running mate. He'd refuse
point-blank at first to be separated from the obsolete engine, that was
either carded for some local jerk-water, mixed-freight run, or for a
construction job somewhere.

"Leave her with me," he'd say to Regan, the master mechanic. "Leave me
with her. You can give my run to some one else, Regan, d'ye mind?
It's little I care for the swell run; me and the old girl sticks. I'll
have nothing else."

But the bluff, fat, big-hearted, good-natured, little master mechanic,
knew his man--and he knew an engineer when he saw one. Regan would no
more have thought of letting Owsley get away from the Imperial's
throttle than he would have thought of putting call boys in the cabs to
run his engines.

"H'm!" he would say, blinking fast at Owsley. "Feel that way, do you?
Well, then, mabbe it's about time you quit altogether. I didn't offer
you your choice, did I? You take the Imperial with what I give you to
take her with--or take nothing. Think it over!"

And Owsley, perforce, had to "think it over"--and, perforce, he stayed
on the limited run.

Came then the day when changes in engine types were not so frequent,
and a fair maximum in machine-design efficiency had been obtained--and
Owsley came to love, more than he had ever loved any engine before, his
big, powerful, 1600-class racer, with its four pairs of massive
drivers, that took the curves with the grace of a circling bird, that
laughed in glee at anything lower than a three per cent grade, and
tackled the "fives" with no more than a grunt of disdain--Owsley and
the 1601, right from the start, clipped fifty-five minutes off the
running time of the Imperial Limited through the Rockies, where before
it had been nip and tuck to make the old schedule anywhere near the dot.

For three years it was Owsley and the 1601; for three years east and
west through the mountains--and a smile in the roundhouse at him as he
nursed and cuddled and groomed his big flyer, in from a run. Not
now--they don't smile now about it. It was Owsley and the 1601 for
three years--and at the end it was still Owsley and the 1601. The two
are coupled together--they never speak of one on the Hill Division
without the other--Owsley and the 1601.

Owsley! One of the old guard who answered the roll call at the birth
of the Hill Division! Forty years a railroader--call boy at
ten--twenty years of service, counting the construction period, on the
Hill Division! Straight