This leviathan of steel and oak had grown like the beanstalk of Jack the Giant-killer—had spread and spread with incredible rapidity, until it reached, not from earth to heaven, but from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Lakes to the Gulf. It had brought San Francisco as near Boston as was Philadelphia in the days of the post rider. The four days’ stage journey from New York to Boston it covered in four hours. It had bound together into a concrete whole a country so vast that it equals in area the whole of Europe. And all this in little more than fifty years! Verily, there are modern labours of Hercules beside which the ancient ones seem mere child’s play!
“It’s a long stretch,” said Allan, looking back, through the gathering darkness, along the way that they had come. “It must be nearly a mile from here to the station.”
“Just about,” agreed Jim. “But I know Tom Mickey, the head lineman, pretty well, and I believe that I can get him to let us string our wire on the company’s poles. You see there’s three or four empty places on the cross-bars.”
“Oh, if we can do that,” said Allan, “it will be easy enough. Do you suppose he will let us?”
“I’m sure he will,” asserted Jim, with a good deal more positiveness than he really felt. “I’ll see Mickey in the morning—I’ll start early so I’ll have time before the whistle blows.”
“It seems to me that you’re doing it all, and that I’m not doing anything,” said Allan. “You must let me furnish the wire, anyway.”
“We’ll see about it,” said Jim. “Won’t you come in and see my mother?” he added, a little shyly.
“It’s pretty late,” said Allan. “Do you think I’d better?”
“Yes,” Jim replied. “She—she asked me to bring you, the first chance I had.”
“What for?” asked Allan, looking at him in surprise.
“No matter,” said Jim. “Come on,” and he opened the door and led him into the house.
They crossed a hall, and beside a table in the room beyond, Allan saw a woman seated. She was bending over some sewing in her lap, but she looked up at the sound of their entrance, and as the beams of the lamp fell upon her face, Allan saw how it lighted with love and happiness. And his heart gave a sudden throb of misery, for it was with that selfsame light in her eyes that his mother had welcomed him in the old days.
“Mother,” Jim was saying, “this is Allan West.”
She rose with a little cry of pleasure, letting her sewing fall unheeded to the floor, and held out her hands to him.
“So this is Allan West!” she said, in a voice soft and sweet and gentle. “This is the boy who saved my boy’s life!”
“It was nothing,” stammered Allan, turning crimson. “You see, I just happened to be there—”
“Nothing! I wonder if your mother would think it nothing if some one had saved you for her!”
A sudden mist came before Allan’s eyes; his lips trembled. And the woman before him, looking at him with loving, searching eyes, understood.
“Dear boy!” she said, and Allan found himself clasped close against her heart.
CHAPTER IV
THE YOUNG OPERATORS
Tom Mickey, chief lineman of the Ohio division of the P. & O., was, like most other human beings, subject to fluctuations of temper; only, with Tom, the extremes were much farther apart than usual. This was due, perhaps, to his mixed ancestry, for his father, a volatile Irishman, had married a phlegmatic German woman, proprietress of a railroad boarding-house, where Mickey found a safe and comfortable haven, with no more arduous work to do than to throw out occasionally some objectionable customer—and Mickey never considered that as work, but as recreation pure and simple. It was into this haven that Tom was born; there he grew up, alternating between the chronic high spirits of his father and the chronic low ones of his mother, and being, on the whole, healthy and well-fed and contented.
He had entered the service of the road while yet a mere boy, preferring to go to work rather than to school, which was the only alternative offered him; and he soon became an expert lineman, running up and down the poles as agile as a monkey and dancing out along the wires in a way that earned him more than one thrashing from his boss. Advancing years had tempered this foolhardiness, but had only served to accentuate the eccentric side of his character. He would be, one day, buoyant as a lark and obliging to an almost preposterous degree, and the next day, ready to snap off the head of anybody who addressed him, and barely civil to his superior officers.
These vagaries got him into hot water sometimes; and more than once he was “on the carpet” before the superintendent; but the greatest punishment ever meted out to him was a short vacation without pay. The road really could not afford to do without him, for Tom Mickey was the best lineman in the middle west. The tangle of wires which were an integral part of the system was to him an open book, to be read at a glance. Was any wire in trouble, he would mount his tricycle, a sort of miniature hand-car, spin out along the track, and in a surprisingly short time the trouble was remedied and the wire in working order. Tom was a jewel—in the rough, it is true, and not without a flaw—but a jewel just the same.
Luckily he was in one of his buoyant moods when Jim Anderson approached him on the morning following his conversation with Allan. Perhaps it is only right to say that this was not wholly luck, for Jim had reconnoitred thoroughly beforehand, and had not ventured to approach the lineman until assured by one of his helpers that he was in a genial humour.
Mickey was just loading up his tricycle with wire and insulators, preparatory to a trip out along the line, when Jim accosted him.
“Mr. Mickey,” he began, “another fellow named Allan West and myself want to rig up a little telegraph line from my house, out near the two bridges, to his, just back of the yards here, and we were wondering if you would let us string our wire on the company’s poles. There seem to be some vacant places, and of course we’d be mighty careful not to interfere with the other wires.”
He stopped, eying Mickey anxiously, but that worthy went on with his work as though he had not heard. He was puffing vigorously at a short clay pipe, and with a certain viciousness that made Jim wonder if he had approached him at the wrong moment, after all.
“What ’d ye say th’ other kid’s name is?” Mickey asked, after what seemed an age to the waiting boy.
“Allan West.”
“Is that th’ kid that Jack Welsh took t’ raise?”
“Yes; he lives with the Welshes. He worked in Welsh’s section-gang last year—took Dan Nolan’s place, you know.”
“Yes—I moind,” said Mickey, and went on smoking.
“How does it happen,” he demanded at last, “that he wants