“I don’t forget nothin’,” grumbled Mike. “But the super is watchin’ the out-put of lubricatin’ oil. He has an idee we feed it to the cats and grease the turntables with it. He sees a chance of savin’ the Great Northern two cents’ worth of oil in the course of a year. Huh!” “Well, I am not going to buy the oil myself,” Ralph rejoined, with conviction. “And we don’t carry a greaser’s slushpot on the Midnight Flyer.” “Sure, are the wheelboxes heatin’ on you?” asked the foreman. “I think they need repacking. But, of course, there isn’t time between runs to do all that. Is there another locomotive I could use to pull the Flyer with?” “You know there isn’t. Not a bull in the stable, anyway, could make the time you are getting out of that mill. Two-o-two would be an hour late at Hammerfest.” “Don’t tell me that!” gasped Ralph. “I am having a hard enough time as it is. Guess I’ll have to coax this one along until they can send you a Class-A locomotive over from the main.” “And when will that be, I dunno,” muttered the pessimistic foreman. So Ralph was pulling out of the Rockton terminal every night with a sort of sick feeling at the pit of his stomach. He said nothing to anybody about this nervous apprehension—not even to his mother. It seemed unmanly, he thought. He never knew before that he was a coward! That is what he called it, cowardice. But it was not. It was the effect of increased responsibility on his mind. The threat of some terrible accident to the train he pulled was always hanging over him. Strikers and their sympathizers now gathered about the crossings at midnight when the Flyer pulled out and booed and threatened the train crew. It was spread broadcast in the labor journals that something was likely to happen to the crippled engines pulling the division trains. Passengers were warned by big posters to refrain from traveling by this division of the Great Northern in particular, because the strike of shopmen and maintenance of way men made it impossible for the trains to be run safely and on time. But Barton Hopkins was by no means a fool. He gave an interview to the reporters of the fair-minded journals in which he showed by schedule that the passenger trains, at least, over the division, were ordinarily on time. He even took advantage of Ralph Fairbanks’ governing the engine pulling the Midnight Flyer to prove that that important train had kept closer to the schedule since the beginning of the strike than ever before. This statement to the press angered the strikers more than anything that Hopkins had done. Its truth hurt their cause. When Ralph pulled the Flyer out of the yards that night, at Hammerby Street the cab was assailed with stones and rotten vegetables from a gang of hoodlums, of course egged on my McCarrey. “Scab! Scab!” these fellows yelled as the broken glass tinkled about the ears of the engineer and his two firemen.