THE DONOVAN CHANCECHAPTER ITHE BUG AND THE ELEPHANT
THE DONOVAN CHANCE
Engine 331, the biggest mountain passenger-train puller on the Nevada Short Line, was a Pacific-type compound, with a bewildering clutter of machinery underneath that made a wiper’s job a sort of puzzle problem; the problem being to get the various gadgets clean without knocking one’s head off too many times against the down-hanging machinery. Larry Donovan, mopping the last of the gadgets as the shop quitting-time whistle blew, called it a day’s work, flung down his handful of oily waste and crawled out of the concrete pit.
Grigg Dunham, fireman of the 246, which was standing next door to the 331, leaned out of his cab window.
“’Lo, Blackface!” he grinned. “Time to go home and eat a bite o’ pie.”
Larry’s return grin showed a mouthful of well-kept teeth startlingly white in their facial setting of grime. Normally he was what you might call a strawberry blonde, with lightish red hair that curled and crinkled discouragingly in spite of a lot of wetting and brushing, and a skin, where it wasn’t freckled or sunburned, ashealthily clear as a baby’s; but wiping black oil and gudgeon grease from the under parts of a locomotive would make a blackamoor out of an angel—for the time being, at least.
“I’m going after that piece of pie as soon as I can wash up,” he told Dunham; and a minute later he was stripping off his overalls in the round-house scrub room.
Thanks to a good bath and a change from his working clothes it was an altogether different looking Larry who presently left the round-house to go cater-cornering up the yard toward the crossing watchman’s shanty at Morrison Avenue. One thing his hard-earned High School course—just now completed—had taught him was to be really chummy with soap and water, and another was to leave the shop marks behind him when the quitting whistle blew—as a good many of his fellow workers on the railroad did not. Big and well-muscled for his age, it was chiefly his cheerful grin that stamped him as a boy when he looked in upon his father at the crossing shanty.
“Ready, Dad?” he asked; and the big, mild-eyed crossing watchman, whose empty left sleeve showed why he was on the railroad “cripple” list, nodded, took down his coat from its hook on the wall and joined his son for the walk home.
“Well, Larry, lad, how goes the new job by this time?” John Donovan asked, after the pair had tramped in comradely silence for a square or two.
Larry was looking straight ahead of him when he replied:
“I’m going to tell you the truth, Dad; I’m not stuck on it—not a little bit.”
The crossing watchman shook his big head in mild disapproval.
“You’ve done fine, Larry; pulling yourself through the school by the night work in the shops. But it’s sorry I am if it’s made you ashamed of a bit of black oil.”
“It isn’t that; you know it isn’t, Dad. The black oil doesn’t count.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“It’s—er—oh, shucks! I just can’t tell, when you pin me right down to it. I don’t mind the work or getting dirty, or anything like that; and I do like to fool around engines and machinery. I guess it’s just what there is to look forward to that’s worrying me. I’ll be wiping engines for a few months, and then maybe I’ll get a job firing a switching engine in the yard. A year or two of that may get me on a road engine; and if I make good, a few years more’ll move me over to the right-hand side of the cab.”
“Good enough,” said John Donovan. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing—except that the last boost will be the end of it; you know it will, Dad. It’s mighty seldom that a locomotive engineer ever gets to be anything else, no matter how good an engineer he is. Right there I’ll stop; and I’ve been sort of asking myself if I’m going to be satisfied to stop.”
Again John Donovan made the sign of disapproval.
“’Tis too many high notions the school’s been putting into your head, Larry, boy,” he deprecated. “You’d be forgetting that your father was an engineer before you—till the old ’69 went into the ditch and gave me this”—moving the stump in the empty sleeve.
“No, I’m not forgetting, Dad; not for a single minute,” Larry broke in quickly. “You’ve made the best of your chance—and of everything. And I want to do the same. Maybe Iamdoing it in the round-house; I can’t think it out yet. But I mean to think it out. There are Kathie and Jimmie and Bessie and little Jack; they’ve got to have their chance at the schools, too, the same as I’ve had mine.”
“And you’ll give it to them, Larry, if I can’t. With even a fireman’s pay you could help.”
“I know,” said Larry; and at this point the little heart-to-heart talk slipped back into the comradely silence and stayed there.
