The boys! Big fellows in fezes, Shriner style, and slim fellows in duck, sailor style, and bow-legged fellows in cheviot, any old style. Chaps in white flannel, and chaps in gray, and chaps in blue. Turkish whiskers and Key West cigars and Crusaders' togs--and, between them, Bucks, his head most of the time in chancery. It was the first time they had seen him since he had made our Jim Crow line into a system known from the Boston and Maine to the Mexican Central, and, bar none, run cleaner or better. The first time they had seen him since he had made a name for himself and for his road from Newport News to 'Frisco, and they meant now to kill him, dead. You know about what it meant and about how it went, how it had to go. What could Martin say to the man who had made him all he was and who stood, now a boy again among the boys of his boyhood, and asked for fifteen minutes--a quarter of an hour for De Molay Number Four? It threw the little Chief completely off his schedules; just fifteen minutes was more than enough to do that. All the work was done, the anxiety nearly past--Martin had risen to rest his thumping head. But fifteen minutes; once in a lifetime--Bucks asking it. Duffy turned to big Jack Moore standing at his side ready to pull De Molay over the Pass, and spoke him low. Jack nodded; everything went with Jack, even the turn-tables that stuck with other engineers. Martin in his shirt-sleeves leaned out the window and, looking down on the turbaned and turbulent mob, spoke so Bucks could hear. "What is it?" demanded the most puissant commander of De Molay excitedly. "What does he say, Bucks?" "What says the slave?" growled a second formidable crusader; "out with it!" "All we want is fifteen minutes." "You wouldn't turn us down on fifteen minutes this far from an oasis, would you, Bucks?" protested a glass-eyed Shriner. Bucks looked around royally. "Fifteen minutes?" he drawled. "What's a quarter of an hour in a lifetime, Jackman, on the last oasis? Take off your clothes, you fellows, and take half an hour. Now will you be good?" De Molay put up a Templar yell. They always get the good things of life, those Pittsburg men; things other fellows couldn't begin to get. They passed the word through the sleepers, and the women began pouring from the vestibules. In two quick minutes out came the Duquesne band in red pompoms, duck trousers and military jackets, white corded with black. The crowd broke, the band marched down the platform and, striking up the "Washington Post," opened ranks on the grass plot above the Wickiup to receive the De Molay guard. One hundred Knights Templar in fatigue debouched into a bit of a park, and in the purple of the sunset gave a commandery drill to the honor of Bucks--Bucks and the West End.