taste.

Only one thing troubled him. He had bought a big farm not far from
Chicago, for which he was paying out of his savings. If he kept well, as
he had done all his life, three years more on the Limited would let him
out. Then he could retire a year ahead of time, and settle down in
comfort on the farm and watch the trains go by.

It would be his salvation, this farm by the roadside; for the very
thought of surrendering the "La Salle" to another was wormwood and gall
to Henry. It never occurred to him to quit and go over to the N.W. or
the P.D. & Q., where they had no age limit for engineers. No man ever
thought of leaving the service of the Chicago, Milwaukee & Wildwood. The
road was one of the finest, and as for the run,--well, they used to say,
"Drive the Wildwood Limited and die." Henry had driven it for a decade
and had not died. When he looked himself over he declared he was the
best man, physically, on the line. But there was the law in the Book of
Rules,--the Bible of the C.M. & W.,--and no man might go beyond the
limit set for the retirement of engine-drivers; and Henry Hautman, the
favorite of the "old man," would take his medicine. They were a loyal
lot on the Milwaukee in those days. Superintendent Van Law declared them
clannish. "Kick a man," said he, "in St. Paul, and his friends will feel
the shock in the lower Mississippi."

Time winged on, and as often as Christmas came it reminded the old
engineer that he was one year nearer his last trip; for his mother, now
sleeping in the far West, had taught him to believe that he had come to
her on Christmas Eve.

How the world had aged in threescore years! Sometimes at night he had
wild dreams of his last day on the freight wagon, of the endless reaches
of waving wild grass, of bands of buffalo racing away toward the setting
sun, a wild deer drinking at a running stream, and one lone Indian on
the crest of a distant dune, dark, ominous, awful. Sometimes, from his
high seat at the front of the Limited, he caught the flash of a field
fire and remembered the burning wagons in the wilderness.

But the wilderness was no more, and Henry knew that the world's greatest
civilizer, the locomotive, had been the pioneer in all this great work
of peopling the plains. The pathfinders, the real heroes of the
Anglo-Saxon race, had fought their way from the Missouri River to the
sundown sea. He recalled how they used to watch for the one opposing
passenger train. Now they