There never was, and there isn’t now, anything elusive about the Hill Division, unless you get to talking about the mileage—when you strike the mileage you strike deep water, and the way of it is this. Most things that are big and vital and enduring develop with the years to their own maturity, and with maturity comes perfection—as nearly as anything is perfect. When the last rail that proclaimed man’s mastery of the Rockies and the Sierras an accomplished fact was spiked to the ties with much ceremony and more eclat, to say nothing of the somewhat wobbly and uncertain blows with which the silk-hatted, very-important-national-personage performed this crowning act, while the rough-and-readys whose toil and sweat and grime and blood had bought the miles the orators were eulogizing, being no longer of the elect, looked on from a respectful distance—when all this was done the Hill Division, even then, was no more than the rough draft of a masterpiece.

In the years that followed came the pruning and the changes, the smoothing and the toning down—tunnels bored through the mountain-sides lessened the grades and lopped off winding miles around projecting spurs; trestles with long embankment approaches added their quota to this much-to-be-desired result; while in the foothills, instead of circling around and around, to the right and the left and the left and the right of an endless procession of buttes, the buttes themselves came to be bisected with mathematical precision. All told, many miles, very many miles, have been wiped out in this fashion—the elusive part of it is that, measured in the dollars and cents paid by the tourists for transportation and the shippers and consignees for freight hauls, the line is just as long as ever it was! And it would appear that a good deal of money had been spent with nothing to show for it; but then against this is the fact that the directors down East were never rated as imminent or near-imminent subjects for a lunacy commission. The mileage is elusive—let it go at that.

For the rest, the right of way from Big Cloud, the divisional point, just East of the mighty blue-blurred, snow-capped range that towers to the skyline North and South—from there to the rolling, undulating country that reaches West from the base of the Sierras, the Hill Division is, without question, the most marvelous piece of track ever conceived by man, and it stands a perpetual and enduring monument to the brains and the genius, ay, and the manhood, too, of those who built it.

Such is the Hill Division. You who know the Rockies know it for the grandeur of its scenery, know it for the glory of its conquest over obstacles seemingly insurmountable; but there is another side that you may not know, a side that the maps and plans and blueprints and the railroad folders and the windows of the observation cars, big as they are, do not show—and that side is the human side. It is full of tears and laughter, full of sorrow and joy, of dangers and death and mistakes and triumph—its history would fill many pages, but it is a history that will never be written, for the generals and the rank and file of its army have fought their battles without the blare of trumpets, have done their work and their duty as they saw it, simply and with few words, without thought of personal profit and, much less, of fame. They tell their own stories amongst themselves, and they hold in honor those entitled thereto—which is a meed beyond any recognition of governments or kings or principalities, because it is the tribute of man to man, without glamor and without pretense. If you are a man as they measure men, they will tell you the stories, too; and, if you care to smoke, they will offer you their black plugs with the heart-shaped tin tags that their favorite manufacturer imbeds therein and, further, they will hand you their clasp knives with which to slice it. If you are wise you will understand that you are honored above most men, and you will be becomingly humble and will listen. But if this, through circumstance and misfortune, has never been your lot, then, here and there, inadequately and meagerly, you may run across, in print, a stray breath from the Hill Division—this is a case in print—the story of “King” Gilleen.

Gilleen was a man you would never pass in a crowd without turning your head to look at him a second time, not even in a big crowd, for nature had dealt with Gilleen generously—or otherwise—whichever way it pleases you best to consider it. He had red hair of a shade that might be classified as brilliant, but which Regan, the master mechanic, described in metaphor. Said Regan: “You could see that head a mile away on the other side of a curve in a blizzard at night when he pokes it out of the cab window. You’ll never get Gilleen on the carpet because his headlight’s out, what?” Certainly, at any rate, Gilleen’s hair was undeniably red. He had blue eyes, and a very small nose which, for all that, was, next to his hair, the most prominent feature he possessed—small noses with a slight up-cant to the tip are pronounced, mere size to the contrary. His face was freckled and so were his hands; also, he was no small chunk of a man, not so very tall, but the shoulders on him were something to envy if you were friendly with him, or to respect if you were not. That was Gilleen, all except the fact that he admitted with emphasis to the blood of some wild Irish race of kings coursing through his veins. This last point was never established—every one took Gilleen’s word for it, that is every one but Regan, who was Irish himself and, more pertinent still, Gilleen’s direct superior. On this point Regan, who was never averse to doing it, could get a rise out of Gilleen quicker than the bite of a hungry trout.

