But if Delaroo treated the proposal coolly, not so Maje Sampson; when the news of the offer reached him, Maje went into an unaccountable flutter. He acted at first exactly as if he wanted to hold his man back, which was dead against cab ethics. Finally he assented, but his cheeks went flabby and his eyes hollow, and he showed more worry than his creditors. Nobody understood it, yet there was evidently something on, and the Major's anxiety increased until Delaroo, the Indian fireman and knight companion of the Ancient Order of Druids and Fluids, completely took Neighbor's breath by declining the new engine. That was a West End wonder. He said if it made no odds he would stay on the 264. The men all wondered; then something new came up and the thing was forgotten. Maje Sampson's cheeks filled out again, he regained his usual nerve, and swore on the money question harder than ever. After that it was pretty generally understood that Delaroo and Maje Sampson and the 264 were fixtures. Neighbor never gave any one a chance to decline an engine more than once. The boys all knew, if Delaroo didn't, that he would be firing a long time after throwing that chance by; and he was. The combination came to be regarded as eternal. When the sloppy 264 hove in sight, little Delaroo and big Maje Sampson were known to be behind the boiler pounding up and down the mountains, up and down, year in and year out. Big engines came into the division and bigger. All the time the division was crowding on the Motive Power and putting in the mammoth types, until, when the 264 was stalled alongside a consolidated, or a mogul skyscraper, she looked like an ancient beer glass set next an imported stein. With the 264, when the 800 or the 1100 class were concerned, it was simply a case of keep out of our way or get smashed, Maje Sampson or no Maje Sampson, money question or no money question. Benevolent benefits fraternally proposed or ante-room signals confidentially put forth by the bald-headed 264 were of no sort of consequence with the modern giants that pulled a thousand tons in a string up a two-thousand-foot grade at better than twenty miles an hour. It was a clear yet cold, "You old tub, get out of our way, will you?" And the fast runners, like Moore and Hawksworth and Mullen and the Crowleys, Tim and Syme, had about as much consideration for Maje and his financial theories as their machines had for his machine. His jim-crow freight outfit didn't cut much of a figure in _their_ track schedules.