, a chime whistle came ringing long, imperiously, from the
curve ahead. Fatty Hogan's face went white; he was standing up in the
cab and close to Coussirat, and he clasped the fireman's arm. "What's
that?" he cried.

The answer came with a rush--a headlight cut streaming through the
night, there was a tattoo of beating trucks, an eddying roar of wind, a
storm of exhausts, a flash of window lights like scintillating
diamonds, and the Limited, pounding the fish-plates at sixty miles an
hour, was in and out--and _gone_.

Hogan sank weakly down on his seat, and a bead of sweat spurted from
his forehead.

"My God, Bull," he whispered, "do you know what that means?
Something's wrong. _She's against our order_."

They found the Kid and Dan McGrew, and they got the Kid into little
Doctor McTurk's hands at Big Cloud--but it was eight weeks and more,
while the boy raved and lay in stupor, before they got the story. Then
the Kid told it to Carleton in the super's office late one afternoon
when he was convalescent--told him the bald, ugly facts in a sort of
hopeless way.

Carleton listened gravely; it had come near to being a case of more
lives gone out on the Circus Special and the Limited that night than he
cared to think about. He listened gravely, and when the Kid had
finished, Carleton, in that quiet way of his, put his finger instantly
on the crux of the matter--not sharply, but gently, for the Kid had
played a man's part, and "Royal" Carleton loved a man.

"Was it worth it, Keene?" he asked. "Why did you try to shield McGrew?"

The Kid was staring hard at the floor.

"He was my father," he said.

IX

THE OTHER FELLOW'S JOB

There is a page in Hill Division history that belongs to Jimmy Beezer.
This is Beezer's story, and it goes back to the days of the building of
the long-talked-of, figure-8-canted-over-sideways tunnel on the Devil's
Slide, that worst piece of track on the Hill Division, which is to say,
the worst piece of track, bar none, on the American continent.

Beezer, speaking generally, was a fitter in the Big Cloud shops;
Beezer, in particular, wore a beard. Not that there is anything
remarkable in the fact that one should wear a beard, though there are
two classes of men who shouldn't--the man who chews tobacco, and the
man who tinkers around a railroad shop and on occasions, when major
repairs are the order of the day, is intimate with the "nigger-head" of
a locomotive. Beezer combin