ok for
Tim to sign with his mark, as his drunken grandfather has educated him
to do.

Then Mr. Craney strolls away to answer the signals of the engine that
there are cars to be weighed, and Tim prowling professionally past the
lunch counter in the waiting room, steals a banana and a sandwich, which
he has for breakfast in the shade of a pile of ties. There he watches
the making up of trains, the flying switches, the flatheads scuttling
along packing the journal boxes; and far beyond he can see the machine
shops with the forked tongues of blacksmiths' forges and the blink of
brasses in the roundhouse.

A great groan of iron and steam and toil swells in the smoky light, and
the bells call to him so that he begins prowling everywhere from end to
end of the yards. The noon comes with blowing of whistles; and hungry
again he goes back to the lunch counter while the waiter is busy and
sandwiches are easy prey. But instead of stealing them he comes out on
the platform with empty hands and stares back, not understanding why it
is so, till the groan of the work hour swelling again calls up the
memory of black-browed Regan who has been big boss of it all.

"'T is sure he would never run and hide from a policeman," says Tim, and
ponders how Regan would act in his place. "He would go hungry if he was
not strong enough to take what he wanted to their faces--that is what
Regan would do," he says; and despising sandwiches and sinkers which
have to be stolen in secret he struts proudly about with his rags and
hunger till the six o'clock whistle blows and Mr. Craney meets him at
the yard limit.

Now be it explained that just below this spot the Great Southwest had
built its first freight house, abandoned as the village of Barlow grew
away from it into a big town. Long ago the foundations have been wiped
out, but in Regan's time it still stands, a ramshackle ruin on the edge
of the right of way, which some official with economy has leased out
instead of tearing down.

"This is the Terminal Building," explains Mr. Craney as they come up,
"of the Barlow Suburban Railway." And he points out the sagging track of
rust-eaten rails which wanders away across the town's outskirts. "In
here," he explains, escorting Tim up the incline of the platform and
through the sliding door of the wareroom, "we have a stall for the
motive power, which is a horse, and in the corner a cot for the general
manager, who drives him. 'T is only three runs must