iced that Georgie began wearing gloves on the engine--not kid
gloves, but yellow dogskin; and black silk shirts--he bought them in
Denver. Then--such an odd way engineers have of paying compliments--when
Georgie pulled into town on Number Two, if it was Sankey's train, the
big sky-scraper would give a short, hoarse scream, a most peculiar note,
just as it drew past Sankey's house, which stood on the brow of the hill
west of the yards. Thus Neeta would know that Number Two and her father,
and naturally Mr. Sinclair, were in again, and all safe and sound.

When the railway trainmen held their division fair at McCloud there was
a lantern to be voted to the most popular conductor--a gold-plated
lantern with a green curtain in the globe. Cal Stewart and Ben Doton,
who were very swell conductors and great rivals, were the favorites, and
had the town divided over their chances for winning it. But at the last
moment Georgie Sinclair stepped up to the booth and cast a storm of
votes for old man Sankey. Doton's friends and Stewart's laughed at
first; but Sankey's votes kept pouring in amazingly. The two favorites
got frightened; they pooled their issues by throwing Stewart's vote to
Doton. But it wouldn't do. Georgie Sinclair, with a crowd of
engineers--Cameron, Kennedy, Foley, Bat Mullen, and Burns--came back at
them with such a swing that in the final five minutes they fairly
swamped Doton. Sankey took the lantern by a thousand votes. But I
understood it cost Georgie and his friends a pot of money.

Sankey said all the time that he didn't want the lantern, but just the
same he always carried that particular lantern, with his full name,
Sylvester Sankey, ground into the glass just below the green mantle.
Pretty soon, Neeta being then eighteen, it was rumored that Sinclair was
engaged to Miss Sankey, and was going to marry her. And marry her he
did; though that was not until after the wreck in the Blackwood gorge
after the Big Snow.

It goes by just that name on the West End yet; for never were such a
winter and such a snow known on the plains and in the mountains. One
train on the northern division was stalled six weeks that winter, and
one whole coach was chopped up for kindling wood. The great and
desperate effort of the company was to hold open the main line, the
artery which connected the two coasts. It was a hard winter on trainmen.
Week after week the snow kept falling and blowing. The trick was not to
clear the line; it