INCE the drafting room in the Green Butte railroad shops was merely an extension of the shop office, I could hardly help overhearing what went on when men came in applying for work. Grimsby, our division master mechanic, was rather hardboiled with job seekers, probably because the Western shops catch a good many “floaters”: tramps calling themselves mechanics and afterward turning out to be anything but. Just the same, I thought the boss was a little more hardboiled than common the day “Buck” Harrod blew in and asked for a job,
“Let me see your hands!” was the first thing I heard; and when I gave a glance over my shoulder I saw a solidly built young fellow, with square shoulders and a still squarer jaw, showing the palms of his hands to Grimsby. “Huh! Look to me more like a prize fighter's hands than a machinist's,” the boss went on gruffly. “Where are you from?”
The young fellow named a railroad in Ohio, and Grimsby snorted again.
“Put it far enough away, didn't you? Did you quit, or get fired?”
To my astonishment the job hunter said shortly: “I was fired.”
“What for?”
“For punching a man's head in the shop,” was the calm reply.
“Oho! A scrapper, are you? Well, you look it. We don't need any box-fighters here.”
A biff like that was usually enough to make the hungriest job chaser take the count, but this one didn't.
“Some day you might, at that,” he said mildly. Then: “I know my job. If I can't prove it, it won't cost you anything to give me my time.”
As I knew Grimsby, this was no way at all to get on his soft side, if he had one; but for once in a blue moon it seemed to work.
“Ha! Think you can make good, do you?” he barked. “All right; come along and we'll see what your bluff amounts to.” And he got up and took the new man into the shop.
That was all for the moment; but, later in the day, when I had occasion to go into the back shop, I saw that Harrod had been put on one of the pit gangs. He was taking down the front end of an engine to grind in the dry-pipe joints, and the way he went at the job told me that he was at least no “floater.” You can tell, if you've ever handled tools yourself, as I had before I worked my way out of the shop and into the drafting room.
That evening at quitting time I chanced to catch up with Harrod as we were crossing the tracks to the town side of things and spoke to him.
“Been in town long?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. “I came in this morning.”
“Got a good place to stay?”
He named a pretty tough joint on a side street, adding: “Flagman on the train sent me there. I can't say much for his notion of a place to eat and sleep.”
“No,” I agreed; then: “Mother Gifford—she runs a boarding house for a bunch of us—has a spare room. Like to go around with me and look at it?”
He said he would, and the result was that he became one of us, after a fashion; I say after a fashion because he didn't mix and mingle to amount to anything; got in all the overtime he could, and when there wasn't any, he spent the evenings in his room, smoking and reading detective stories. He wasn't surly, or anything of that sort; just kept himself to himself, as you might say.
After a bit we got chummy enough so that I'd drop into his room now and then of an evening to smoke a bedtime pipe with him, and at such times he gave me the notion that there was more to him than appeared on the surface; I mean that when he came to us he wasn't just the ordinary mechanic out of work falling into the first shop he came to for a job; that he had some bigger reason than that for picking Green Butte as a stopping place.
One evening when we were chinning in his room I was brash enough to ask him how he come to pick on Green Butte and our railroad dump for a hangout, and he bluffed me fair and square.
“Maybe you'll find out some day, Jimmie,” he said, with a grin that wasn't altogether good natured. “I had my reasons.”
I knew it was no good to ask him what the reasons were. If he wanted to, he'd tell me, when he got ready, but not a minute before. Drifting into talk about other things, he asked me, casually, if I knew anything about the opening of a new bank in Green Butte, and I said I knew the town talk; that some rich relation of Mr. Homer's, our division superintendent, was backing it, and that I'd heard the rich man's son was to be put in as manager. Also, that there was a rumor that the new bank would get the railroad pay-roll account, through Mr. Homer, of course.
“Do you happen to know where this rich banker is from?” he asked.