had a piece of paper in his hand.

"Hang on to it, son," cautioned Foley; "but you can show it to Mr. Reed
if you want to."

The youngster handed me the paper. It was an order directing Andrew
Cameron to report to the master-mechanic for service in the morning.

* * * * *

I happened over at the round-house one day nearly a year later, when
Foley was showing Cameron a new engine, just in from the East. The two
men were become great cronies; that day they fell to talking over the
strike.

"There was never but one thing I really laid up against this man," said
Cameron to me.

"What's that?" asked Foley.

"Why, the way you shoved that pistol into my face the first night you
took out No. 1."

"I never shoved any pistol into your face." So saying, he stuck his hand
into his pocket with the identical motion he used that night of the
strike, and levelled at Andy, just as he had done then--a plug of
tobacco. "That's all I ever pulled on you, son; I never carried a pistol
in my life."

Cameron looked at him, then he turned to me, with a tired expression:

"I've seen a good many men, with a good many kinds of nerve, but I'll be
splintered if I ever saw any one man with all kinds of nerve till I
struck Foley."

Second Seventy-Seven

It is a bad grade yet. But before the new work was done on the river
division, Beverly Hill was a terror to trainmen.

On rainy Sundays old switchmen in the Zanesville yards still tell in
their shanties of the night the Blackwood bridge went out and Cameron's
stock-train got away on the hill, with the Denver flyer caught at the
foot like a rat in a trap.

Ben Buckley was only a big boy then, braking on freights; I was
dispatching under Alex Campbell on the West End. Ben was a tall,
loose-jointed fellow, but gentle as a kitten; legs as long as
pinch-bars, yet none too long, running for the Beverly switch that
night. His great chum in those days was Andy Cameron. Andy was the
youngest engineer on the line. The first time I ever saw them together,
Andy, short and chubby as a duck, was dancing around, half dressed, on
the roof of the bath-house, trying to get away from Ben, who had the
fire-hose below, playing on him with a two-inch stream of ice-water.
They were up to some sort of a prank all the time.

* * * * *

June was usually a rush month with us. From the coast we caught the new
crop Japan teas and the fall