cab, that is, all in--he always had his head out of the
window--said he could see better, though the wind used to send the
water trickling down from the old blue eyes, and generally there were
two little white streaks on his cheeks where no grime or coal dust ever
got a chance at a strangle hold on the skin crevices. For the rest,
what you could see sticking out of the cab over the whirling rod as he
came down the straight, was just a black, greasy peaked cap surmounting
a scanty fringe of gray hair, and a wizened face, with a round little
knob in the center of it for a nose.

But that isn't altogether old Dan MacCaffery, either--there was Mrs.
MacCaffery. Everybody liked Dan, with his smile, and the cheery way he
had of puckering up his lips sympathetically and pushing back his cap
and scratching near his ear where the hair was, as he listened maybe to
a hard-luck story; everybody liked Dan--but they swore by Mrs.
MacCaffery. Leaving out the railroaders who worshipped her anyway,
even the worst characters in Big Cloud, and there were some pretty bad
ones in those early days, hangers-on and touts for the gambling hells
and dives, used to speak of the little old lady in the lace cap with a
sort of veneration.

Lace cap? Yes. Sounds queer, doesn't it? An engineer's wife, keeping
his shanty in a rough and ready, half baked bit of an uncivilized town
in the shadow of the Rockies, and a lace cap don't go together very
often, that's a fact. But it is equally a fact that Mrs. MacCaffery
wore a lace cap--and somehow none of the other women ever had a word to
say about her being "stuck up" either. There was something patrician
about Mrs. MacCaffery--not the cold, stand-offish effect that's only
make-believe, but the real thing. The Lord knows, she had to work hard
enough, but you never saw her rinsing the washtub suds from her hands
and coming to the door with her sleeves rolled up--not at all. The
last thing you'd ever think there was in the house was a washtub.
Little lace cap over smoothly-parted gray hair, little black dress with
a little white frill around the throat, and just a glad look on her
face whether she'd ever seen you before or not--that was Mrs.
MacCaffery.

As far back as any one could remember she had always looked like that,
always a little old lady--never a young woman, although she and Dan had
come there years before, even before the operating department had got
the steel shaken down into anyth