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They climbed up onto the track to determine whether the foot-prints turned east or west; but further quest here proved useless, on account of its being a snow-beaten section-hand trail. Slavin balked again, swore in fluent and horrible fashion. For a space he remained in brooding thought, then he turned abruptly to his companions. "Come on," he jerked out savagely, "let's get back."
Rafael my husband I can't stand this sort of life." And she related all the petty trials of her existence. In order not to feel that she was prematurely a widow, she had to go with her husband in his automobile and show an interest in his trips which once had amused her but now were growing unbearable. "It's the life of a section-hand, papa, always swallowing dust and counting kilometers.
"There is nothing so disagreeable in life," I explained apologetically to my friends, "as a hard and fast schedule, which keeps one jumping like an electric clock, doing sixty things every hour and never varying the performance. Fortunately trains run every day except Sunday, and the general order of the universe is not going to be upset because I am not checking myself off like a section-hand."
Helen was a new arrival, a prim Miss of six, who used to live on the plains, where her father was section-hand on the railroad; which accounted, perhaps, for the fact that the time when Father Lane, the old preacher from Merritt's Camp, called and they sang, "Blest be the tie that binds," and the teacher asked Helen what ties were meant, she promptly answered, "Railroad ties, ma'am."
While the section-hand may become a section boss, a roadmaster, a division superintendent, a general superintendent, a general manager, and, finally, the president of a railroad; while the stock boy becomes, eventually, a salesman, then a sales manager, and, finally, the head of the corporation; while apprentices to carpenters, bricklayers, and plumbers may become journeymen, and then contractors, and, finally, owners of big buildings; while the farmhand may become a farm owner, then a landlord, and, finally, perhaps, the president of a bank; while a workman in a factory handling a wheelbarrow may afterward become the president of the greatest corporation in the world, the clerk, toiling over his papers and his books, is almost inevitably sentenced to a lifetime of similar toil, with small opportunities for advancement before him.
This time he had more friends. They swarmed respectfully but enthusiastically after him out of Hoffmuller's place, a dozen at least of our ne'er-do-wells. One of these, "Big Joe" Kestril, a genial lout of a section-hand, ostentatiously carried the bag and had an arm locked tenderly through one of the Colonel's. These two led the procession.
O'Flannagan's and a daintily bedecked creature in a fifty-dollar hat and a two-hundred-dollar dress, wearing twenty-dollar shoes, stepped out exhibiting a none too slender calf encased in a five-dollar stocking, though her father might have gotten his start as a section-hand at two dollars per day on the L. & N. or have driven a huckster's wagon, or tended bar, or curried horses.
At intervals of a mile the train whirls past a solitary stone hut occupied by the family of the watchman or section-hand. Sometimes a man stands out and waves a little flag, and sometimes a woman. Whether male or female, the flag-signaller is invariably an uncouth bundle of rags.
Thorlakson, the good-hearted Icelandic woman, and the giant Swede section-hand, Svenson, who was a friendly sort of elephant. He tried to entertain her with a humorous account of his surveying experiences, information about the country and funny stories that he had picked up here and there.
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