erators, to save their
lives, couldn't catch it. I listened a minute; it was Neighbor. Now
Neighbor isn't great on dispatching trains. He can make himself
understood over the poles, but his sending is like a boy's sawing
wood--sort of uneven.

However, though I am not much on running yards, I claim to be able to
take the wildest ball that was ever thrown along the wire, and the chair
was tendered me at once to catch Neighbor's extraordinary passes at the
McCloud key. They came something like this:

_To Opr._:

Tell Massacree [_that was the word that stuck them all, and I
could perceive Neighbor was talking emphatically; he had
apparently forgotten Bartholomew's last name and was trying to
connect with the one he had disremembered the night
before_]--tell Massacree [_repeated Neighbor_] that he is
al-l-l right. Tell hi-m I give 'im double mileage for to-day
all the way through. And to-morrow he gets the 109 to keep.

NEIGHB-B-OR.

Bucks

"I see a good deal of stuff in print about the engineer," said Callahan,
dejectedly. "What's the matter with the dispatcher? What's the matter
with the man who tells the engineer what to do--and just what to do? How
to do it--and exactly how to do it? With the man who sits shut in brick
walls and hung in Chinese puzzles, his ear glued to a receiver, and his
finger fast to a key, and his eye riveted on a train chart? The man who
orders and annuls and stops and starts everything within five hundred
miles of him, and holds under his thumb more lives every minute than a
brigadier does in a lifetime? For instance," asked Callahan, in his
tired way, "what's the matter with Bucks?"

* * * * *

Now, I myself never knew Bucks. He left the West End before I went on.
Bucks is second vice-president--which means the boss--of a
transcontinental line now, and a very great swell. But no man from the
West End who calls on Bucks has to wait for an audience, though bigger
men do. They talk of him out there yet. Not of General Superintendent
Bucks, which he came to be, nor of General Manager Bucks. On the West
End he is just plain Bucks; but Bucks on the West End means a whole lot.

"He saved the company $300,000 that night the Ogalalla train ran away,"
mused Callahan. Callahan himself is assistant superintendent now.

"Three hundred thousand dollars is a good deal of money, Callahan," I
objected.

"Figure it