“By Christmas,” Gilleen would sputter on such occasions, “I’ll have you know I’m no liar, an’ if ‘twere not for the missus an’ the six kids”—here Gilleen would always stop to count, owing to a possible arrival since the last clash, realizing that any slip would be instantly and mercilessly turned against him by the grinning master mechanic—“if’twere not for them, Regan, you listen to me, I’d bash your face an’ then ram the measly job you give me down your throat, I would that!”

“Well,” Regan would return, “when you get to sitting on a dinky, gilded throne, sunk to the crown-sheet in the bogs though it will be, I’d ask no more nor as much from your hands as you get from mine—which is more than your deserts. Who but me would do as much for you? You ought to be back wiping. I’ve thought some seriously of it, h’m? Six, is it now?—well, it’s a grand race!”

Whereupon Gilleen would say hot words and say them fervently, while he shook his fist at the master mechanic.

“I’ll show you some day, Regan,” was his final word. “I’ll show you what kind of a race it is, an’ don’t you forget it!”

All of which is neither very interesting nor in any degree witty—it simply shows where Gilleen’s nickname came from. Everybody on the division called him “King”—not to his face, they do now, but they didn’t then. Queer the way a little thing like that acts on a man sometimes. Gilleen was well enough liked in a way, but no one ever really took him seriously in anything. Associate a man with a joke and henceforward and forever after, usually, the two are inseparable. He may have aspirations, ambitions, what you will, but he is given no credit for having them—with Gilleen it was that way. Just Gilleen, “King” Gilleen—and a grin.

The Lord only knows what possessed Gilleen to adhere with such stout-hearted loyalty to his ancestors—you may put an interrogation mark after that last word, if you like—it began with perhaps no more than a boyish boast when his official connection with the system was no further advanced than to the degree of holding down the job of assistant boiler-washer in the roundhouse. The more they guyed him the more stubbornly he stuck—it was a matter worth fighting for, and Gilleen fought. He threw pounds, reach, and other advantages to the winds and took on anybody and everybody. By the time he had moved up to firing he had fought all who cared to fight, who were not a few; and when, following that in the due course of promotion, he got his engine, he had by blows, not argument, established his assertion outwardly at least. At a safe distance the division, remembering broken noses and missing teeth and no longer denying him his royal blood, gave him his way, smiled tolerantly in self-solace and called him “nutty.”

Regan, of course, still guyed—but Regan was master mechanic. Not that he did it by virtue of the immunity his official position afforded him, he never gave that a thought. He did it because he was Regan, and Regan was built that way. He could no more forego the chance of a laugh or an inward chuckle than he could forego the act of breathing—and live. A joke was a joke, just fun with him, that was all.

But with Gilleen it was different. Being unable to use his fists as was his wont, and being possessed of no other safety-valve, the pressure mounted steadily until it registered a point on his mental gauge that spoke eloquently of trouble to come.

And so matters stood when, following a rather dull summer, the fall business opened with a rush and a roar. Things moved with a jump, and the rails hummed under a constant stream of traffic east and west. Here, at least, was no joke—a rush on the Hill Division, single-track, through the mountains, never was. A month of it, and every one from car-tink to superintendent began to show the effects of the strain. It was double up everywhere, extra duty, extra tricks. The dispatchers caught their share of it and their eyes grew red and heavy under the lamps at night, and the heads of the day-men ached as they figured a series of meeting points that had no beginning and no end; but, bad as it was for the men on the keys, it was worse for some of those in the cabs. Schedulers went to smash. Perishables and flyers were given the best of it—the rights of the rest were the sidings. It was a case of crawl along, sneak from one to the other, with layout after layout, until the ordinary length of a day’s duty lapped over into fifteen-hour stretches and sometimes to twenty-four. Sleep, what they could get of it, the engine crews snatched bolt upright in their seats while they waited for Number One’s headlight to shoot streaming out of the East, or nodded until roused by the roar and thunder of a flying freight, cars and cars of it crammed with first-class ratings, streaking East, as it hurtled by with insolent disregard for every mortal thing on earth.

