n! Toddles would have
sold his soul for the despatcher.

It wasn't easy, though; and Bob Donkin wasn't an easy-going taskmaster,
not by long odds. Donkin had a tongue, and on occasions could use it.
Short and quick in his explanations, he expected his pupil to get it
short and quick; either that, or Donkin's opinion of him. But Toddles
stuck. He'd have crawled on his knees for Donkin anywhere, and he
worked like a major--not only for his own advancement, but for what he
came to prize quite as much, if not more, Donkin's approval.

Toddles, mindful of Donkin's words, didn't fight so much as the days
went by, though he found it difficult to swear off all at once; and on
his runs he studied his Morse code, and he had the "calls" of every
station on the division off by heart right from the start. Toddles
mastered the "sending" by leaps and bounds; but the "taking" came
slower, as it does for everybody--but even at that, at the end of six
weeks, if it wasn't thrown at him too fast and hard, Toddles could get
it after a fashion.

Take it all around, Toddles felt like whistling most of the time; and,
pleased with his own progress, looked forward to starting in presently
as a full-fledged operator. He mentioned the matter to Bob
Donkin--once. Donkin picked his words and spoke fervently. Toddles
never brought the subject up again.

And so things went on. Late summer turned to early fall, and early
fall to still sharper weather, until there came the night that the
operator at Blind River muddled his orders and gave No. 73, the
westbound fast freight, her clearance against the second section of the
eastbound Limited that doomed them to meet somewhere head-on in the
Glacier Canyon; the night that Toddles--but there's just a word or two
that comes before.

When it was all over, it was up to Sam Beale, the Blind River operator,
straight enough. Beale blundered. That's all there was to it; that
covers it all--he blundered. It would have finished Beale's railroad
career forever and a day--only Beale played the man, and the instant he
realized what he had done, even while the tail lights of the freight
were disappearing down the track and he couldn't stop her, he was
stammering the tale of his mistake over the wire, the sweat beads
dripping from his wrist, his face gray with horror, to Bob Donkin under
the green-shaded lamp in the despatchers' room at Big Cloud, miles away.

Donkin got the miserable story over the cha