Blackburn was four years at the Wickiup on the night trick; it wouldn't have seemed natural to see him there in daylight. It needed the yellow gloom of the old kerosene lamp in the room; the specked, knotted, warped, smoky pine ceiling losing itself in black and cobwebbed corners; the smoldering murk of the soft-coal fire brooding in the shabby old salamander, and, outside in the darkness, the wind screwing down the gorge and rattling the shrunken casements, to raise Blackburn in the despatcher's chair. Blackburn and the lamp and the stove and the ceiling and the gloom--in a word, Blackburn and the night trick--they went together. Before the Short line was opened the Number One and Number Five trains caught practically all the coast passenger business. They were immensely heavy trains; month after month we sent out two and three sections of them each way, and they always ran into our division on the night trick. Blackburn handled all that main line business with a mileage of eight hundred and five, besides the mountain branches, say four hundred more; and the passenger connections came off them, mostly at night, for One and Five. Now, three men wrestle with Blackburn's mileage; but that was before they found out that despatchers, although something tougher than steel, do wear out. Moreover, we were then a good way from civilization and extra men. If a despatcher took sick there was no handy way of filling in; it was just double up and do the best you could. One lad in the office those days everybody loved: Fred Norman. He was off the Burlington. A kid of a fellow who looked more like a choir boy than a train despatcher. But he was all lightning--a laughing, restless, artless boy, open as a book and quick as a current. There was a better reason still, though, why they loved Fred: the boy had consumption; that's why he was out in the mountains, and his mother in Detroit used to write Bucks asking about him, and she used to send us all things in Fred's box. His flesh was as white and as pink as mountain snow, and he had brown eyes; he was a good boy, and I called him handsome. I reckon they all did. Fred brought out a tennis set with him, the first we ever saw in Medicine Bend, and before he had been playing an hour he had Neighbor, big as a grizzly, and Callahan, with a pipe in one hand and a tennis guide in the other, chasing all over the yard after balls; and Hailey trying to figure forty love, while Fred taught Bucks the Lawford drive. I don't say what he was to me; only that he taught me all I ever knew or ever will know about handling trains; and, though I was carrying messages then, and he was signing orders, we were really like kids together.