Not officially; I don't pretend to say that. You might travel the West End from fresh water to salt--and we dip into both--without ever locating the Spider Water by map or by name. But if you should happen anywhere on the West End to sit among a gang of bridge carpenters; or get to confidence with a bridge foreman; or find the springy side of a roadmaster's heart; _then_, you might hear all you wanted about the Spider Water--maybe more; anyway, full plenty, as Hailey used to say. The Sioux named it; and whatever may be thought of their interpretation of Scriptural views on land-grabbing, no man with sense ever attempted to improve on their names for things, whether birds, or braves, or winds, or waters--they know. Our General Managers hadn't always sense--this may seem odd, but on the system it would excite no comment--and one of them countenanced a shameful change in the name of the Spider Water. Some polytechnical idiot at a safe distance dubbed it The Big Sandy; and the Big Sandy it is to this day on map and in folder--but not in the lingo of trackmen nor the heart of the Sioux. Don't say Big Sandy to trackmen and hand out a cigar. It will not go. Say Spider Water without any cigar and you will get a word and a stool, and if you ask it, fine cut. The Spider Water--although ours is the pioneer line--was there when we first bridged it. It is probably as old as sundown, and nothing like as pretty. The banks--it has none to speak of. Its stones--they are whiskered. Its bed--full of sand-burs. Everything about the villain stream has a dilapidate, broken-down air: the very mud of the Spider Water is rusty. So our people bridged it; and the trouble began. A number of matters bothered our pioneer managements--Indians, outlaws, cabinet officers, congressional committees, and Wall Street magnates--but at one time or another our folks managed all of them. The only thing they couldn't at any time satisfactorily manage was the Spider Water. Bridge after bridge they threw across it--and into it. Year after year the Spider Water toyed with our civil engineers and our material department. One man at Omaha given to asthma and statistics estimated, between spells, that the Spider Water had cost us more money than all the water courses together from the Missouri to the Sierras. Then came to the West End a masterful man, a Scotchman, pawky and hard. Brodie was his name, an Edinburgh man with no end of degrees and master of every one. Brodie came to be superintendent of bridges on the Western Division, and to boss every water course on the plains and in the mountains. But the Spider Water took a fall even out of Brodie. It swept out a Howe truss bridge for Brodie before he got his bag unpacked, and thereafter Brodie, who was reputed not to care a stringer for anybody, did not conceal a distinct respect for the Spider.