Larry ate supper with the family that evening as usual, but he said so little, and was so evidently preoccupied, that his mother asked him if he wasn’t feeling well. The talk with his father on the way home had been his first attempt to put the vague stirrings inside of him into spoken words, and the natural consequence was that he was trying to make the stirrings take some sort of definite and tangible shape. Of course they refused utterly to do anything so reasonable as that—which is the way that all ambitious stirrings have in their early stages—and the result was to make him thoughtful and tongue-tied.
So the table chatter went on through the meal without any help from him, and he found himself listening with only half an ear when his father told of a perfectly hair-raising escape an automobile full of people had had on his crossing during the day. Kathryn, who was fifteen, was the only one besides the mother to notice Larry’s preoccupation, and when he came down-stairs after supper to go out, she was waiting at the front door for him.
“What is it, Larry?” she asked. “Did something go twisty with you to-day?”
“Not a thing in the wide world, Kathie,” he denied, calling up the good-natured grin and laying an arm in brotherly fashion across her shoulders.
“But you’re not going back to work to-night?”
“Not me,” he laughed, cheerfully reckless of his grammar now that his school-days were over. “I’m just going out to walk around the block and have a think; that’s all.”
“What about?”
“Oh, I don’t know; everything, I guess. Don’t you worry about me. I’m all right.” And to prove it he went off whistling and with his hands in his pockets.
The after-supper stroll, which was entirely aimless as to its direction, led him first through the quiet streets of the “railroad colony.” In its beginnings Brewster had been strictly a railroad town; but now it had become the thriving metropolis of Timanyoni Park; a city in miniature, with electric lights and power furnished by the harnessed river, with some manufacturing, and with an irrigated wheat and apple-growing country around it to take the place of the cattle ranges which had preceded the coming of the railroad.
Now, though Larry’s stroll was aimless, as we have said, that is, in any conscious sense of having a definite destination, there was just one direction it was almost bound to take. Born and bred in a railroad atmosphere, it was second nature for him to drift toward the handsome, lava-stone building which served the double purpose of the Nevada Short Line’s passenger station and general office headquarters.
The long concreted approach platform running downfrom the foot of the main street offered itself as a cab rank for the station; and as Larry traversed it, still deep in the brown study, General Manager Maxwell’s smart green roadster cut a half circle in the turning area, whisked accurately into its parking space between two other cars, and the fresh-faced young fellow who had played at first base on the Brewster High School nine in the winning series with Red Butte, climbed out and hailed the brown-studier.
“Hullo, Curly!” he called, using the school nickname which Larry had long since come to accept merely because he had never been able to think up any way of killing it off. “What are you doing down here at this time o’ night?”
“‘Time o’ night’ happens to be time of the early evening,” Larry corrected; adding: “One thing I’m not doing is joy-riding in a green chug-wagon.”
“Tag,” said the general manager’s son good-naturedly. “Neither am I. Father has a conference of some sort on with the bosses. I don’t know what’s up, but I suppose it’s all this anarchist talk that’s been going around and stirring things up. He ’phoned me up home a little while ago and told me to drive down and wait for him.”
“Anarchist talk?” said Larry; “I haven’t heard any.”
“Oh, it’s just that little bunch of trouble-makers over on the west end. You remember reading in the papers how they spoiled a lot of work in the shops and raised Cain generally. The court over in Uintah County sent three of them to prison last week for sabotage and the others have threatened to get square with the company for prosecuting them. That’s all.”
Larry caught step with the former first baseman as they walked on toward the station building.
“Is this all you’re going to do this vacation, Dick?” he asked; “drive down to the offices once in a while to take your father home in the car?”
“Not on your sweet life!” was the laughing reply. “What I’m going to do is tied up in a sort of secret, but I guess it’ll be all right to tell you. The company is going to build a road up the Tourmaline to the Little Ophir gold field, and—this is the secret part of it—we’re going to try to beat the Overland Central to it. I’m to go out with the surveying party, or rather the construction party, as a sort of roustabout, chain-bearer—anything you like to call it.”
The difference between Dick Maxwell’s prospects and his own gave Larry Donovan the feeling of having been suddenly wrapped in a wet blanket. In a flash he saw a panorama picture of Dick’s summer; the free, adventurous life in the mountain wilds, the long days crammed full of the most interesting kind of work, the camp fire at night in the heart of the immensities, and, more than all, the chance to be helping to do something that was really adding to the sum of the world’s riches. Wiping grease from tired machinery wasn’t to be spoken of in the same day with it. Yet Larry was game; he wouldn’t share the wet blanket with the lucky one.
