hide on Henry's face and made him look old before
his time.

At night they used to arrange the wagons in a ring, in which the
freighters slept.

One night Henry was wakened by the yells of Indians, and saw men
fighting. Presently he was swung to the back of a cayuse behind a
painted warrior, and as they rode away the boy, looking back, saw the
wagons burning and guessed the rest.

Later the lad escaped and made his way to Chicago, where he began his
career on the rail, and where this story really begins.

It was extremely difficult, in the early days, to find sober, reliable
young men to man the few locomotives in America and run the trains. A
large part of the population seemed to be floating, drifting west, west,
always west. So when this stout-shouldered, strong-faced youth asked for
work, the round-house foreman took him on gladly. Henry's boyhood had
been so full of peril that he was absolutely indifferent to danger and a
stranger to fear. He was not even afraid of work, and at the end of
eighteen months he was marked up for a run. He had passed from the
wiping gang to the deck of a passenger engine, and was now ready for the
road.

Henry was proud of his rapid promotion, especially this last lift, that
would enable him to race in the moonlight along the steel trail, though
he recalled that it had cost him his first little white lie.

One of the rules of the road said a man must be twenty-one years old
before he could handle a locomotive. Henry knew his book well, but he
knew also that the railroad needed his service and that he needed the
job; so when the clerk had taken his "Personal Record,"--which was only
a mild way of asking where he would have his body sent in case he met
the fate so common at that time on a new line in a new country,--he gave
his age as twenty, hoping the master-mechanic would allow him a year for
good behavior.

Years passed. So did the Indian and the buffalo. The railway reached out
across the Great American Desert. The border became blurred and was
rubbed out. The desert was dotted with homes. Towns began to grow up
about the water-tanks and to bud and blow on the treeless plain.

Henry Hautman became known as the coolest and most daring driver on the
road. He was a good engineer and a good citizen. He owned his home; and
while his pay was not what an engineer draws to-day for the same run
made in half the time, it was sufficient unto the day, his requirements,
and his wife's