; he had railroaded too long
to care for anybody's chaff. But one day, after the Sky-Scraper had
gotten her flues pretty well chalked up with alkali, Foley insisted that
she must be renamed.

"I have the only genuine sky-scraper on the West End now myself,"
declared Foley. He did have a new class H engine, and she was
awe-inspiring, in truth. "I don't propose," he continued, "to have her
confused with your old tub any longer, Dad."

Dad, oiling his old tub affectionately, answered never a word.

"She's full of soda, isn't she, father?" asked Georgie, standing by.

"Reckon she is, son."

"Full of water, I suppose?"

"Try to keep her that way, son."

"Sal-soda, isn't it, Dad?"

"Now I can't say. As to that--I can't say."

"We'll call her Sal Soda, Georgie," suggested Foley.

"No," interposed Georgie; "stop a bit. I have it. Not Sal Soda, at
all--make it Soda-Water Sal."

Then they laughed uproariously; and in the teeth of Dad Sinclair's
protests--for he objected at once and vigorously--the queer name stuck
to the engine, and sticks yet.

To have seen the great hulking machine you would never have suspected
there could be another story left in her. Yet one there was; a story of
the wind. As she stood, too, when old man Sinclair took her on the Acton
run, she was the best illustration I have ever seen of the adage that
one can never tell from the looks of a frog how far it will jump.

Have you ever felt the wind? Not, I think, unless you have lived on the
seas or on the plains. People everywhere think the wind blows; but it
really blows only on the ocean and on the prairies.

The summer that Dad took the Acton run, it blew for a month steadily.
All of one August--hot, dry, merciless; the despair of the farmer and
the terror of trainmen.

It was on an August evening, with the gale still sweeping up from the
southwest, that Dad came lumbering into Acton with his little trolley
train. He had barely pulled up at the platform to unload his passengers
when the station-agent, Morris Reynolds, coatless and hatless, rushed up
to the engine ahead of the hostler and sprang into the cab. Reynolds was
one of the quietest fellows in the service. To see him without coat or
hat didn't count for much in such weather; but to see him sallow with
fright and almost speechless was enough to stir even old Dad Sinclair.

It was not Dad's habit to ask questions, but he looked at the man in
questioning amazement. Reynolds choked