have forgotten him the next week, unless,
perhaps, he had spoken to you. He looked fifty years of age, and yet he
might have been but thirty. He was stout and strong, his hair and beard
cropped short. He wore a rough blue jumper, corduroy trousers, and a red
flannel shirt, which showed at his throat and wrists. He wore, too, a
leather strap buckled about his waist.

If there was anything that distinguished him it was his mouth and eyes,
especially when he smiled. The mouth was clean and fresh, the teeth
snow-white and regular, as if only pure things came through them; the
eyes were frank and true, and looked straight at you without wavering. If
you gave him an order he said, "Yes, sir," never taking his gaze from
yours until every detail was complete. When he asked a question it was to
the point and short.

The first week he shoveled coal on a siding, loading the yard engines.
Then Burchard, the station-master, sent him down to the street crossing to
flag the trains for the dump carts filling the scows at the long dock.

This crossing right-angled a deep railroad cut half a mile long. On the
level above, looking down upon its sloping sides, staggered a row of
half-drunken shanties with blear-eyed windows, and ragged roofs patched
and broken; some hung over on crutches caught under their floor timbers.
Sanders lived in one of these cabins,--the one nearest the edge of the
granite retaining-wall flanking the street crossing.

Up the slopes of this railroad cut lay the refuse of the
shanties,--bottomless buckets, bits of broken chairs, tomato cans, rusty
hoops, fragments of straw matting, and other debris of the open lots. In
the summer-time a few brave tufts of grass, coaxed into life by the warm
sun, clung desperately to an accidental level, and now and then a gay
dandelion flamed for a day or two and then disappeared, cut off by some
bedouin goat. In the winter there were only patches of blackened snow,
fouled by the endless smoke of passing trains, and seamed with the
short-cut footpaths of the yard men.

There were only two in Sanders's shanty,--Sanders and his crippled
daughter, a girl of twelve, with a broken back. She barely reached the
sill when she stood at the low window to watch her father waving his flag.
Bent, hollow-eyed, shrunken; her red hair cropped short in her neck; her
poor little white fingers clutching the window-frame. "The express is late
this morning," or "No. 14 is on time," she would say, he