Two days later the gang from the next section to the east joined us in the afternoon, and together we put in a new “frog” in the switch near the Buda station. They were the Irish boss with his two sons and the taciturn hand of the farm-laborer type. The boss remembered me instantly and commented favorably on my having taken his advice in applying to Osborn for a job. The point of our joining forces was in the necessity of laying the frog without interfering with traffic. Osborn had chosen the hour in the day when there was the longest interval between trains, and we had everything in readiness when, at the appointed time, the other gang met us, so that with our united labor the frog was in place and secure when the next train passed. Much of the talk between the bosses at this time referred to a later meeting, when, on an appointed day, the gangs for many miles along the line were to foregather at Grand Island under the Division-Superintendent’s orders. There was to be a general distribution then of new sleepers along the railway. What interested me most at the moment was the tone of the men in speaking of their superior in the service. I had caught it frequently in earlier references to the Superintendent among ourselves. He was the official in command of all the section-gangs in the division and directly responsible for the condition of the road. The men told me that he had been a section-hand himself and then a boss, and that he had worked his way to the position of superintendent in a long service with the company. The feeling that they bore him was one of admiration, not unmixed with fear. They respected his knowledge of every detail of their work, and a certain liking for him grew out of the fact of his having been a laborer like themselves, but they feared him with an awesome fear. I remember his passing one afternoon while we were at work. We had stood aside at the coming of a freight train, and, as we stepped back to our work, we caught sight of a wiry little man standing on the rear platform of the caboose, his hands clasping the railing and his eyes intent on the road-bed. Osborn thought that he saw the flutter of a piece of paper in the dust raised by the passing train, and suspecting that it was an order for himself, he dropped his tools and searched the embankment, and even the neighboring cornfield to the leeward, with an eagerness that might have marked a hunt for hid treasure. He could find nothing, however, and for the rest of the day, and I know not for how much longer, the incident was upon his mind with a sense of keen anxiety. When the day appointed for distributing the sleepers came, we boarded at Buda an eastbound passenger train, and were pressed into a smoking-car already overcrowded by bosses and section-hands. Osborn vouched for us to the conductor, as the other bosses did for their men when we picked up a gang at almost every station.