“That’s simply bully!” he said; “first lessons in engineering, eh?”
“Y-yes; maybe: but it ought to be you, Larry, instead of me. You’ve got the head for it, and the math., and all the rest of it. Have you gone to work in the round-house as you said you were going to?”
“Yep,” said Larry, and he tried to say it as a workingman would have said it. “I had to make up my mind one way or the other. It was either the round-house or an apprenticeship in the back shop.”
“Wouldn’t the apprenticeship have been better?”
“Nope; nothing at the end of that alley but maybe a foreman’s job.”
“And maybe a master-mechanic’s,” Dick Maxwell put in.
“Not much!” Larry scoffed. “Might have put that sort of stuff over in our grandfather’s days—theydidput it over then. But you can’t do it now. Look at our own superintendent of Motive Power—Mr. Dawson; he’s a college man—has to be; and so is every single one of the division master-mechanics. It’s all very well to talk about climbing up through the ranks, Dick, and I guess now and then a fellow does do it by working his head off. But it’s the education that counts.”
“I guess that’s so, too,” was the half reluctant reply. “But how about the ‘promosh’ from where you are now in the round-house, Larry?”
“From where I am now I can count on getting an engine to run some day, if I’ll be good—and if I live long enough. That’s a step higher than a shop foremanship—at least, in wages.”
By this time they had passed through the station archway that ran through the first story of the railroad building and were out upon the broad, five-track train platform.
“Let’s tramp a bit,” said Dick. “They’re still drilling over that conference in the trainmaster’s office and goodness only knows when they’ll be through.”
The tramping turned itself into a sort of sentry-go up and down the long platform; and to go with it there was a lot of talk about things as they are, and things as they ought to be. Since he couldn’t talk freely at home—at least to anybody but Kathryn, and she, after all was said, was only a girl—Larry opened his mind to the fellow with whom, among all his late classmates, he had been most chummy.
“I don’t know; it looks as if a fellow never does know, until it’s everlastingly too late, Dick; but I shouldn’t wonder if I’m not taking that ‘line of the least resistance’ that Professor Higgins used to be always talking about. I guess I could make out to go to college this fall and grind my way through somehow, even without much money; in fact I’m sure I could if I should set my head on it. But then there are the home folks. Dad’s got about all he can carry, and then some; and Kathie and the others are needing their boost for the schooling—they’ve got to have it. I’ll leave it to you, Dick: has a fellow in my fix any right to drop out for four solid years—just when the money he can earn is needed most?”
It was too deep a question for Dickie Maxwell and he confessed it. What he didn’t realize was that it was made a lot deeper for him because he had never known how much brain or brawn, or both, it takes to roll up the slow, cart-wheel dollars in this world. He hadn’t had to know, because his father, in addition to being the railroad company’s general manager, was half-owner in one of the best-paying gold mines in the near-by Topaz range. True, Mr. Richard Maxwell was democratic enough to put his son into an engineering party for thesummer, but that didn’t mean that the wages that Dick might earn—or the wages he might get without specially earning them—would make any real difference to anybody.
As the two boys tramped up and down the platform and talked, the stir around them gradually increased. Train gates and grilles were as yet unknown in Brewster, and intending travelers, with their tickets bought and their baggage checked, were free to wander out upon the platform to wait for their train—which they mostly did.
Dick Maxwell held his wrist watch up to the light of one of the masthead electrics. The “Flying Pigeon” from the west was almost due; but Number Eleven, the time freight from the east, had not yet pulled in, as they could see by looking up through the freight yard starred with its staring red, yellow and green switch lights.
“Eleven is going to miss making her time-card ‘meet’ here with the ‘Pigeon’ if she doesn’t watch out,” said the general manager’s son, who knew train schedules and movements on the Short Line much better than he did some other and—for him, at least—more necessary things.
“That will just about break Buck Dickinson’s heart,” Larry predicted. “Only day before yesterday I heard him bragging that since they gave him the big new 356 Consolidated he hadn’t missed a ‘meet’ in over two months.”
Again Dick looked at his watch.
“If the ‘Pigeon’s’ on time he has only thirteen minutes left,” he announced; and then: “Hullo!—what’s that?”
“That” was a small white spot-light coming down through the freight yard from the east. It was too littlefor an engine headlight—and too near the ground level. Somewhere up among the yard tracks it stopped; the switch lamp just ahead of it flicked from yellow to red; the little headlight moved on a few yards; and then the switch signal flicked back to yellow.
