H'm?"

Carleton shook his head.

"I don't think it would have made any difference in the long run,
Tommy. I told you there'd be changes as soon as the new board got
settled in the saddle."

Regan tugged viciously at his scraggly brown mustache.

"Mabbe," he growled fiercely; "but Campbell's seen old Dan now, or I'd
put one over on the pup--I would that! There ain't any birth register
that I ever heard of out here in the mountains, and if Dan said he was
fifty I'd take his word for it."

"Dan wouldn't say that," said Carleton quietly, "not even to hold his
job."

"No, of course he wouldn't!" spluttered the fat little master mechanic,
belligerently inconsistent. "Who said he would? And, anyway, it
wouldn't do any good. Campbell asked him his age, and Dan told him.
And--and--oh, what's the use! I know it, I know I'm only talking,
Carleton."

Neither of them said anything for a minute; then Regan, pacing up and
down the room, spoke again:

"It's a clean sweep, eh? Train crews, engine crews, everything--there
ain't any other job for him. Over sixty is out everywhere. A white
man--one of the whitest"--Regan sort of said it to himself--"old Dan
MacCaffery. Who's to tell him?"

Carleton drew a match, with a long crackling noise, under the arm of
his chair.

"Me?" said Regan, and his voice broke again. He stopped before the
desk, and, leaning, over, stretched out his arm impulsively across it.
"I'd rather have that arm cut off than tell him, Carleton," he said
huskily. "I don't know what he'll say, I don't know what he'll do, but
I know it will break his heart, and break Mrs. MacCaffery's
heart--Carleton." He took another turn the length of the room and back
again. "But I guess it had better be me," said the little master
mechanic, more to himself than to Carleton. "I guess it had--I'd hate
to think of his getting it so's it would hurt any more than it had to,
h'm?"

And so Tommy Regan told old Dan MacCaffery--that afternoon--the day
after pay day.

Regan didn't mean to exactly, not then--he was kind of putting it off,
as it were--until next day--and fretting himself sick over it. But
that afternoon old Dan, on his way down to the roundhouse--Dan took out
the regular passenger local that left Big Cloud at 6.55 every evening,
and to spend an hour ahead of running time with the 304 was as much a
habit with Dan as breathing was--hunted Regan up in the latter's office
just before the six o'clock whi