't thought much about Burns before. He was a tall, lank Irish boy,
with an open face and a morning smile. Dad Sinclair took him on because
nobody else would have him. Burns was so green that Foley said you
couldn't set his name afire. He would, so Foley said, put out a hot box
just by blinking at it.

But every man's turn comes once, and it had come for Burns. It was Dick
Burns's chance now to show what manner of stuff was bred in his long
Irish bones. It was his task to make the steam--if he could--faster than
Dad Sinclair could burn it. What use to grip the throttle and scheme if
Burns didn't furnish the power, put the life into her heels as she raced
the wind--the merciless, restless gale sweeping over the prairie faster
than horse could fly before it?

Working smoothly and swiftly into a dizzy whirl, the monstrous drivers
took the steel in leaps and bounds. Dad Sinclair, leaning from the cab
window, gloatingly watched their gathering speed, pulled the bar up
notch after notch, and fed Burns's fire into the old engine's arteries
fast and faster than she could throw it into her steel hoofs.

That was the night the West End knew that a greenhorn had cast his
chrysalis and stood out a man. Knew that the honor-roll of our frontier
division wanted one more name, and that it was big Dick Burns's.
Sinclair hung silently desperate to the throttle, his eyes straining
into the night ahead, and the face of the long Irish boy, streaked with
smut and channelled with sweat, lit every minute with the glare of the
furnace as he fed the white-hot blast that leaped and curled and foamed
under the crown-sheet of Soda-Water Sal.

There he stooped and sweat and swung, as she slewed and lurched and
jerked across the fish-plates. Carefully, nursingly, ceaselessly he
pushed the steam-pointer higher, higher, higher on the dial--and that
despite the tremendous draughts of Dad's throttle.

Never a glance to the right or the left, to the track or the engineer.
From the coal to the fire, the fire to the water, the water to the
gauge, the gauge to the stack, and back again to the coal--that was
Burns. Neither eyes nor ears nor muscles for anything but steam.

Such a firing as the West End never saw till that night; such a firing
as the old engine never felt in her choking flues till that night; such
a firing as Dad Sinclair, king of all West and East End firemen, lifted
his hat to--that was Burns's firing that night on Soda-Water Sal; the
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