Larry Donovan laughed.
“I ought to know what that thing is, if you don’t,” he offered. “It’s Mr. Roadmaster Browder’s gasoline inspection car—‘The Bug,’ as they call it.I’dsay he was taking chances; coming in that way just ahead of a time freight.”
“A miss is as good as a mile,” Dick countered. “He’s in, and side-tracked and out of the way, and that’s all he needed. There goes his light—out.”
As he spoke the little spot-light blinked out, and as the two boys turned to walk in the opposite direction an engine headlight appeared at the western end of things, coming up the other yard from the round-house skip. Since Brewster was a locomotive division station, all trains changed engines, and the boys knew that this upcoming headlight was carried by the “Flying Pigeon’s” relief; the engine that would take the fast train up Timanyoni Canyon and on across the Red Desert.
Half a minute later the big passenger flyer trundled up over the outside passing-track with a single man—the hostler—in the cab. At the converging switches just west of the station platform the engine’s course was reversed and it came backing slowly in on the short station spur or stub-track to come to a stop within a few yards of where Larry and the general manager’s son were standing.
“The 331,” said Larry, reading the number. “Sheought to run pretty good to-night. I put in most of the afternoon cleaning her up and packing her axle-boxes.”
Dick Maxwell didn’t reply. Being a practical manager’s son, he was already beginning to acquire a bit of the managerial point of view. What he was looking at was the spectacle of Jorkins, the hostler, hooking the 331’s reversing lever up to the center notch, and then dropping out of the engine’s gangway to disappear in the darkness.
“That’s a mighty reckless thing to do, and it’s dead against the rules,” Dick said; “to leave a road engine steamed up and standing that way with nobody on it!”
“Atkins and his fireman will be here in a minute,” Larry hazarded. “And, anyway, nothing could happen. She’s hooked up on the center, and even if the throttle should fly open she couldn’t start.”
“Just the same, a steamed-up engine oughtn’t to be left alone,” Dick insisted. “There’s always a chance that something might happen.”
Now in the case of the temporarily abandoned 331 something did happen; several very shocking somethings, in fact; and they came so closely crowding together that there was scarcely room to catch a breath between them.
First, a long-drawn-out whistle blast announced the approach of the “Flying Pigeon” from the west. Next, the waiting passengers began to bunch themselves along the inbound track. Dickie Maxwell, managerial again, was growling out something about the crying necessity for station gates and a fence to keep people from running wild all over the platform when Larry grabbedhim suddenly, exclaiming, “Who is that—on the ’Thirty-one?”
What they saw was a small, roughly dressed man, a stranger, with a bullet-shaped head two-thirds covered by a cap drawn down to his ears, snapping himself up to the driver’s step in the cab of the 331. In a flash he had thrown the reversing lever into the forward motion and was tugging at the throttle-lever. A short car-length away down the platform, fat, round-faced Jerry Atkins and his fireman were coming up to take their engine for the night’s run to Copah. They were not hurrying. The “Flying Pigeon” was just then clanking in over the western switches, and the incoming engine must be cut off and taken out of the way before they could run the 331 out and back it in to a coupling with the train. And since the two enginemen were coming up from behind, the high, coal-filled tender kept them from seeing what was going on in the 331’s cab.
But the two boys could see, and what they saw paralyzed them, just for the moment. The bullet-headed stranger was inching the throttle-valve open, and with a shuddering blast from the short stack the wheels of 331 began to turn. An instant later it was lumbering out around the curving stub-track and as it lurched ahead, somebody, invisible in the darkness, set the switch to connect the spur-track with the main line.
Dick Maxwell gasped.
“Who is that man at the throttle?” he demanded; but before there could be any answer they both saw the man hurl himself out of the right-hand gangway of the moving machine, to alight running, and to vanish in the nearest shadows. Then they knew.
“The anarchists!—they’re going to wreck her!” yelled Larry. “Come on!” and then they both did just what anybody might have done under the stinging slap of the first impulse, and knowing that a horrifying collision of the runaway with the over-due fast freight couldn’t be more than a few short minutes ahead: they started out to chase a full-grown locomotive, under steam and abandoned, afoot!
