eal; old Dad Hamilton was proof enough of that.

One evening, just after pay-day, I saw the pair in the post-office lobby
getting their checks cashed. Presently the two stepped over to the
money-order window; a moment later each came away with a money-order.

"Is that where you leave your wealth, Georgie?" I asked, as he came up
to speak to me.

"Part of it goes there every month, Mr. Reed," he smiled. "Checks are
running light, too, now--eh, Dad?"

"A young fellow like you ought to be putting money away in the bank,"
said I.

"Well, you see I have a bank back in Pennsylvania--a bank that is now
sixty years old, and getting gray-headed. I haven't sent her much since
I've been on the relief, so I'm trying to make up a little now for my
old mammie."

"Where does yours go, Dad?" I asked.

"Me?" answered the old man, evasively, "I've got a boy back East;
getting to be a big one, too. He's in school. When are you going to give
us a passenger run with the Sky-Scraper, Neighbor?" asked Hamilton,
turning to the master-mechanic.

"Soon as we get this wheat, up on the high line, out of the way,"
replied Neighbor. "We haven't half engines enough to move it, and I get
a wire about every six hours to move it faster. Every siding's blocked,
clear to Belgrade. How many of those sixty-thousand-pound cars can you
take over Beverly Hill with your Sky-Scraper?"

He was asking both men. The engineer looked at his chum.

"I reckon maybe thirty-five or forty," said McNeal. "Eh, Dad?"

"Maybe, son," growled Hamilton; "and break my back doing it?"

"I gave you a helper once and you kicked him off the tender," retorted
Neighbor.

"Don't want anybody raking ashes for me--not while I'm drawing full
time," Dad frowned.

But the upshot of it was that we put the Sky-Scraper at hauling wheat,
and within a week she was doing the work of a double-header.

It was May, and a thousand miles east of us, in Chicago, there was
trouble in the wheat-pit on the Board of Trade. You would hardly suspect
what queer things that wheat scramble gave rise to, affecting Georgie
McNeal and old man Hamilton and a lot of other fellows away out on a
railroad division on the Western plains; but this was the way of it:

A man sitting in a little office on La Salle Street wrote a few words on
a very ordinary-looking sheet of paper, and touched a button. That
brought a colored boy, and he took the paper out to a young man who sat
at the eastern end of a pri