awkeye, carrying the punch on the local passenger, that happened to be
the run Toddles was given when the News Company sent him out from the
East, used to think he got a good deal of fun out of Toddles--only his
idea of fun and Toddles' idea of fun were as divergent as the poles,
that was all.

Toddles, however, wasn't anybody's fool, not by several degrees--not
even Hawkeye's. Toddles hated Hawkeye like poison; and his hate, apart
from daily annoyances, was deep-seated. It was Hawkeye who had dubbed
him "Toddles." And Toddles repudiated the name with his heart, his
soul--and his fists.

Toddles wasn't anybody's fool, whatever the division thought, and he
was right down to the basic root of things from the start. Coupled
with the stunted growth that nature in a miserly mood had doled out to
him, none knew better than himself that the name of "Toddles," keeping
that nature stuff patently before everybody's eyes, damned him in his
aspirations for a bona fide railroad career. Other boys got a job and
got their feet on the ladder as call-boys, or in the roundhouse;
Toddles got--a grin. Toddles pestered everybody for a job. He
pestered Carleton, the super. He pestered Tommy Regan, the master
mechanic. Every time that he saw anybody in authority Toddles spoke up
for a job, he was in deadly earnest--and got a grin. Toddles with a
basket of unripe fruit and stale chocolates and his "best-seller" voice
was one thing; but Toddles as anything else was just--Toddles.

Toddles repudiated the name, and did it forcefully. Not that he
couldn't take his share of a bit of guying, but because he felt that he
was face to face with a vital factor in the career he longed for--so he
fought. And if nature had been niggardly in one respect, she had been
generous in others; Toddles, for all his size, possessed the heart of a
lion and the strength of a young ox, and he used both, with black and
bloody effect, on the eyes and noses of the call-boys and younger
element who called him Toddles. He fought it all along the line--at
the drop of the hat--at a whisper of "Toddles." There wasn't a day
went by that Toddles wasn't in a row; and the women, the mothers of the
defeated warriors whose eyes were puffed and whose noses trickled
crimson, denounced him in virulent language over their washtubs and the
back fences of Big Cloud. You see, they didn't understand him, so they
called him a "bad one," and, being from the East and not one of