e engineer a friendly push doorwards.

Not a very big thing--to pull the latch of the Directors' Special?
Nothing to make a fuss over? Well no, perhaps not--not unless you were
a railroad man. It meant quite a bit to Dan MacCaffery, though, and
quite a bit to Mrs. MacCaffery because it was an honor coming to Dan;
and it meant something to Regan, too. Call it a little thing--but
little things count a whole lot, too, sometimes in this old world of
ours, don't they?

There had been a sort of little programme mapped out. Regan, as
naturally fell to his lot, being master mechanic, was to do the honors
of the shops, and Carleton was to make the run up through the Rockies
and over the division with the new directors: but at the last moment a
telegram sent the superintendent flying East to a brother's sick bed,
and the whole kit and caboodle of the honors, to his inward
consternation and dismay, fell to Regan.

Regan, however, did the best he could. He fished out the black Sunday
suit he wore on the rare occasions when he had time to know one day of
the week from the other, wriggled into a boiled shirt and a stiff
collar that was yellow for want of daylight, and, nervous as a galvanic
battery, was down on the platform an hour before the train was due.
Also, by the time the train rolled in, Regan's handkerchief was
wringing wet from the sweat he mopped off his forehead--but five
minutes after that the earnest little master mechanic, as he afterwards
confided to Carleton, "wouldn't have given a whoop for two trainloads
of 'em, let alone the measly lot you could crowd into one private car."
Somehow, Regan had got it into his head that he was going on his mettle
before a crowd of up-to-the-minute, way-up railroaders; but when he
found there wasn't a practical railroad man amongst them, bar H.
Herrington Campbell, to whom he promptly and whole-heartedly took a
dislike, Regan experienced a sort of pitying contempt, which, if it
passed over the nabobs' heads without doing them any harm, had at least
the effect of putting the fat little master mechanic almost
superciliously at his ease.

Inspect the shops? Not at all. They were out for a joy ride across
the continent and the fun there was in it.

"How long we got here? Three hours? Wow!" boomed a big fellow,
stretching his arms lazily as he gazed about him.

"Let's paint the town, boys," wheezed an asthmatic, bowlegged little
man of fifty, who sported an enormous gold w