r work on this
engine?"

There was nothing to say to that. Dad kept still.

"You talk about men," continued the young fellow. "If I am not more of a
man than to slug a fellow from behind, the way they slugged me, I'll get
off this engine and stay off. If that's what you call men out here I
don't want to be a man. I'll go back to Pennsylvania."

"Why didn't you stay there?" growled Dad.

"Why didn't you?"

Without attempting to return the shot, Dad pulled nervously at the
chain.

"If I hadn't been fool enough to go out on a strike I might have been
running there yet," continued Georgie.

"Ought to have kept away from the post-office," grumbled Dad, after a
pause.

"I get a letter twice a week that I think more of than I do of this
whole road, and I propose to go to the post-office and get it without
asking anybody's permission."

"They'll pound you again."

Georgie looked out into the storm. "Well, why shouldn't they? I've got
no friends."

"Got a girl back in Pennsylvania?"

"Yes, I've got a girl there," replied the boy, as the rain tore at the
cab window. "I've had a girl there a good while. She's gray-headed and
sixty years old--that's my girl--and if she can write letters to me, I
can get them out of the post-office without a guardian."

"There she comes," said Dad, as the headlight of the Pullman special
shone faint ahead through the mist.

"I'm mighty glad of it," said Georgie, looking at his watch. "Give me
steam now, Dad, and I'll get you home in time for a nap before
breakfast."

A minute later the special shot over the switch, and the young runner,
crowding the pistons a bit, started off the siding. When Dad, looking
back for the hind-end brakeman to lock the switch and swing on, called
all clear, Georgie pulled her out another notch, and the long train
slowly gathered headway up the slippery track.

As the speed increased the young man and the old relapsed into their
usual silence. The 244 was always a free steamer, but Georgie put her
through her paces without any apology, and it took lots of coal to
square the account.

In a few minutes they were pounding along up through the Narrows. The
track there follows the high bench between the bluffs, which sheer up on
one side, and the river-bed, thirty feet below the grade, on the other.

It is not an inviting stretch at any time with a big string of gondolas
behind. But on a wet night it is the last place on the division where an
engineer