“Hoh!” cried Ralph, interrupting. “There are a lot of those ‘little birds.’ And I bet they all belong to the St. Mark’s Sewing Guild. Yes, sir! What has Gossip’s tongue been saying now?” “Gossip can be kind as well as cruel. After all, Ralph, gossip is the most interesting thing in the world. Newspapers and magazines and books are full of it. Just gossip. And what I heard about you was anything but unkind, although it did not sound good for Mr. Hopkins.” His mother went on to relate what she had heard from an eyewitness of the occurrence when the supervisor had forbidden his daughter to speak to Ralph, and then had promised to send her away from home because of her defiance. “She is a girl who would make any boy a faithful friend. I admire her very much, although I have never seen her,” Mrs. Fairbanks said. “And I wonder at that man, Mr. Hopkins, Ralph, for picking on you the way he does. I cannot understand it.” “Unfortunately,” her son told her, “I have unintentionally occasioned Mr. Hopkins some ruffling of the temper. And, believe me, his temper is easy to ruffle. Well, I am sorry if Cherry was sent away because of me. It’s so foolish.” “Yes, I am told she has gone,” said his mother. “To Shelby Junction. Of course, you never go as far away from Rockton as that?” “Not likely,” replied Ralph, laughing to hide a good bit of his disappointment. “Nobody but the strikers is taking a vacation on this division of the Great Northern.” The number of strikers increased daily. News came from points all along the division that little bunches of workmen in various departments had thrown down their tools and joined the strikers. Hopkins was strongly in favor of hiring men in the East and bringing them out to take the strikers’ places, especially in the shops. And perhaps he was right in this desire, for the locomotives and other rolling stock were fast becoming decrepit. Ralph, like most of the old-timers driving the engines, saw to it that his toolbox was well fitted and he carried spare valves and cocks and such small articles against chance trouble. It was not against the rules for a locomotive engineer to tinker with his huge charge if it broke down anywhere on the run. When they came back to Rockton each day, however, Ralph and his two firemen went over the mechanism of the big eight-wheeler with meticulous care. The firemen took example of their chief and watched for small faults and possible breakdowns, like two cats at a mousehole. Whenever the Midnight Flyer or the return eastbound express halted, down jumped the firemen with their long nosed oilcans and squirted the lubricant into every nook and cranny they could get at. The roundhouse foreman sputtered like a wet firecracker about Ralph’s demands on him for oil. “Better be oil than brasswork and steel,” said the young engineer. “Don’t forget that, Mike.”