ok unconscious of all we saw
in the faces of the group at Dad's bed.

He never got his old strength back, yet Neighbor fixed him out, for all
that. The Sky-Scraper, once our pride, was so badly stove that we gave
up hope of restoring her for a passenger run. So Neighbor built her over
into a sort of a dub engine for short runs, stubs, and so on; and though
Dad had vowed long ago, when unjustly condemned, that he would never
more touch a throttle, we got him to take the Sky-Scraper and the Acton
run.

And when Georgie, who takes the Flyer every other day, is off duty, he
climbs into Dad's cab, shoves the old gentleman aside, and shoots around
the yard in the rejuvenated Sky-Scraper at a hair-raising rate of speed.

After a while the old engine got so full of alkali that Georgie gave her
a new name--Soda-Water Sal--and it hangs to her yet. We thought the best
of her had gone in the Harvard wreck; but there came a time when Dad and
Soda-Water Sal showed us we were very much mistaken.

Soda-Water Sal

When the great engine which we called the Sky-Scraper came out of the
Zanesville shops, she was rebuilt from pilot to tender.

Our master-mechanic, Neighbor, had an idea, after her terrific
collision, that she could not stand heavy main-line passenger runs, so
he put her on the Acton cut-off. It was what railroad men call a
jerk-water run, whatever that may be; a little jaunt of ten miles across
the divide connecting the northern division with the Denver stem. It was
just about like running a trolley, and the run was given to Dad
Sinclair, for after that lift at Oxford his back was never strong enough
to shovel coal, and he had to take an engine or quit railroading.

Thus it happened that after many years he took the throttle once more
and ran over, twice a day, as he does yet, from Acton to Willow Creek.

His boy, Georgie Sinclair, the kid engineer, took the run on the Flyer
opposite Foley, just as soon as he got well.

Georgie, who was never happy unless he had eight or ten Pullmans behind
him, and the right of way over everything between Omaha and Denver, made
great sport of his father's little smoking-car and day-coach behind the
big engine.

Foley made sport of the remodelled engine. He used to stand by while the
old engineer was oiling and ask him whether he thought she could catch a
jack-rabbit. "I mean," Foley would say, "if the rabbit was feeling
well."

Dad Sinclair took it all grimly and quietly