and upright as a young sapling at fifty-odd,
with a swing through the gangway that the younger men tried to imitate;
hair short-cropped, a little grizzled; gray, steady eyes; a beard whose
color, once brown, was nondescript, kind of shading tawny and gray in
streaks; a slim, little man, overalled and jumpered, with greasy,
peaked cap--and, wifeless, without kith or kin save his engine, the
star boarder at Mrs. McCann's short-order house. Liked by everybody,
known by everybody on the division down to the last Polack construction
hand, quiet, no bluster about him, full of good-humored fun, ready to
take his part or do his share in anything going, from a lodge minstrel
show to sitting up all night and playing trained nurse to anybody that
needed one--that was Owsley.

Oh, you, in your millions, who ride in trains by day and night, do you
ever give a thought to the men into whose keeping you hand your lives?
Does it ever occur to you that they are not just part of the equipment
of iron and wood and steel and rolling things to be accepted callously,
as bought and paid for with the strip of ticket that you hold, animate
only that you may voice your grumblings and your discontent at some
delay that saves you probably from being hurled into eternity while you
chafe impatiently and childishly at something you know nothing
about--that they, like you, are human too, with hopes achieved and
aspirations shattered, and plans and interests in life? Have you ever
thought that there was a human side to railroading, and that--but we
were speaking of Owsley, Jake Owsley, perhaps you'll understand a
little better farther on along the right of way.

Elbow Bend, were it not for the insurmountable obstacles that Dame
Nature had seen fit to place there--the bed of the Glacier River on one
side and a sheer rock base of mountain on the other--would have been a
black mark against the record of the engineering corps who built the
station. Speaking generally, it's not good railroad practice to put a
station on a curve--when it can be helped. Elbow Bend, the whole of
it, main line and siding, made a curve--that's how it got its name.
And yet, in a way, it wasn't the curve that was to blame; though, too,
in a way, it was--Owsley had a patched eye that night from a bit of
steel that had got into it in the afternoon, nothing much, but a patch
on it to keep the cold and the sweep of the wind out.

It was the eastbound run, and, to make up for the