ile busy in the tank I felt the air go on full and the reverse
lever come back, while the wheels ground sand. I stepped quickly toward
the cab to see what was the matter, when the Kid sprang into the gangway
and cried 'Jump!'

"I was in the left gangway in a second, but quick as a flash the Kid had
my arm.

"'The other side! Quick! The river!'

"We were almost side by side as she swung me toward the other side of
the engine, and jumped as we crashed into a landslide. I felt Kid's
hand on my shoulder as I left the deck--just in time to save my life,
but not the Kid's.

"She was crushed between the tank and boiler in the very act of keeping
me from jumping to certain death on the rocks in the river below.

"When the crew came over they found me with the crushed clay of my poor,
loved Kid in my arms, kissing her. They never knew who she was. I took
her back to our Texas home and laid her beside the little one that had
gone before. The Firemen's Brotherhood paid Kid's insurance to me and
passed resolutions saying: 'It has pleased Almighty God to remove from
our midst our beloved brother, George Reynolds,' etc., etc.

"George Reynolds's grave cannot be found; but over a mound of
forget-me-nots away in a Southern land, there stands a stone on which is
cut: 'Georgiana, wife of J. E. Wainright, aged thirty-two years.'

"But in my heart there is a golden pyramid of love to the memory of a
fireman and a sweetheart known to you and all the world but me, as 'Jim
Wainright's Kid.'"

AN ENGINEER'S CHRISTMAS STORY

In the summer, fall, and early winter of 1863, I was tossing chips into
an old Hinkley insider up in New England, for an engineer by the name of
James Dillon. Dillon was considered as good a man as there was on the
road: careful, yet fearless, kindhearted, yet impulsive, a man whose
friends would fight for him and whose enemies hated him right royally.

Dillon took a great notion to me, and I loved him as a father; the fact
of the matter is, he was more of a father to me than I had at home, for
my father refused to be comforted when I took to railroading, and I
could not see him more than two or three times a year at the most--so
when I wanted advice I went to Jim.

I was a young fellow then, and being without a home at either end of the
run, was likely to drop into pitfalls. Dillon saw this long before I
did. Before I had been with him three months, he told me one day, coming
in, that it was against hi