After which the man looks upon his ten dollars with contempt and a feeling of injury, and becomes a corporation hater. Or perhaps he was really hurt and had some sort of a bill from his doctor and his druggist, lost time to be compensated at his job. The railroad has figured these together and paid him the sum, with the signing of the release as a necessary feature of the transaction. The thing was not very serious, we will say, in this instance also, and the hundred dollars that he received was really a fair compensation. Now watch the neighbor, who it happens is a pretty shrewd attorney: "Let me take the case, even now," he urges slyly. "I'll get a verdict of five thousand for you, if you are wise, and we will divide the proceeds." "But I've signed their release," groans the other. The shyster laughs in his face. "You were drugged," he whispers, "drugged, and we will prove it." That is not an exaggerated case. It is the sort of thing that the railroad's claim-agents are combating every day of the year; and then wonder not, that some of them finally lose the fine sense of honor, themselves. And beyond this class of folk, is another--nothing less than criminal. There are men and women in this broad land who make a business of feigning injury, and make it a pretty astute business, too, so that they may dig deep into the strong-boxes of the railroad. The most dramatic of this particular brand of "nature fakirs" has been Edward Pape, the man with the broken neck. Pape has a most remarkable deformity and has not been slow to avail himself of it as a money-making device far beyond the figures that might be quoted for him by circus side-shows or dime museums. Pape makes a specialty of the trolley companies. He can so alight from a car, coming slowly to a stop, that he will fall and go rolling into the gutter. Instantly there is excitement and a group of men to pick up the prostrate form. He is found to be badly injured and is hurried to a hospital. There the internes discover that he has a broken neck. A marvellous set of X-ray photographs are made, and the railroad is usually willing to settle a large cash sum rather than stand suit. Within a week he will probably be away and practising his trick on some unsuspecting railroad. "There was a time over in Philadelphia that was hell," Pape once told the writer. "I'd just finished my fancy fall, and they got me into the sickhouse and rigged out most to kill. They put hip-boots on me there in bed, with their soles fastened to the foot-board and a rubber bandage under my chin and over my head. They put seventy-five pounds in weights on a cord and a pulley-jigger to that bandage and it nearly killed me all day long. At night I used to wait until it was dark and then I'd haul up the weights and put them under the blanket with me. Otherwise, I don't know how I'd 'a' got my sleep." [Illustration: THE FREIGHT DEPARTMENT OF THE MODERN RAILROAD REQUIRES A VERITABLE ARMY OF CLERKS]