It was the fact that the 331 was a “compound” that made it seem at first as though they might be able to catch her. Compound engines are the kind designed to take the exhaust steam from one pair of cylinders, using it over again in the second pair. But to get the maximum power for starting a heavy train there is a mechanism which can be set to admit the “live” steam from the boiler into both pairs of cylinders; and the 331 was set that way when the wrecker opened the throttle. As a consequence the big passenger puller was choking itself with too much power, and so was gaining headway rather slowly.
“He’s left her ‘simpled’—we can catch her!” Larry burst out as they raced over the cross-ties in the wake of the runaway. “We—we’vegotto catch her!Sh-she’ll hit the time freight!”
It was all perfectly foolish, of course; but perfectly human. If they could have taken time to think—only there wasn’t any time—they would have run in exactly the opposite direction; back to the despatcher’s office where a quick wire alarm call to the “yard limits” operator out beyond the eastern end of the freight yard might have set things in motion to shunt the wild engineinto a siding, and to display danger signals for the incoming freight train.
But nobody ever thinks of everything all at once; and to Larry and his running mate the one thing bitingly needful seemed to be to overtake that lumbering Pacific-type before it could get clear away and bring the world to an end.
They were not more than half-way up through the deserted freight yard before they both realized that even well-trained, base-running legs and wind were not good enough. Dick Maxwell was the first to cave in.
“W-we can’t do it!” he gurgled—“she’s gone!”
It was at this crisis that Larry Donovan had his inspiration; found himself grappling breathlessly with that precious quality which makes the smashed fighter get up and dash the sweat out of his eyes and fight again. The inspiration came at the sight of the roadmaster’s transformed hand-car which had been fitted with a gasoline drive, standing on the siding where its late users had left it.
“The Bug—Browder’s motor car!” he gasped, leading a swerving dart aside toward the new hope. “Help me push it out to the switch—quick!”
They flung themselves against the light platform car, heaved, shoved, got it in motion, and ran it swiftly to the junction of the siding with the main track. Here, tugging and lifting a corner at a time (they had no key with which to unlock the switch, of course,) they got it over upon the proper pair of rails. Another shove started the little pop-popping motor and they were off, with Larry, who as a night helper in the shops thewinter before had worked on the job of transforming the hand-car and installing the engine in it, at the controls.
By the time all this was done the runaway had passed the “yard limits” signal tower and was disappearing around the first curve in the track beyond. Neither of the boys knew anything about the speed possibilities in the “Bug,” but they soon found that it could run like a scared jack rabbit. Recklessly Larry depressed the lever of the accelerator, trusting to the lightness of the car to keep it from jumping as it squealed around the curves, and at the first mile-post they could see that they were gaining upon the wild engine, which was still choking itself with too much power.
“Another mile and we’ll get there!” Dick Maxwell shouted—he had to shout to make himself heard above the rattle and scream of the flying wheels; “another mile, if that freight’ll only——”
There was a good reason why he didn’t finish whatever it was that he was going to say. The two racing machines, the beetle and the elephant, had just flicked around a curve to a long straight-away, and up ahead, partly hidden by the thick wooding of another curve, they both saw the reflection from the beam of a westbound headlight. The time freight was coming.
It was small wonder that Dickie Maxwell lost his nerve for just one flickering instant.
“Stop her, Larry—stop her!” he yelled. “If we keep on, the smash’ll catch us, too!”
But Larry Donovan was grimly hanging on to that priceless gift so lately discovered; namely, the gift which enables a fellow to hang on.
“No!” he yelled back. “We’ve got to stop that runaway.Clamp onto something—I’m giving her all she’s got!”
It was all over—that is, the racing part of it was—in another half-minute. As the gap was closing between the big fugitive and its tiny pursuer, Larry shouted his directions to Dick.
“Listen to me, Dick: there’s no use in two of us taking the chance of a head-ender with Eleven. When we touch I’m going to climb the ’Thirty-one. As I jump, you shut off and reverse and get back out of the way, quick! Do you hear?”
The Brewster High School ex-first-baseman heard, but he had a firm grip on his nerve, now, and had no notion of heeding.
“I won’t!” he shouted back. “Think I’m going to let you hog all the risk? Not if I know it!”
Circumstances, and the quick wit of one Larry Donovan, cut the protest—and the double risk—as the poor dog’s tail was cut off; close up under the ears. As the motorized hand-car surged up under the “goose-neck” coupling buffer on the rear of the 331’s tender, Larry did two separate and distinct things at the same instant, so to speak; snapped the motor car’s magneto spark off and so killed it, and leaped for a climbing hold on the goose-neck.
