Aloysius McGrath was a little sweeper; but he was an aspiring one, for even a sweeper may aspire, and in point of fact most of them do aspire. Aloysius worked in the roundhouse at the head of the Wind River pass on the West End Mountains. It is an amazingly rough country; and as for grades, it takes your breath merely to look down the levels. Three per cent, four per cent, five per cent--it is really frightful! But Aloysius was used to heavy falls; he had begun working for the company as a sweeper under Johnnie Horigan, and no engineer would have thought of running a grade to compare with Johnnie's headers. Horigan was the first boss Aloysius ever had. Now Aloysius, if caught just right, is a very pretty name, but Johnnie Horigan could make nothing whatever of it, so he called Aloysius, Cooney, as he said, for short--Cooney McGrath--and, by the way, if you will call that McGraw, we shall be started right. As for Horigan, he may be called anything; at least it is certain that on the West End he has been called everything. Johnnie was ordinarily boss sweeper. He had suffered numerous promotions--several times to wiper, and once to hostler; but his tendency to celebrate these occasions usually cost him his job, and he reverted to sweeping. If he had not been such an inoffensive, sawed-off little old nubbin he wouldn't have been tolerated on the pay rolls; but he had been with the company so long and discharged so often that foremen grew tired of trying to get rid of him, and in spite of his very regular habits, he was hanging on somewhere all the time. [Illustration: Cooney] When Johnnie was gone, using the word in at least two senses, Aloysius Cooney McGrath became, _ipso facto_, boss sweeper. It happened first one Sunday morning, just after pay day, when Johnnie applied to the foreman for permission to go to church. Permission was granted, and Johnnie started for church; but it is doubtful whether he ever found it. At all events, at the end of three weeks he turned up again at the roundhouse, considerably the worse for his attempt to locate the house of prayer--which he had tried to find only after he had been kicked out of every other place in town.