retty. Across
the track and siding, facing the two-story wooden structure that was
the station, the bare gray rock of a cut through the mountain base
reared upward to meet a pine-covered slope, and then blend with bare,
gray rock once until it became a glaciered peak at the sky line; behind
the station was a sort of plateau, a little valley, green and velvety,
bisected by a tumbling, rushing little stream, with the mountains again
closing in around it, towering to majestic heights, the sun playing in
relief and shadow on the fantastic, irregular, snow-capped summits. It
was pretty enough, no one ever disputed that! The road hung
four-by-five-foot photographs of it with
eight-inch-wide-trimmed-with-gilt frames in the big hotel corridors
East, and no one who ever bought a ticket on the strength of the
photographer's art ever sent in a kick to the advertising department,
or asked for their money back--it looked all right from the car windows.

But sign of habitation there was not, apart from the little
station--not even a section man's shanty--just the station. Angel
Forks was important to the Transcontinental on one count, and on one
count only--its siding. Neither freight nor passenger receipts were
swelled, twelve months in or twelve months out, by Angel Forks; but,
geographically, the train despatcher's office back in Big Cloud never
lost sight of it--in the heart of the mountains, single-tracked, mixed
trains, locals, way freights, specials, and the Limiteds that knew no
"rights" on earth but a clean-swept track with their crazy fast
schedules, met and crossed each other as expediency demanded.

So, in a way, after all, perhaps it _was_ desolate--except from the car
windows. Horton, the day man that the Kid was relieving, evidently had
found it so. He was waiting on the platform with his trunk when the
way freight pulled in, and he turned the station over to the Kid
without much formality.

"God be with you till we meet again," was about the gist of what Horton
said--and he said it with a mixture of sympathy for another's
misfortune and an uplift at his own escape from bondage struggling for
the mastery, while he waved his hand from the tail of the caboose as
the way freight pulled out.

There was mighty little formality about the transfer, and the Kid found
himself in charge with almost breathtaking celerity. Angel Forks, Dan
McGrew, way freight No. 47, and the man he had relieved, were sort of
hazy, neb