“The Hill Division was proud enough over it, of course, for Carleton was its old chief; but, none the less, it read General Order Number 38 with dismay and misgiving.

“T. J. Hale,” the G. O. ran, “is hereby appointed Superintendent of the Hill Division, with headquarters at Big Cloud, vice H. B. Carleton promoted to General Manager of the System.”

“Now who in the double-blanked, blankety-blanked blazes is Hale?” demanded the roundhouse and the engine crews.

“Carleton was all to the good, h’m?—what!” growled the dispatchers.

The train crews swung their lanterns with a defiant air, and the passenger conductors juggled their punches around their little fingers, smiling a superior smile to themselves. Hale might be a good, man, perhaps he was, but Carleton was—“Royal” Carleton. “I guess he’ll get along all right with us, but he don’t want to get fresh, that’s all. Where’d he come from, h’m?”

That question, at first, no one seemed able to answer. The general impression was that the Transcontinental had got him from some Eastern road. Certainly he was a new man, bran new, to the System.

And then the renown of one Haggerty, who was braking on a passenger local, became great, and, in consequence, the displeasure of the Division increased.

Said Haggerty: “When I was on the Penn five years back, this fellow Hale was assistant super. I knew him well. You wanter look out for him, you can take my little word for that. He’s a holy terror, an’ that’s a fact. Got any chewin’?”

Haggerty got his chewing, being an egregious liar; and Hale got a damaged reputation for the same reason.

But Haggerty got more than his chewing—and he had not long to wait. On the day that the new super was expected, Haggerty, on passenger local Number Seven, got into Big Cloud about noon, and, taking advantage of the ten-minute wait for refreshments, straddled a stool at the lunch-counter. Between bites, he fired questions at Spence the dispatcher, who was bolting his mid-day meal.

“Hale come yet?” he demanded.

“Haven’t seen him,” replied Spence.

“When d’ye expect him?” persisted Haggerty.

“I don’t know,” Spence answered.

“Oh, don’t be so blasted close!” snapped Haggerty. “You ain’t givin’ away any weighty secret if you let out what time his special ‘ll be along, I suppose.”

“I haven’t heard of any special,” said Spence. “Say, Haggerty, they tell me Hale’s an old friend of yours, h’m? No wonder you’re anxious. I forgot about that. As soon as I get word about him, I’ll wire up the line to you so’s you can jump your train, come back on a hand-car, and be here on the platform to meet him.”

“You go to blazes!” retorted Haggerty, and scowled across the counter at an inoffensive looking little fellow who had taken the liberty of smiling at the dispatcher’s words.

At Haggerty’s look, the smile disappeared in a cup of coffee raised hastily to the lips. “Huh!” snorted Haggerty, by way of driving home to the other the audacity and temerity of his act, and likewise the inadvisability of repeating it. Haggerty was galled. Once before that morning he had been obliged to relegate this insignificant, squint, eye-glassed individual, who had persisted in riding on the platform, to a proper sense of submission. And the method employed had been no more delicate a one than that of jerking the man bodily into the car by the collar of his coat. “Huh!” he repeated, with rising inflexion.

“No, Haggerty,” went on Spence pleasantly, “Don’t you worry. I won’t fail you. When the super steps off the train, and the first words he says is, ‘Where’s Haggerty?’ and you’re not here to respond in kind I can plainly see there’ll be doings. Oh, no, don’t you fret, I’ll not throw you down on anything like that——‘twouldn’t be wise for us, that’s got to live with him, to rile him up at the outset! No, it certainly wouldn’t, what?”

“You go bite on a brake-shoe, you’re too sharp to be munchin’ doughnuts,” snarled Haggerty. And, swinging himself from his seat, he went back to his train.

An hour later when he reached Elk River, the end of his run, he found a telegram waiting for him from Spence. He sucked in his under lip as he read it.

“You sly joker,” wired the dispatcher, “why didn’t you tell us that your friend came up with you on Number Seven?”

Haggerty pushed his cap to the back of his head, and swore softly under his breath. He began to go over in his mind the passengers that had been aboard the train when they ran into Big Cloud. No one individual seemed to stand out carded and waybilled as the new super.

Then an idea struck Haggerty, and he climbed into the rear coach where Berkely, his conductor, was making up his report sheets.

“Say, Jim,” said Haggerty, “was there any passes into Big Cloud this mornin’?”

Berkely looked up suspiciously. “You mind your own business, an’ you’ll get along better!” he snapped.

“Oh, punk!” returned Haggerty. “My count’s the same as your’n, ain’t it? What’s the matter with you, then? Honest, Jim, I wanter know. Was there any passes?”

“No, there wasn’t,” grunted Berkely, cooling down a little.

“Well, then, you might have said so at first, instead of jumpin’ a fellow for nothin’,” said Haggerty, and went out of the car to hang meditatively over the handrail and spit reflectively at the ties.

“Now wouldn’t that sting you?” he demanded of the universe in general. “Wouldn’t that sting you? Who ever heard of a new super comin’ on the job ridin’ a local on a ticket! An’ me askin’ when he was goin’ to turn up. Oh, yes, it sure would sting you! That funny boy Spence ‘ll pass this along an’—oh, punk! I ain’t sure it wouldn’t have been better if I’d kept my mouth shut about knowin’ Hale, but who’d ever thought he’d come up on my train! How was I to know, h’m?” And during all that afternoon’s layup at Elk River, Haggerty pondered the matter. He continued to ponder it as they pulled out for the return trip in the evening, and he was still pondering it when they whistled for Big Cloud.

There was no moon up that night, and it was pretty dark as they ran in. Haggerty, with his lantern, was standing on the rear end. As the train slowed itself to a halt, a man came tearing down the station platform at a run.

