could use it.
Short and quick in his explanations, he expected his pupil to get it
short and quick; either that, or Donkin's opinion of him. But Toddles
stuck. He'd have crawled on his knees for Donkin anywhere, and he worked
like a major--not only for his own advancement, but for what he came to
prize quite as much, if not more, Donkin's approval.

Toddles, mindful of Donkin's words, didn't fight so much as the days
went by, though he found it difficult to swear off all at once; and on
his runs he studied his Morse code, and he had the "calls" of every
station on the division off by heart right from the start. Toddles
mastered the "sending" by leaps and bounds; but the "taking" came
slower, as it does for everybody--but even at that, at the end of six
weeks, if it wasn't thrown at him too fast and hard, Toddles could get
it after a fashion.

Take it all around, Toddles felt like whistling most of the time; and,
pleased with his own progress, looked forward to starting in presently
as a full-fledged operator.

He mentioned the matter to Bob Donkin--once. Donkin picked his words and
spoke fervently. Toddles never brought the subject up again.

And so things went on. Late summer turned to early fall, and early fall
to still sharper weather, until there came the night that the operator
at Blind River muddled his orders and gave No. 73, the westbound fast
freight, her clearance against the second section of the eastbound
Limited that doomed them to meet somewhere head-on in the Glacier canyon;
the night that Toddles--but there's just a word or two that comes
before.

When it was all over, it was up to Sam Beale, the Blind River operator,
straight enough. Beale blundered. That's all there was to it; that
covers it all--he blundered. It would have finished Beale's railroad
career forever and a day--only Beale played the man, and the instant he
realized what he had done, even while the tail lights of the freight
were disappearing down the track and he couldn't stop her, he was
stammering the tale of his mistake over the wire, the sweat beads
dripping from his wrist, his face gray with horror, to Bob Donkin under
the green-shaded lamp in the dispatchers' room at Big Cloud, miles away.

Donkin got the miserable story over the chattering wire--got it before
it was half told--cut Beale out and began to pound the Gap call. And as
though it were before him in reality, that stretch of track, fifteen
miles of it, from Blind Ri