In a thousand tank towns and junctions across the land, he was a man boys wanted to be when they grew up. Wherever the railroad had come, depositing a lonely depot in its wake, he was a fixture—and a most important one: Stationmaster, telegrapher, flagman, ticket salesman, and express agent rolled into one—a man who spent, it often seemed, an unconscionable amount of time just sitting peacefully in the sun or jawing with anyone who happened by to pass the time of day, but who carried out his assorted tasks as efficiently as any responsible executive would. His hours, when he was working, were busy ones: when he was not—well, time was what people had most of in 1876 in the town where he lived.

The railroad and everything associated with it fascinated boys endlessly. At the very apex of their dream of glory and ambition was the engineer—that intrepid, keen-eyed man in overalls who leaned out of his cab to wave as the monstrous black engine thundered past in a violent swirl of hissing steam and clanging metal. Keeping one hand on the throttle (there was no problem of steering, of course, so a man could take in the sights that lay along his route), he raised the other in salute, his goggled, sooty face breaking into a grin at the moment he flashed by: then, focussing his eyes on the tracks ahead, he would release a stream of tobacco juice expertly to leeward and roll on toward the horizon, an imperial figure of never-to-be-forgotten splendor. Certainly, he was a man who had everything the world could ofter.

Then there was the stationmaster—somewhat lacking in the heroic qualities, to be sure, but then not everyone could get to lie an engineer. And the next best thing was to be in charge of a station: to know, before anybody else in town did, when the 9:44 would actually arrive, or what the news was down the line, just by listening to the click of the telegraph key. A boy could put his ear to the rail and wait for the faint, thin hum, gradually growing stronger, that meant a train was coming: but thesStationmaster knew. And as custodian of all the engines and the freight and passenger cars that stopped off at his depol, he possessed all other kinds of important knowledge, too.

What this paragon had to be, whether or not small boys realized it, was a Jack of all the many trades related to his job. Ticket-selling does not seem an unduly onerous task, but few practitioners before or since performed the job more deliberately or with a keener eye for the bunco man passing a phony five-dollar bill than the small-town stationmaster who had to account for every penny received. It was his studied conclusion that no one ever arrived at the station to buy a ticket until the long wail of the train whistle