Maybe Gilleen got a little more of it than any one else on the throttles, maybe he did—or maybe he didn’t. Gilleen thought he did anyhow, and naturally he put it down to Regan’s account. Regan was head of the motive power department of the Hill Division—there was no one else to put it down to. It was Regan or imagination. Gilleen, not being strong on imagination, did not debate the question—he let it go at Regan.

In from one run, shot out on another—that was Gilleen’s schedule. The little woman in the little house uptown off Main street got to be mostly a memory to Gilleen, and as for the six brick-headed scions of his kingly race he came to wonder if they really existed at all.

Things boomed and hummed on the Hill Division, and while everybody on it snarled and swore and nagged at each other, as weary, worn-out, dropping-with-fatigue men will do, the smiles broadened on the lips and spread over the faces of the directors down East, as they rubbed their palms beneficently, expectantly, scenting extra dividends and soaring stock.

It was noon one day when Gilleen, with a trailing string of slewing freights behind him, pulled into the Big Cloud yards, uncoupled, backed down the spur, crossed the’table, and ran into the roundhouse. As he swung from the gangway, Regan came hurrying in through the engine doors of Gilleen’s pit from the direction of headquarters, and walked up to the engineer.

“Gilleen,” said he briskly, “you’ll have to take out Special Eighty-three. 1603’s ready with a full head on pit two.”

“What’s that?” snapped Gilleen. “Take out a special now? You know damn well I’m just in from a run. I’m tired. You’ll rub it in once too often, Regan.”

“We’re all tired, aren’t we?” returned the master mechanic tartly. “Do you think you’re the only one? As for rubbing it in, you’d better draw your fire, my bucko. There’s no rubbing in being done except in your eye! Anyhow, that’s enough talk. Special Eighty-three’s carded on rush orders from down East, and she’s been in here an hour now.”

“Well, why didn’t you let the crew that brought her in keep goin’ then?” snarled Gilleen. It was a fool question and he knew it; but, as he had said, he was tired, and his temper, never angelic, was now pretty well on edge.

Regan glared at him a moment angrily. Regan, too, was tired and irritable, harassed beyond the limit that most men are harassed. The demand upon the motive power department for men and engines had kept him up more than one night trying to figure out a problem that was well-nigh impossible.

“Let ‘em go on!” he snorted. “You know well enough I haven’t anything on the Prairie Division men. You know that—what d’ye say it for, h’m? You’re the first man in—and you go out first.”

“It strikes me I’m generally the first man in these days,” retorted Gilleen angrily; “an’ I’m sick of gettin’ the short end of it. I guess I won’t go out this time.”

It took a breathing spell before the master mechanic could explode adequately.

“You call yourself a railroad man!” he flung out furiously. “What are you whining about? Every man’s got his shoulder to the wheel and pushing without talk. We haven’t got any room here for quitters. I guess that blood of yours you’re so pinhead-brained proud——”

Regan did not finish. With a bellow of rage the red-haired engineer went at the other like a charging bull, and the master mechanic promptly measured his length on the roundhouse floor from a wallop on the head that made him see stars.

Regan scrambled to his feet. His heart was the heart of a fighter, even if his build was not. Straight at Gilleen he flew, and the passes and lunges and jabs he made—while the engineer played on the master mechanic’s paunch like a kettle-drum and delivered a second wallop on the head as a plaster for the first—are historic only for their infinitesimal coefficient of effectiveness. It is unquestionably certain that the master mechanic then and there would have proceeded to make up for some of his lost sleep, at least, if Gilleen’s fireman and a wiper or two hadn’t got in between the two men just when they did.

Gilleen was boiling mad.

“Well,” he bawled, “got anything more to say about quittin’ or that other thing? I guess I won’t go out this time, what?”

Regan was equally mad. And as he felt tenderly of his forehead, where a lump was rapidly approximating the formation of a goose egg, he grew madder still.

“You won’t go out, won’t you?” he roared. “Well I guess you will; and, what’s more, you’ll go out now—and get your time! I fire you, understand?”

“You bet!’” said “King” Gilleen—and that’s all he said. He looked at the master mechanic for a minute, but didn’t say anything more—just laughed and walked out of the roundhouse.

