Ten weeks later McCloud was sent from Medicine Bend up on the Short
Line as trainmaster, and on the Short Line he learned railroading.

"That's how I came here," said George McCloud to Farrell Kennedy a
long time afterward, at Medicine Bend. "I had shrivelled and starved
three years out there in the desert. I lived with those cattle
underground till I had forgotten my own people, my own name, my own
face--and Bucks came along one day with Whispering Smith and dragged
me out of my coffin. They had it ordered, and it being a small size
and 'onhandy,' as the undertaker said, I paid for it and told him to
store it for me. Well, do you think I ever could forget either of
those men, Farrell?"

McCloud's fortunes thus threw him first into the operating department
of the mountain lines, but his heart was in the grades and the curves.
To him the interest in the trainwork was the work of the locomotives
toiling with the heavy loads up the canyons and across the uneven
plateaus and through the deep gorges of the inner range, where the
panting exhaust, choked between sheer granite walls, roared in a
mighty protest against the burden put by the steep grades on the
patient machines.

In all the group of young men then on the mountain division, obscure
and unknown at the time, but destined within so few years to be
scattered far and wide as constructionists with records made in the
rebuilding operations through the Rocky Mountains, none was less
likely to attract attention than McCloud. Bucks, who, indeed, could
hardly be reckoned so much of the company as its head, was a man of
commanding proportions physically. Like Glover, Bucks was a giant in
stature, and the two men, when together, could nowhere escape notice;
they looked, in a word, their part, fitted to cope with the tremendous
undertakings that had fallen to their lot. Callahan, the chess-player
on the Overland lines, the man who could hold large combinations of
traffic movement constantly in his head and by intuition reach the
result of a given problem before other men could work it out, was,
like Morris Blood, the master of tonnage, of middle age. But McCloud,
when he went to the mountain division, in youthfulness of features was
boyish, and when he left he was still a boy, bronzed, but young of
face in spite of a lifetime's pressure and worry crowded into three
years. He himself counted this physical make-up as a disadvantage. "It
has embroiled me in no end of trouble, b