s, and was also listening to something else
just at that moment. He was listening to the conversation between Rod and
the superintendent. It certainly was a fine thing for a boy to be talked
to as the greatest man he had ever known was now talking to his one honest
friend, and to be offered such a position too. How he would like to be a
brakeman; and, if he were one, how well he would know how to deal with
tramps. He wondered what Mr. Hill meant by being "on time." Perhaps it
meant being honest.

Then Rod left the car, giving him a nod and a smile as he did so. A moment
later it was again whirling away toward New York, and the superintendent,
coming to where the young tramp was sitting, said: "Now, sir, I'm ready to
attend to your case. Are you willing to tell me what you know about this
business of robbing our freight trains? Or do you prefer to stick to your
lying story and go to prison for it?"

"I'll tell you all I know, if you'll give me a job for it," answered Bill,
with a sudden resolution to try for Rod Blake's friendship, and at the
same time to make a good bargain for himself if he could.

Regarding him keenly, the superintendent said: "So you want to be paid for
being honest, do you? Well, I don't know but what you are right. Honesty
is well worth paying for. So, if you will tell me, truthfully, all you
know of this business I promise you a job that will earn you an honest
living, and that you can keep just so long as you work faithfully at it."

"Honesty again. How often these gentlemen use the word, and how much
they seem to think of it," thought Bill. However, as it seemed to promise
something different from anything he had ever known, he determined to try
it, and see what it would do for him. So he told, in his awkward fashion,
all that he knew of the gang of tramp thieves, who had been for some time
systematically robbing freight trains at several points along the road,
and Mr. Hill listened to him with the deepest interest.

As a speedy result of this confession a freight clerk in the main office
of the company, who had been giving secret information to the thieves,
was discharged the very next day. Brown, the chief of the company's
detectives, learned where and how he could discover the places where the
stolen goods were hidden, and was thus enabled to recover a large portion
of them. And Bill Miner, no longer Bill the tramp, found himself doing
honest work, as a locomotive wiper and assistant hostl