nd old Dan had been paying up ever since.

He was always paying up. Five thousand dollars, even in instalments
for a whole lot of years, didn't leave much to come and go on from his
monthly pay check. He talked some of dropping the benefit orders he
belonged to, and he belonged to most of them, but Mrs. MacCaffery
talked him out of that on account of the insurance, she said, but
really because she knew that Dan and his lodge rooms and his regalias
and his worshipful titles were just part and parcel of each other, and
that he either was, or was just going to be, Supreme High Chief
Illustrious Something-or-other of every Order in town. Besides, after
all, it didn't cost much compared with the other, just meant pinching a
tiny bit harder--and so they pinched.

Old Dan and Mrs. MacCaffery didn't talk about their troubles. You'd
never get the blues on their account, no matter how intimate you got
with them. But everybody knew the story, of course, for everybody
knows a thing like that; and everybody knew that dollars were scarce up
at the MacCafferys' shanty for, though they didn't know how much old
Dan sent East each year, they knew it had to be a pretty big slice of
what was coming to him to make much impression on that five thousand
dollars at the other end--and they wondered, naturally enough, how the
MacCafferys got along at all. But the MacCafferys got along somehow,
outwardly without a sign of the hurt that was deeper than a mere matter
of dollars and cents, got along through the years--and Mrs. MacCaffery
got a little grayer, a little more gentle and patient and sweet-faced,
and old Dan's hair narrowed to a fringe like a broken tonsure above his
ears, and--but there's our "clearance" now, and we're off with a
clean-swept track and "rights through" into division.

Dan was handling the cab end of one of the local passenger runs when
things broke loose in the East--a flurry in Wall Street. But Wall
Street was a long, long way from the Rockies, and, though the papers
were full of it, there didn't seem to be anything intimate enough in a
battle of brokers and magnates, bitter, prolonged, and to the death
though it might be, to stir up any excitement or enthusiasm on the Hill
Division. The Hill Division, generally speaking, had about all it
could do to mind its own affairs without bothering about those of
others', for the Rockies, if conquered, took their subjection with bad
grace and were always in an incipient