The Donovan Chance by Francis Lynde

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."