't put it into my head; and now
the more I think of it, the better it looks."

"I thought so," sniffed Mrs. Beezer profoundly. "And now, Mr. Beezer,
let this be the last of it. The idea! I never heard of such a thing!"

Curiously enough, or perhaps naturally enough, Mrs. Beezer's cold-water
attitude had precisely the opposite effect on Jimmy Beezer to that
which she had intended it should have. It was the side-entrance
proposition over again. When you've been caught sneaking in that way,
you might just as well use the front door on Main Street next time, and
have done with it. Beezer began to do a little talking around the
roundhouse. The engine crews, by the time they tumbled to the fact
that it wasn't just the ordinary grumble that any man is entitled to in
his day's work, stuck their tongues in their cheeks, winked
surreptitiously at each other--and encouraged him.

Now it is not to be implied that Jimmy Beezer was anybody's fool--not
for a minute--a first-class master fitter with his time served is a
long way from being in that class right on the face of it. Beezer
might have been a little blinded to the tongues and winks on account of
his own earnestness; perhaps he was--for a time. Afterwards--but just
a minute, or we'll be running by a meeting point, which is mighty bad
railroading.

Beezer's cap, when he took the plunge and tackled Regan, had got tilted
pretty far back, so far that the peak stood off his forehead at about
the same rakish angle that his upturned little round knob of a nose
stuck up out of his beard; which is to say that Beezer had got to the
stage where he had decided that the professional swing through the
gangway he had been practising every time, and some others, that he had
occasion to get into a cab, was going to be of some practical use at an
early date.

He put it up to Regan one morning when the master mechanic came into
the roundhouse.

Regan leaned his fat little body up against the jamb of one of the big
engine doors, pulled at his scraggly brown mustache, and blinked as he
listened.

"What's the matter with you, Beezer, h'm?" he inquired perplexedly,
when the other was at an end.

"Haven't I just told you?" said Beezer. "I want to quit fitting and
get running."

"Talks as though he meant it," commented Regan sotto voce to himself,
as he peered earnestly into the fitter's face.

"Of course, I mean it," declared Beezer, a little tartly. "Why
wouldn't I?"

"No,