There isn’t much use in talking about the logical or the illogical when you come to couple up with a man’s hobby, because a hobby is a hobby and that’s all there is to it—with nothing left to be said on the subject. Most men have a hobby. McQueen’s was coal—just coal.

McQueen talked coal with a persistence that was amazing. On all occasions and under any pretext it was coal. Was he off schedule with a regularity that entailed his presence on the carpet before the division superintendent, it was coal. Did he break down between meeting-points with the attendant result that the dispatchers fretted and fumed and swore as they readjusted their schedules and rearranged their train sheets, it was coal. Everlastingly and eternally coal.

“What’s coal?” McQueen would demand oracularly. “It’s carbon and oxygen and hydrogen with a dash of nitrogen, ain’t it? Well, then, what are you talking about? Coal ain’t just coal, some of it’s mostly slate. Two hundred and ten pounds all the way, all the time, with the grate bars cluttered with that, huh! What?”

No purchasing agent that had ever hit the division had been quite able to satisfy McQueen with the brand of the commodity that was supplied in accordance with the requisition orders that he drew. And so, day in and day out, big 802 puffed her way through the mountains, and McQueen, in the cab, absorbed coal statistics, coal data, coal everything, with an avidity, a thoroughness, and a masterliness of detail, that would have put some noted geologists to shame and given the rest a run to hold their rights on the marked-up schedule.

Up at headquarters—when things were running smoothly and McQueen was behaving himself with no scores chalked up against him on the time-card—they treated his hobby as a joke. So that when his whistle boomed out of the gorge to the westward, or shrilled across the cut to the eastward, followed a moment afterward by the sight of the big, flying mogul with her string of slewing dark-green coaches, the staff on duty at Big Cloud would lean from the upper windows and watch the Limited as she shattered the yard switches with a roar—watch as, with a hiss of the air and the grinding of the brake shoes as they sparked the tires, she would draw up, panting, at the platform, and the big engineer would swing himself from the cab for an oil around. Then the badinage flew thick and fast while McQueen swabbed his hands on a hunk of waste and punctuated the remarks with squirts from his long-spouted can as he filled the thirsty oil cups.

So the big fellows laughed and joked, and the Brotherhood chaffed him unmercifully.

If anyone had asked McQueen what had started, let alone caused him to exhaust the subject of coal with such painstaking and conscientious insistence, he couldn’t for the life of him have answered. It had started—just started, that’s all—and, fascinating him, had pursued its insidious advance unchecked and unquestioned—that is, unquestioned until one morning when Clarihue, the turner at the Big Cloud roundhouse, kind of jerked him up a little on the proposition.

“You’re against the red, you and your coal, Mac, all right, all right,” Clarihue chuckled, as the engineer came in to sign on for the day’s run.

McQueen was patting 802’s slide bars affectionately. “How’s that?” he asked.

“Oil!”

“Oil?” repeated McQueen, puzzled.

“Sure thing! No more coal—no more slate—no more cinders—you touch her off, and there you are! You’ll have to cut out the coal and plug up on oil, Mac.”

“Oh!” said McQueen, enlightened. “Oil-burners, eh? I saw one of ‘em down East. They’re evil smelling, inhuman, stinking brutes, that’s what they are! don’t you let ‘em side track you like that, son. They may do down there, but not in the hills. Not while you and me are pulling throttles, and don’t you think so.”

Clarihue grinned.

“Well, mabbe,” said he. “But say, honest, Mac, what’s the sense of gassing about coal the way you do? What’s to come out of it? What’s the good of it? You just get the laugh from the boys, what?”

McQueen’s answer was to scratch his head. To put the matter into the concrete class of practicability was a phase of the subject that he had not considered. He scratched his head when the turner had gone; and, also, he scratched his head for several days thereafter. Then he caught at a happy inspiration whereby to solve the riddle, and therein he fell—but of that in a moment.

Things were booming on the Hill Division. Traffic was doubled, trebled. Everything on the train sheets was in sections. Promotions flew thick and fast. Wipers were set to firing, and the firemen moved over to the right-hand side of the cabs. Every wheel the division could beg, borrow or steal was doing fancy time stunts smashing records. Everyone from car-tink to superintendent, was on the jump. Even the directors, not to be outdone in the general order of things, worked overtime rubbing fat hands in gleeful anticipation of juicy, luscious dividends to be; only they neglected to figure in Noonan as an item on the balance sheets.

Noonan? Where is the Brotherhood that does not number among its members men with grievances, fancied or real? Noonan had a grievance,—no particular grievance, just a grievance—and Noonan was a power in that branch of the Brotherhood that held sway over the Hill Division. Noonan always had a grievance; due, primarily, to the fact that he had a deep and long-seated grudge against himself. It dated way back—he’d been born that way.

“Grievances!” he spluttered to a group of his admirers. “Grievances? Why, we’re against the worst of it all the time. We’re not track-walkers, are we? Well then, who runs the road? It’s us on the throttles, what? Who’s to blame for our measly schedule of hours and pay? We are, ‘cause we haven’t the sand to stand up for our rights. That’s what, and don’t you forget it!”

There was a chorus of assent. “Noonan’s right,” said one Devins, “only it don’t look to me like now was what you might rightly call the time to growl. Times are good, everything’s double-headed, and the paycar’s running carload lots.”