Naturally enough, the story got up and down the division, and everybody talked about it. With their rough and impartial justice they put both men in the wrong, but mostly Gilleen for insubordination. The affront Gilleen had suffered was not so big and momentous, a long way from being the vital thing in their eyes that it was in his. Gilleen was just nutty on that point, that was all there was to that. Regan’s judgment had been bad and the moment he had seized for his thrust and fling was by no manner of means a psychological one; but, for all that, Gilleen had no business to strike the master mechanic. He had got what was coming to him—that was the verdict. He was out and out for good. It was pretty generally conceded that it would be a long while before he pulled a throttle on the Hill Division again.

What sympathy the engineer got, for he got some, wasn’t on his own account. It was on account of his family—not the ancestral end of it, however. Six kids and a wife do not leave much change out of a paycheck even when it’s padded by overtime; six kids and a wife with no pay-check is pretty stiff running.

Gilleen was too hot under the collar to give a thought to that when he marched out of the roundhouse that noon; but it wasn’t many hours, after he had put in a few to make up for the sleep he hadn’t had during the preceding weeks, that the problem was up to him for consideration with a vote for adjournment for once ruled out as not in order.

Mrs. Gilleen may or may not have shared her spouse’s opinions on the subject of his illustrious descent—if she did she never put on any “airs” about it. Washing and dressing and cooking was about all one woman could manage for a household as big as hers. That’s what she said anyway, whenever any one asked her about it. And one glance at the red-headed brood that filled the front yard and swung on the front gate, whose hinges creaked in loud and bitter protest, was enough to preclude any dispute on that score. Just a little bit of a woman she was physically; but bigger practically than the whole corps of leading lights in social and domestic economy—which, come to think of it, is damning Mrs. Gilleen with faint praise, whereas too much couldn’t be said for her. However, let that go. Mrs. Gilleen was practical, and she had the matter up to the engineer almost before he had the sleep washed out of his eyes. No nagging, no reproach, nothing of that kind—Mrs. Gilleen wasn’t that sort of a woman. “King,” or not, Gilleen might have been, Katie Gilleen was a queen, not in looks perhaps, but a queen—that’s flat. A fine woman is the finest thing in the world, and if that were said a little more often than it is maybe things generally wouldn’t be any the worse for it—which is not a plank in the platform of the Suffragettes, though it may sound like it.

“Michael,” said she, “you rowed with Mr. Regan, and he fired you. Will he take you back?”

Gilleen lowered the towel to his chin to catch the dripping water from his hair—he had just buried his head in the washbowl the minute before—and looked at his wife.

“I wouldn’t ask him, Kate,” he said shortly.

Mrs. Gilleen was proud, too—but for all that she sighed.

“What will you do, then, Michael?” she asked.

“I dunno yet, little woman. Some of the others will give me a job, I guess. Mabbe I’ll try the train crews. I’ll hit ‘em up for something, anyway.”

“But there’s ever so much less money in that”—Mrs. Gilleen’s tones were judicial, not plaintive.

“I know it,” returned Gilleen; “but it’ll tide us over an’ keep the steam up till we get a chance to pull out for somewheres where a man can get an engine without a grinning fool of a master mechanic to doublecross him with the worst of it every chance he gets.”

“I hope it will all come out right,” said Mrs. Gilleen, a little wistfully.

“It will,” Gilleen assured her. “Don’t you worry. I’ll get after a job right away as soon as I’ve had a bite.”

It came easier even than Gilleen had figured it would—such as it was—and it was about the last job Gilleen had thought of as a possibility. Things have a peculiar way of working themselves out sometimes, and, curiously enough, by means which, on the surface, are, more often than not, apparently trivial and inconsequent. Certainly, if Gilleen, on his way to the station that morning, had not run into Gleason, the yard-master, why then—but he did.

“Call-boys kind of scarce around your diggin’s since yesterday, ain’t they, Gilleen?” was Gleason’s greeting.

“Yes,” said Gilleen. “I’m out.”

“See you’re headin’ for the station,” remarked Gleason tentatively. “Goin’ down to patch it up?”

“No!” answered Gilleen with a hard ring in his voice—the “no” was emphatic.

Gleason stared at the engineer for a minute, then took a bite from his plug, and the motion of his head might have been a nod of understanding or merely a wrench or two to free his teeth from the black-strap in which they were imbedded.

“No,” said Gilleen again; “I’m not. I’m goin’ down for another job.”

“What kind of a job?” inquired Gleason.

“Any kind from any one that will put me on—except Regan.”

Gleason thought of ............