that time to unite the chief port of the Pacific coast,
San