Noonan glared. “You’ve got the brains of a piston head, that’s what you have,” he exploded. “It’s times like these we’d win hands down. Perhaps you’d like to wait till there’s nothing doing, and they’re laying the boys off and everybody, mostly, is running spare! What chance d’ye think any demands would stand then?”

Of a truth it was the accepted time and a most glorious opportunity. In that, Noonan was right. Only one obstacle lay between him and the accomplishment of his cherished ambition to make something of his trouble-hunting proclivities and become a leader of men—in a strike. That obstacle was McQueen.

McQueen was a company man. Out and out a company man; though nothing would have surprised McQueen more than to learn that he was looked up to as a leader by the conservative element of the Brotherhood. True, he and his coal was the joke of the division; but that was only a joke, and in no wise to be held up against him. His influence, of whose existence he was oblivious, was based on things apart from that. Big, kindly, honest, incapable of deceit, simple, straight-forward, staunch in his friendships, somewhat inclined to stubborness in his beliefs perhaps, easily ruffled but as easily pacified, such was McQueen. Such was the McQueen the officials honored, and such was the McQueen with whom the boys would gladly and loyally have shared their pay checks to the last cent.

All this Noonan knew. Knew, too, that to gain his end he must first win over McQueen. And to that object he began to devote himself. He and McQueen shared the honors of the fast mail, and under ordinary conditions communication between the two men was limited to a flirt of the hand from the cab as one or other of them tore by the siding designated as their meeting-point by the lords of the road, the dispatchers. But now things were a bit different, everything was more or less off schedule. And while the Limited, East and West, was nursed along as near her running time as possible, and generally got the best of it over everything else, there were, nevertheless, occasions when both men were stalled together on time orders at the same point.

Noonan tackled McQueen at the first opportunity.

He picked his way cautiously as though not quite sure of his rights and ready for a quick reverse.

“Say, Mac,” he began, “what do you think of all this talk that’s going ‘round?”

“Talk?” said McQueen. “What talk?”

“You don’t mean to say,” gasped Noonan, in well-simulated surprise, “that you haven’t heard it? And the boys are slinging it pretty hot, at that!”

“I haven’t heard anything,” McQueen answered, slightly suspicious that Noonan was about to spring one at his expense. “What you giving us?”

“Straight,” confided Noonan earnestly. “It’s strike, Mac, that’s what.”

“Strike!” ejaculated McQueen, bewildered. “What for?”

“What for!” cried Noonan. “What for? That’s a sweet question to ask. Well, pretty dashed near everything,”—he waved his hand expansively—“hours, scale, and—and—”

McQueen shook his head. “I’m not kicking,” he said. “I don’t see anything to strike about. Looks to me as though you fellows were hunting trouble. You’ll probably get it, what?”

“You never see anything,” Noonan blurted out, irritation getting the better of diplomacy. “Nothing but the blamed coal you’re forever yapping about.”

“What I know about coal,” returned McQueen with dignity, “you’ll never know. It’s a subject that requires brains.”

“Is that so!” Noonan jeered. “You tell it!”

“It requires brains,” McQueen repeated stolidly.

“It’s a shame that the only man on the division that has ‘em, don’t know how to use ‘em, then,” Noonan prodded. “Who cares about your blazing old coal and what it’s made of? Talk’s cheap. There’s no sense to it, anyhow.”

“Maybe there isn’t, and then again maybe there is. At any rate, there’s a dollar a day for every man pulling a throttle,” McQueen announced triumphantly. “I don’t know yet just how much for the firemen, I haven’t figured it on their schedule.”

Noonan pricked up his ears. “What’s that you say, Mac,” he demanded.

Here was McQueen’s vindication. They’d laugh at his absurd, pointless theories on coal, would they? Well then, he’d show them! And it wasn’t any of their business, either, how many days he’d racked his brains, puzzling out an adequate solution to the question Clarihue had flung at him! He shook two impressive fat fingers at Noonan.

“One dollar a day, every day, and the spare men proportionately, that’s what! Do you get that, Noonan?”

“Rats!” said Noonan. “You’d better go into the shops for repairs. You need new stay-bolts on your dome cover!”

“Never you mind my dome cover,” McQueen flung back, beginning to get exasperated. “It may need a little tinkering, but it’s not ready for the scrap-heap yet, the way some are I could mention—but won’t. It all goes back to what I said. It’s a subject that requires brains—which you haven’t got. There’s no use explaining anything to you because——”

“You can’t,” Noonan interrupted craftily. “You’re only long on wind, Mac.”

“You listen to me, you rust-jointed disgrace to the throttle!” cried McQueen, stung into retort. “You listen to me! What are you paid for? Mileage, ain’t it? How do you get your mileage? Steam! What makes steam? Coal! D’ye hear? Coal! Coal, and don’t you forget it. Well then, poor coal means poor steam, and poor steam means poor mileage, don’t, it, what?”

Noonan burst into a loud and derisive guffaw.

McQueen glared. “You’re a wild, uneducated, hee-hawing ass!” he choked. “What do you know, anyway? Nothing! But I know! A dollar a day I said, and I say so now. I figured it out. It’s the difference between high grade coal and the muck we burn. It’s the difference between the mileage we make and the mileage we could make in the same time. That totes up one dollar a day. Sup............