With his hold made good he permitted himself a single backward glance. True to form, the Bug, with its power cut off, was fading rapidly out of the zone of danger. Larry gathered himself with a grip on the edge of the tender flare, heaved, scrambled, hurled himself over the heaped coal and into the big compound’s cab and grabbed for the throttle and the brake-cock handle.
There wasn’t any too much time. After he had shut off the steam and was applying the air-brakes with one hand and holding the screaming whistle open with the other, the headlight of the fast freight swung around the curve less than a quarter of a mile away. As you would imagine, there was also some pretty swift work done in the cab of the freight engine when Engineer Dickinson saw a headlight confronting him on the single track and heard the shrill scream of the 331’s whistle.
Luckily, the freight happened to be a rather light train that night—light, that is, as modern, half-mile-long freight trains go—and the trundling flats, boxes, gondolas and tank-cars, grinding fire under every clamped wheel, were brought to a stand while there was yet room enough, say, to swing a cat between the two opposed engines. Explanations, such as they were, followed hastily; and the freight crew promptly took charge of the situation. The Bug was brought up, lifted off the rails, carried around, and coupled in to be towed instead of pushed; and then Dickinson’s fireman was detailed to run the 331 back to Brewster, with the freight following at a safe interval.
Larry and Dick Maxwell rode back in the cab of 331, Larry doing what little coal shoveling was needed on the short run. When the big Pacific-type, towing the transformed hand-car, backed through the freight yard and edged its way down to the passenger platform, there was an excited crowd waiting for it, as there was bound to be. News of the bold attempt at criminal sabotage had spread like wildfire, and the two criminals—the one who had started the locomotive, and the other who had set theoutlet switch for it—had both been caught before they could escape.
Larry Donovan, dropping his shovel, saw the crowd on the station platform and knew exactly what it meant; or rather, exactly what was going to happen to him and Dick when they should face it. Like most normal young fellows he had his own special streak of timidity, and it came to the fore with a bound when he saw that milling platform throng.
With a sudden conviction that it would be much easier to face loaded cannon than those people who were waiting to yell themselves hoarse over him and Dickie Maxwell, he slid quickly out of the left-hand gangway before the 331 came to a full stop, whisked out of sight around an empty passenger-car standing on the next track, and was gone.
It was still only in the shank of the evening when he reached home. A glance through the window showed him the family still grouped around the lamp in the sitting-room. Making as little noise as possible he let himself into the hall and stole quietly up-stairs to his room. Now that the adventure was over there were queer little shakes and thrills coming on to let him know how fiercely he had been keyed up in the crisis.
After a bit he concluded he might as well go to bed and sleep some of the shakiness off; and he already had one shoe untied when somebody tapped softly on his door.
“It’s only me—Kathie,” said a voice, and he got up to let her in. One glance at the sort of shocked surprise in his sister’s pretty eyes made him fear the worst.
“Mr. Maxwell has just sent word for you to come tohis office, right away,” was the message that was handed in; and Larry sat on the edge of his bed and held his head in his hands, and said, “Oh,gee!”
“What have you been doing to have the general manager send for you at this time of night?” Kathie wanted to know. The question was put gently, as from one ready either to sympathize or congratulate—whichever might be needed.
“You’ll probably read all about it in theHeraldto-morrow,” said Larry, gruffly; and with that he tied his shoe string and found his cap and went to obey the summons.
It is hardly putting it too strongly to say that Larry Donovan found the six city squares intervening between home and the headquarters building a rather rocky road to travel as he made his third trip over the same ground in a single evening. The timidity streak was having things all its own way now, and he thought, and said, he’d rather be shot than to have to face what he supposed he was in for—namely, the plaudits of a lot of people who would insist upon making a fuss over a thing that was as much a bit of good luck as anything else.
But, as often happens, if you’ve noticed it, the anticipation proved to be much worse than the reality. Reaching the railroad headquarters-station building he found that the “Flying Pigeon” had long since gone on its way eastward, the crowd had dispersed, and there was nobody at all in the upper corridor of the building when he passed through it on his way to the general manager’s suite of rooms at the far end.
Still more happily, after he had rather diffidently let himself in through the ante-room, he found only thesquare-shouldered, grave-faced general manager sitting alone at the great desk between the windows. There was a curt nod for a greeting; the nod indicating an empty chair at the desk end. Larry sat on the edge of the chair with his cap in his hands, and the interview began abruptly.
