Blackwings! How he loved that locomotive, and how absurd it seemed now for a man to become so attached to a mere machine! But she was not inanimate. She lived, moved, breathed. How often, as they swept beneath the stars of an autumn night, had he felt her hot breath upon his face, heard the steel singing beneath her feet and felt her tremble, responsive to his lightest touch. How wild and free and glad she had seemed, let loose in the moonlight with the Limited behind her. How gracefully, easily, she lifted the huge, vestibuled train from swale to swell. How she always passed station after station on the tick of the clock, keeping to the time-card, unvarying as the sun. Proud and queenly, yet gentle, she always answered the signals of the less fortunate locomotives that stood panting on the side tracks, with their heavy loads. Even the Meteor, the engine that wore white flags and pulled the president's private car, always took the siding and saluted Blackwings as she swept by majestically with the Limited. More than once Moran had refused promotion that would take him from his engine--from the open fields and free, wide world in which they lived and moved together--to the cares and anxieties of a stuffy office. He had been contented and happy with Blackwings, his books and his briar-root pipe. He did not share the troubles of his less fortunate brothers, who hugged and exaggerated their grievances until they became, to them, unbearable. But when they quit he climbed down, took off his overclothes, folded them carefully and carried them away with him. He had nothing to gain by the strike, but he had much to lose by remaining at his post--the confidence and respect of his fellow-toilers. Besides he, in common with the rest, regarded the classification of engineers as unfair to the men and to the travelling public. If a man were competent to handle a passenger train, said the strikers, he ought to have first-class pay. If he were incompetent he ought to be taken off, for thousands of lives were in the hands of the engineer during the three years through which, at reduced pay, he was becoming competent. These were the arguments advanced by the men. This business upon the one hand, and a deep longing upon the part of the management to learn just how far the men could go in the way of dictating to the officials, in fixing the load for a locomotive, and the pay of employees, caused the company, after years of sparing, to undertake the chastisement of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.[3] [3] _The Burlington officials claim that, by resolutions in the lodge room at Lincoln, the engineers fixed the load for certain classes of engines, together with the penalty for pulling more. They argue that if allowed to do this the men would want to make the time-cards and fix freight rates. They certainly had as much right to do the one as the other._