Thirty minutes later,
the million-dollar train was turned over to the East End to wrestle
with, and we breathed, all of us, a good bit easier.

Bartholomew Mullen, now a passenger runner who ranks with Kennedy and
Jack Moore and Foley and George Sinclair himself, got a personal letter
from the General Manager complimenting him on his pretty wit; and he was
good enough to say nothing whatever about mine.

We registered that night and went to supper together: Foley, Jackson,
Bartholomew, and I. Afterward we dropped into the despatcher's office.
Something was coming from McCloud, but the operator to save his life
couldn't catch it. I listened a minute; it was Neighbor. Now, Neighbor
isn't great on despatching trains. He can make himself understood over
the poles, but his sending is like a boy's sawing wood--sort of uneven.
However, though I am not much on running yards, I claim to be able to
take the wildest ball that ever was thrown along the wire, and the chair
was tendered me at once to catch Neighbor's extraordinary passes at the
McCloud key. They came something like this:

"To Opr. Tell Massacree"--that was the word that stuck them all, and I
could perceive that Neighbor was talking emphatically. He had apparently
forgotten Bartholomew's last name, and was trying to connect with the
one he had "disremembered" the night before. "Tell Massacree," repeated
Neighbor, "that he is al-l-l right. Tell hi-m I give him double mileage
for to-day all the way through. And to-morrow he gets the 109 to
keep.--NEIGHB-B-OR."

I

THE BULLDOG BREED

A Story of the Russo-Japanese War

By AMBROSE PRATT

"WHAT do you make of her, Maclean?" asked Captain Brandon anxiously.

First mate Hugh Maclean did not reply at once. Embracing a stanchion of
the S.S. _Saigon's_ bridge in order to steady himself against the
vessel's pitching, he was peering with strained eyes through the
captain's binoculars at two small brown needle-points, set very close
together, that stabbed the northeastern horizon.

At length, however, he lowered the glass, and resumed the perpendicular.

"You were right, sir," he declared. "She has altered her course, and our
paths now converge."

"Which proves that she is one of those d----d Russian volunteer
pirates."

"Or else a Japanese cruiser, sir."

"Nonsense! The Jap cruisers have only one mast."

"So they have, sir. I was forgetting that."

"What to do!" growled the captain, and he fell to fro