imself.

"If I were you, Nulty," he murmured, and they stooped to catch the
words, "I'd look out for--for--that----"

The words trailed off into incoherency.

Regan, tugging at his mustache, swallowed a lump in his throat, and
turned away his head.

"It's queer!" he muttered. "How'd he know--what? I wonder where he
came from, and who he was?"

But P. Walton never said. P. Walton was dead.

VI

THE AGE LIMIT

As its scarred and battle-torn colors are the glory of a regiment,
brave testimony of hard-fought fields where men were men, so to the
Hill Division is its tradition. And there are names there, too, on the
honor roll--not famous, not world-wide, not on every tongue, but names
that in railroading will never die. The years have gone since men
fought and conquered the sullen gray-walled Rockies and shackled them
with steel and iron, and laid their lives on the altar of one of the
mightiest engineering triumphs the world has ever known; but the years
have dimmed no memory, have only brought achievement into clearer
focus, and honor to its fullness where honor is due. They tell the
stories of those days yet, as they always will tell them--at night in
the round-house over the soft pur of steam, with the yellow flicker of
the oil lamps on the group clustered around the pilot of a 1600-class
mountain greyhound--and the telling is as though men stood erect,
bareheaded, at "salute" to the passing of the Old Guard.

Heroes? They never called themselves that--never thought of themselves
in that way, those old fellows who have left their stories. Their
uniform was a suit of overalls, their "decorations" the grime that came
with the day's work--just railroad men, hard-tongued, hard-fisted,
hard-faced, rough, without much polish, perhaps, as some rank polish,
with hearts that were right and big as a woman's--that was all.

MacCaffery, Dan MacCaffery, was one of these. This is old Dan
MacCaffery's story.

MacCaffery? Dan was an engineer, one of the old-timers, blue-eyed,
thin--but you'd never get old Dan that way, he wouldn't look natural!
You've got to put him in the cab of the 304, leaning out of the window,
way out, thin as a bent toothpick, and pounding down the gorge and
around into the straight making for the Big Cloud yards, with a string
of buff-colored coaches jouncing after him, and himself bouncing up and
down in his seat like an animated piece of rubber. Nobody ever saw old
Dan inside the