The Donovan chance

Engine 331, the biggest mountain passenger-train puller on the Nevada Short Line, was a Pacific-type compound, with a bewildering clutter of machinery underneath that made a wiper’s job a sort of puzzle problem; the problem being to get the various gadgets clean without knocking one’s head off too many times against the down-hanging machinery. Larry Donovan, mopping the last of the gadgets as the shop quitting-time whistle blew, called it a day’s work, flung down his handful of oily waste and crawled out of the concrete pit.

Grigg Dunham, fireman of the 246, which was standing next door to the 331, leaned out of his cab window.

“’Lo, Blackface!” he grinned. “Time to go home and eat a bite o’ pie.”

Larry’s return grin showed a mouthful of well-kept teeth startlingly white in their facial setting of grime. Normally he was what you might call a strawberry blonde, with lightish red hair that curled and crinkled discouragingly in spite of a lot of wetting and brushing, and a skin, where it wasn’t freckled or sunburned, as healthily clear as a baby’s; but wiping black oil and gudgeon grease from the under parts of a locomotive would make a blackamoor out of an angel――for the time being, at least.

“I’m going after that piece of pie as soon as I can wash up,” he told Dunham; and a minute later he was stripping off his overalls in the round-house scrub room.

Thanks to a good bath and a change from his working clothes it was an altogether different looking Larry who presently left the round-house to go cater-cornering up the yard toward the crossing watchman’s shanty at Morrison Avenue. One thing his hard-earned High School course――just now completed――had taught him was to be really chummy with soap and water, and another was to leave the shop marks behind him when the quitting whistle blew――as a good many of his fellow workers on the railroad did not. Big and well-muscled for his age, it was chiefly his cheerful grin that stamped him as a boy when he looked in upon his father at the crossing shanty.

“Ready, Dad?” he asked; and the big, mild-eyed crossing watchman, whose empty left sleeve showed why he was on the railroad “cripple” list, nodded, took down his coat from its hook on the wall and joined his son for the walk home.

“Well, Larry, lad, how goes the new job by this time?” John Donovan asked, after the pair had tramped in comradely silence for a square or two.

Larry was looking straight ahead of him when he replied:

“I’m going to tell you the truth, Dad; I’m not stuck on it――not a little bit.”

The crossing watchman shook his big head in mild disapproval.

“You’ve done fine, Larry; pulling yourself through the school by the night work in the shops. But it’s sorry I am if it’s made you ashamed of a bit of black oil.”

“It isn’t that; you know it isn’t, Dad. The black oil doesn’t count.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

“It’s――er――oh, shucks! I just can’t tell, when you pin me right down to it. I don’t mind the work or getting dirty, or anything like that; and I do like to fool around engines and machinery. I guess it’s just what there is to look forward to that’s worrying me. I’ll be wiping engines for a few months, and then maybe I’ll get a job firing a switching engine in the yard. A year or two of that may get me on a road engine; and if I make good, a few years more’ll move me over to the right-hand side of the cab.”

“Good enough,” said John Donovan. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing――except that the last boost will be the end of it; you know it will, Dad. It’s mighty seldom that a locomotive engineer ever gets to be anything else, no matter how good an engineer he is. Right there I’ll stop; and I’ve been sort of asking myself if I’m going to be satisfied to stop.”

Again John Donovan made the sign of disapproval.

“’Tis too many high notions the school’s been putting into your head, Larry, boy,” he deprecated. “You’d be forgetting that your father was an engineer before you――till the old ’69 went into the ditch and gave me this”――moving the stump in the empty sleeve.

“No, I’m not forgetting, Dad; not for a single minute,” Larry broke in quickly. “You’ve made the best of your chance――and of everything. And I want to do the same. Maybe I am doing it in the round-house; I can’t think it out yet. But I mean to think it out. There are Kathie and Jimmie and Bessie and little Jack; they’ve got to have their chance at the schools, too, the same as I’ve had mine.”