“You are John Donovan’s son, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“H’m; so you’re the fellow who was with my Dick.What made you run away and go homeafter you got back with the 331?”
“What made you run away and go home?”
“What made you run away and go home?”
“What made you run away and go home?”
Larry grinned because he couldn’t help it, though it was a sort oflesé majestéto grin in the presence of the general manager.
“I—I guess it was because I was afraid of the crowd,” he confessed.
“Modest?—or just bashful?”
“J-just scared, I guess.”
The barest shadow of a smile flickered for an instant in the general manager’s shrewd gray eyes.
“I don’t know as I blame you so much for that,” he commented. Then: “Dick tells me that you are wiping engines in the round-house. Did you pick out that job for yourself?”
“N-not exactly,” Larry managed to stammer. “I was through school and had to go to work at something. I guess I just took the first thing I could find.”
“Well, do you like it? Is it what you want to do?”
Larry somehow found his courage returning.
“No, sir; it isn’t,” he said baldly.
“Why isn’t it?”
Stumblingly and most awkwardly, as it seemed to himwhen he recalled it afterward, Larry blurted out some of his half-formed ambitions, and the conditions which were handcuffing them; the desire to get on in the world without knowing just how it was to be accomplished.
“If Dad hadn’t been crippled,” he finished; “if he could have gone on getting an engineer’s pay, things would be different. But as it is—well, I guess you can see how it is, Mr. Maxwell. I’m the oldest.”
The general manager heard him through without breaking in, and at the end of the story he was looking aside out of one of the darkened windows.
“You may not realize it,” he said, without looking around, “but you did a mighty brave thing to-night, boy. Dick has told me all about it; how it was your idea to take the roadmaster’s gasoline inspection car for the chase; how you kept on when he would have given up; how you drove him back at the last and wouldn’t let him share the risk which you took alone.”
Larry felt that this was too much. He had time for the sober second thought now, and he saw how all of the danger might have been avoided.
“I’m sort of ashamed of myself, Mr. Maxwell,” he said sheepishly. “The ’Thirty-one wasn’t going very fast; she was ‘simpled’ and was choking herself. If, instead of chasing her, we had run up to the despatcher’s office, they could have caught her all right at ‘yard limits’.”
“That doesn’t cut any figure,” was the sober reply. “The main thing is that you did what you set out to do—stopped that runaway engine. Results are what count. You didn’t think of the easy thing to do, but you did think of something that worked. For that the companyis indebted to you. How should you like to have the debt paid?”
“We didn’t do it for pay,” Larry protested.
“I know that,”—curtly. “Just the same, you have earned the pay. What would you like? Don’t be bashful twice in the same evening.”
Thus adjured, Larry took his courage in both hands and gripped it so hard that if it had had a voice it must have yelled aloud.
“I—I’d like to have a job this summer where I could earn enough money to count for something at home, and where I could have a chance to learn something and get ahead.”
Again the grave-eyed “big boss” was looking out of the darkened window.
“Tell me just what the job would be—if you could have your choice,” he said quietly.
For one flitting instant Larry thought of the engineering party that was going to the Tourmaline, and what a perfectly rip-roaring good time he could have with Dick if he should be along; but so he dismissed that picture before it should get too strong a hold.
“I guess I’m not picking and choosing much,” he made shift to say. “I’ll do anything you tell me to, Mr. Maxwell.”
“But that wouldn’t be paying the company’s debt. If you’ve got it in you to make good, you shall have the kind of job to give you the opportunity,” said the general manager, adding: “That is, of course, if your father approves.”
Larry leaned forward anxiously.
“Would it be—would it be to go on wiping engines?” he made bold to ask, rather breathlessly.
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought there was just a hint of a twinkle in the grave gray eyes to go with Mr. Maxwell’s reply.
“That wouldn’t be much of a reward—to make you foreman of engine-wipers: you’d probably earn that for yourself in course of time. I said you might have the kind of job you wanted most. Dick has been telling me of your talk just before the 331 was stolen. Next Monday morning you and he will both go out with the Tourmaline Canyon construction force—to do whatever Mr. Ackerman, the chief of construction, may want you to do; always providing your father approves. Your pay will be something better than you are at present getting in the round-house. That’s all; run along, now, and talk it over with your father and mother.”
And Larry ran, treading upon air for the space of six city squares. For now, you see, he had been given his chance—which was all that a Donovan could ask.