Carleton groaned. The Imperial Limited West and East, officially known on the train-sheets as One and Two, carried both the transcontinental mail and the de-luxe passengers. Of late the East had been making pertinent suggestions to the Division Superintendent that it would be as well if those trains ran off the Hill Division with a little more regard for their established schedule. So Carleton groaned. He got up and put on his hat and coat preparatory to going home. “Look here,” he said from the doorway, “they’ll stand for ‘most anything if we don’t misuse One and Two. They’re getting mighty savage about that, and they’ll drop hard before long. You fellows have got to take care of those trains, if nothing else on the division moves. That’s orders. I’ll shoulder all kicks coming on the rest of the traffic. Good-night.” When Bunty left the office that night and walked home with his father, he had learned that there was another side to railroading besides the building and repairing of engines, and the delivery of magic tissue sheets to train crews that told them when and where to stop, and how to thread their way through hills and plains on a single-track road, with heaps of other trains, some going one way, some another. He understood vaguely and in a hazy kind of way that somewhere, many, many miles away, were men who sat in judgment on the doings of his father and Spence and Carleton; that these men were to be obeyed, that their word was law, and that their names were President and Directors. So Bunty, trotting beside his father, pondered these things. Being too weighty for him, he appealed: “Daddy, what’s president and directors?” Regan’s temper being still ruffled, he answered shortly: “Fools, mostly.” Bunty nodded gravely, and his education as a railroad man was almost complete. The rest came quickly, and the Gap did it. The Gap! There was not a man on the division, from track-walker to superintendent, who would not jump like a nervous colt if you said “Gap!” to them offhand and short-like. A peaceful stretch of track it looked, a little crooked, as Regan said, hugging the side of the mountain at the highest point of the division. The surroundings were undeniably grand. A sheer drop of eighteen-hundred feet to the canon below, with the surrounding mountains rearing their snow-capped peaks skyward, completed a picture of which the road had electrotypes and which it used in their magazine-advertising. What the picture did not show was the two-mile drop, where the road-bed took a straight three per cent and sometimes better, to the lower levels. So when Carleton or Spence or Regan, reading their magazines, saw the picture, they shuddered, and, remembering past history and fearful of the future, turned the page hurriedly.