Inside, and unaware of all this pother, sat the General Freight Agent. Big of body, with the topography of his father’s heath upon his wide face, soft in the heart and hard in the head, Robert Mitchell was a man of no airs. His origin was probably shanty Irish, and he didn’t care who suspected it. By painful labor, a ready smile, a hearty laugh, a square deal to his company and as square a deal to the public as he could give—"consistently"—he had got to his present modest eminence. He was going higher and was not particular who suspected that either; but was not boastful, had the respect of all men who knew him well, and the affection of those who knew him intimately. He sat just now in a thoroughly characteristic pose, with the stubby fingers of one fat hand thoughtfully teasing a wisp of reddish brown hair, while his shrewd blue eyes were screwing at the exact significance of the top letter on a pile before him. Over in a corner was Mitchell’s guest and vast superior, Malden H. Hale, the president of the twelve thousand miles of shining steel which made up the Great South-western Railway System, in which Mitchell’s little road nestled like a rabbit in the maw of a python. Mr. Hale was signing some letters dictated yesterday to John, finding them paragraphed and punctuated to his complete satisfaction, with here and there a word better than his own looming up in the context. For a time there was no sound save the scratching of his pen and the fillip of the sheets as he turned them over. Then he chuckled softly, and presently spoke. "Bob," he said, "that’s an odd genius, that stenographer out there." "Yes," replied Mr. Mitchell absently, without looking up from his work, and then suddenly he stabbed the atmosphere with a significant rising inflection: "Genius?" "Well, yes," affirmed Mr. Hale. "Genius! He impresses you first as absurdly incompetent, but his workmanship is really superior, and later you get a suggestion of something back of him, something buried that might come out, you know." "I used to think so," the General Freight Agent replied, with a tone which indicated loss of interest in the subject, but being tardily overtaken in his reading by a sense that he had not quite done justice to the big stenographer, he broke the silence to add: "He is a fine character. He has very high thoughts,"—vacancy was in his eye for a moment,—"so high they’re cloudy." And that was all. Mr. Hale made no further comment. Mr. Mitchell, a just man, was satisfied that he had done justice. Thus in the minds of two arbiters of the destinies of many men, John Hampstead, loyal, laborious, who had served faithfully for seven years, was lifted for a moment until the sun of prospect flashed upon him,—lifted and then dropped. And they did not even know that nature, too, had dropped him,—that he was blind.