“Where’s Haggerty?” he called breathlessly. “Where’s——”

“Here,” said Haggerty promptly, leaning out over the steps and showing his light. “What d’ye want?”

“Oh, all right,” said the man. “I’ll be back—” and he disappeared in the shadow of the station.

“He acts like he was nutty,” muttered Haggerty, and swung himself off the steps.

But, though Haggerty waited, the man did not come back, and he had not come back when the train began to roll out of the station, and Haggerty was again on the rear platform of the car. Then, just as his hand reached out to open the door, he stopped and started suddenly as though he had been stung.

A voice came out of the darkness from the other side of the track over by the roundhouse. “Where’s Haggerty?” it demanded anxiously.

Then Haggerty tumbled, and his face went red with rage. He leaned far out over the rail, and, forgetful that the pantomime was lost in the darkness, shook his clinched fist in the direction from whence the voice had come.

“You go to he-ee-ll-lll!” he bawled, the exclamation shaken into syllables by reason of the car wheels jolting over the siding switches at that precise moment. And then, his senses being very acute, from where the light shone in the dispatcher’s window he-thought he heard, above the momentarily increasing rattle of the train, a laugh—a laugh that produced anything but a quieting effect on his already outraged sensibilities.

Now Haggerty was not the nature of those who can pass lightly over a joke at their own expense, especially if that joke be too prolonged and carries with it a hint of underlying venom. Therefore, as the “one on Haggerty” spread over the division, and scarcely an hour of the day passed that the cry “Where’s Haggerty?” did not reach his ears, he began to sulk and treasure up his injury. The division was rubbing it in pretty hard. But the curious part of it all was that his bitterness was not directed against himself who was the direct cause of his discomfiture, nor against Spence who was the indirect cause, but against Hale, who was no cause at all.

Just once had Haggerty seen the superintendent. Hale was pointed out to him on the platform at Big Cloud, and Haggerty had ducked hastily back inside his train. Hale was the inoffensive little fellow he had treated with such scant courtesy at the lunch-counter, the insignificant, squint-eye-glassed individual he had hauled from the car platform by the coat collar! When Haggerty’s mingled feelings of perturbation and amazement permitted him any speech at all, it was rather incoherent.

“That—the runt!” he gasped, and subsided into an empty seat.

And in this inelegant, but pithy, summing up of the capacity and dimensions of the new official the division was with him to the last section hand. Him—a railroad man! The Hill Division remembered “Royal” Carleton and was ashamed, and it rankled for the shame that it considered had been put upon it. Out of it all, Haggerty was the only thing of saving grace! So upon Haggerty they loosened, behind the humor, some of their bitterness. Haggerty became the safety valve of the division.

A month had gone by and Hale had lived well up to what his appearance had led them to expect. He might have been an automaton for all the signs of life that emanated from his office. Just routine, the routine business, routine, that was all. The disquiet and unrest that brooded over the division became contempt—the kind of contempt that made the car-tinks put on airs, and in their heart of hearts figure themselves better railroad men than he who sat over them in supreme authority.

Even Haggerty no longer ducked out of sight when circumstances required that he should breathe the same air as his superior. Haggerty had acquired a swagger; also, he now voiced his opinion, his cordially poor opinion, of Mr. Hale without restraint and with no check upon his tongue.

And then Haggerty got a shock. It was imparted by Spence.

“Got it from Hale’s clerk last night,” said the dispatcher. “He’s going to run an inspection special over the division, and he’s picked out the fag end of all things for the crew. He picked you first, Haggerty.”

“Aw, forget it!” growled Haggerty, with a scowl.

“I think there’s something behind it, though,” Spence went on, his voice modulated confidentially. “Between you and me, Haggerty, the inspection trip is a bluff.”

Haggerty pricked up his ears. “How’s that?” he demanded.

“Well,” said Spence serenely, backing to a safe distance, “I think he’s hurt at the way you’ve cut him since he’s been here. He’s pining for your company, and——”

Haggerty sprang to his feet from the baggage truck on which he had been seated, and shook his fist frantically at the fast retreating figure. He was still gesticulating fiercely and muttering savagely to himself when the window in the dispatcher’s room overhead opened softly, and Spence stuck out his head.

“Hey, there, Haggerty,” he called, “quit practising that deaf and dumb alphabet. You haven’t got any time to waste. You want to run along and get the missus to press out a pair of panties, and iron a boiled shirt for you. You’ll get your orders in the morning.”

“Come down for one minute,” choked Haggerty, his rage fanned to a white heat by the knowledge of his own impotence, for Spence, as he well knew, was safely entrenched behind locked doors. “Just one minute, an’ I’ll make your face look like it had never been born. I will that!”

“Haggerty,” said Spence in an injured tone, as the window closed, “you are disgruntled.”

But Haggerty was to be still more disgruntled, for the next morning, true to Spence’s words, he found himself assigned to Inspection Special Number Eighty-nine. Haggerty was not happy; but he boarded the forward car, as they pulled out for the mountains with the mental resolution that he would keep out of the super’s way.

Resolutions, however, like many other things, are sometimes rudely upset in the face of conditions that are not taken into account in the reckoning. They had been running at a forty-mile clip, and were about into the yard at Coyote Bend, when Haggerty nearly went to the floor as the “air” came on with a sudden rush, and the train came jerking to a halt like a bucking bronco. The whistle was going like mad for the block ahead. Haggerty grabbed his red flag, dropped to the ground, and ran back past the super’s car to take his distance.

Up ahead, he could see the tail end of a freight disappearing around the bend, crawling into safety on the siding. Nothing very interesting about that, somebody would get Tokio for laying out the Special, he supposed. Maybe the freight had had a breakdown, and was off schedule making the Bend............