dog. I'm going to
make 'em pay for it; I'm after my pound of flesh now! There's just one
thing that road prizes above all else--it's St. Louis-Kansas City mail
contracts. The award comes up again in March. The system that can make
the fastest time in the government speed trials gets the plum.
Understand?"

"I do!" answered Martin, with the first real enthusiasm he had known
in weeks. "'Tis me budget I'll be fixin' up immejiate at once. Ye'll
get action, ye will." He departed for a frenzied month. Then he
returned at the request of President Barstow.

"You're doing wonderful work, Martin," said that official. "It's
coming along splendidly. But--but----I understand there's a bit of a
laugh going around among the railroad men about you."

"About me?" Garrity's chest bulged aggressively. "An' who's laughin?"

"Nearly everybody in the railroad game in Missouri. They say you let
some slick salesman sting you for a full set of Rocky Mountain
snow-fighting machinery, even up to a rotary snow plough. I----"

"Sting me?" Martin bellowed the words. "That I did not!"

"Good! I knew----"

"I ordered it of me own free will. And if annybody laughs----"

"But, Martin"--and there was pathos in the voice--"a rotary snow
plough? On a Missouri railroad? Flangers, jull-ploughs, wedge
ploughs--tunnel wideners--and a rotary? Here? Why--I--I thought better
of you than that. We haven't had a snow in Missouri that would require
all of those things, not in the last ten years. What did they cost?"

"Eighty-three thousand, fi'hunnerd an' ten dollars," answered Martin
gloomily. He _had_ pulled a boner. Mr. Barstow figured on a sheet of
paper.

"At three dollars a day, that would hire nearly a thousand track
labourers for thirty days. A thousand men could tamp a lot of ballast
in a month, Martin."

"That they could, sir," came dolefully. Then Garrity, the old lump in
his throat, waited to be excused, and backed from the office. That
rotary snow plough had been his own, his pet idea--and it had been
wrong!

Gloomily he returned to Northport, his headquarters, there to observe
a group of grinning railroad men gathered about a great, bulky object
parked in front of the roundhouse. Behind it were other contraptions
of shining steel, all of which Martin recognized without a second
glance--his snow-fighting equipment, just arrived. Nor did he approach
for a closer view. Faintly he heard jeering remarks from the crowd;
then laughter. He caug