“And you’ll give it to them, Larry, if I can’t. With even a fireman’s pay you could help.”

“I know,” said Larry; and at this point the little heart-to-heart talk slipped back into the comradely silence and stayed there.

Larry ate supper with the family that evening as usual, but he said so little, and was so evidently preoccupied, that his mother asked him if he wasn’t feeling well. The talk with his father on the way home had been his first attempt to put the vague stirrings inside of him into spoken words, and the natural consequence was that he was trying to make the stirrings take some sort of definite and tangible shape. Of course they refused utterly to do anything so reasonable as that――which is the way that all ambitious stirrings have in their early stages――and the result was to make him thoughtful and tongue-tied.

So the table chatter went on through the meal without any help from him, and he found himself listening with only half an ear when his father told of a perfectly hair-raising escape an automobile full of people had had on his crossing during the day. Kathryn, who was fifteen, was the only one besides the mother to notice Larry’s preoccupation, and when he came down-stairs after supper to go out, she was waiting at the front door for him.

“What is it, Larry?” she asked. “Did something go twisty with you to-day?”

“Not a thing in the wide world, Kathie,” he denied, calling up the good-natured grin and laying an arm in brotherly fashion across her shoulders.

“But you’re not going back to work to-night?”

“Not me,” he laughed, cheerfully reckless of his grammar now that his school-days were over. “I’m just going out to walk around the block and have a think; that’s all.”

“What about?”

“Oh, I don’t know; everything, I guess. Don’t you worry about me. I’m all right.” And to prove it he went off whistling and with his hands in his pockets.

The after-supper stroll, which was entirely aimless as to its direction, led him first through the quiet streets of the “railroad colony.” In its beginnings Brewster had been strictly a railroad town; but now it had become the thriving metropolis of Timanyoni Park; a city in miniature, with electric lights and power furnished by the harnessed river, with some manufacturing, and with an irrigated wheat and apple-growing country around it to take the place of the cattle ranges which had preceded the coming of the railroad.

Now, though Larry’s stroll was aimless, as we have said, that is, in any conscious sense of having a definite destination, there was just one direction it was almost bound to take. Born and bred in a railroad atmosphere, it was second nature for him to drift toward the handsome, lava-stone building which served the double purpose of the Nevada Short Line’s passenger station and general office headquarters.

The long concreted approach platform running down from the foot of the main street offered itself as a cab rank for the station; and as Larry traversed it, still deep in the brown study, General Manager Maxwell’s smart green roadster cut a half circle in the turning area, whisked accurately into its parking space between two other cars, and the fresh-faced young fellow who had played at first base on the Brewster High School nine in the winning series with Red Butte, climbed out and hailed the brown-studier.

“Hullo, Curly!” he called, using the school nickname which Larry had long since come to accept merely because he had never been able to think up any way of killing it off. “What are you doing down here at this time o’ night?”

“‘Time o’ night’ happens to be time of the early evening,” Larry corrected; adding: “One thing I’m not doing is joy-riding in a green chug-wagon.”

“Tag,” said the general manager’s son good-naturedly. “Neither am I. Father has a conference of some sort on with the bosses. I don’t know what’s up, but I suppose it’s all this anarchist talk that’s been going around and stirring things up. He ’phoned me up home a little while ago and told me to drive down and wait for him.”

“Anarchist talk?” said Larry; “I haven’t heard any.”

“Oh, it’s just that little bunch of trouble-makers over on the west end. You remember reading in the papers how they spoiled a lot of work in the shops and raised Cain generally. The court over in Uintah County sent three of them to prison last week for sabotage and the others have threatened to get square with the company for prosecuting them. That’s all.”

Larry caught step with the former first baseman as they walked on toward the station building.

“Is this all you’re going to do this vacation, Dick?” he asked; “drive down to the offices once in a while to take your father home in the car?”