key, we know that--that
counts for something. What's the matter with sending him somewhere up
the line where he can't get a drink if he goes to blazes for it? It
might make a man of him, and save the company a good operator at the
same time--we're not long on operators."

"H'm!" observed Carleton, with a wry grin, picking up his cards again
one by one. "I suppose you've some such place as Angel Forks, for
instance, in mind, Tommy?"

"Yes," said Regan. "I was thinking _of_ Angel Forks."

"I'd rather be fired," submitted Carleton dryly.

"Well," demanded Regan, "what do you say? Can he have it?"

"Oh, yes," agreed Carleton, smiling. "He can have _that_--after I've
talked to him. We're pretty short of operators, as you say. Perhaps
it will work out. It will as long as he sticks, I guess--if he'll take
it at all."

"He'll take it," said Regan, "and be glad to get it. What do you bid?"

McGrew had been at Angel Forks--night man there--for perhaps the matter
of a month, when the Kid came to Big Cloud fresh from a key on the
Penn. They called him the Kid because he looked it--he wasn't past the
stage of where he had to shave more than once a week. The Kid, they
dubbed him on the spot, but his name was Charlie Keene; a thin, wiry
little chap, with black hair and a bright, snappy, quick look in his
eyes and face. He was pretty good on the key, too; not a master like
McGrew, he hadn't had the experience, but pretty good for all that--he
could "send" with the best of them, and there wasn't much to complain
about in his "taking," either.

The day man at Angel Forks didn't drink--at least his way-bill didn't
read that way--and they gave him promotion in the shape of a station
farther along the line that sized up a little less tomb-like, a little
less like a buried-alive sepulcher than Angel Forks did. And the Kid,
naturally, being young and new to the system, had to start at the
bottom--they sent him up to Angel Forks on the morning way freight the
day after he arrived in Big Cloud.

There was something about the Kid that got the train crew of the way
freight right from the start. They liked a man a whole lot and pretty
sudden in their rough-and-ready way, those railroaders of the Rockies
in those days, or they didn't like him well enough to say a good word
for him at his funeral; that's the way it went--and the caboose was
swearing by the Kid by the time they were halfway to Angel Forks, where
he shifted