The superintendent was perplexed, but he did not show it. He kept lighting cigars and throwing them away half-smoked. And all the while he was sending orders over his wire. If a narrow strand of steel, stretching for miles through darkness and through storm could carry infectious courage, that wire carried the superintendent's courage out to every far corner of his division through those early hours. "Keep at it," was the tenor of his message. "Keep everlastingly at it." And between times he was planning how to help them to keep everlastingly at it. Men were summoned to report Sunday morning at the shops--they might need to make some quick repairs, and it is a matter of record on that division that a locomotive has been torn apart, entirely overhauled and placed in service again in twenty-four hours--others were ordered to stand by important switches against breakdowns in the interlocking. There were special problems in plenty to be considered, a new one arising every hour. One of them will suffice to show the measure of that superintendent's problem that night. Up in a narrow pass between overhanging hills a much-delayed local, with a light road-engine, was still struggling to get the Christmas celebrators home. It was a hard proposition; and just a block back of the suburban train was chafing the midnight express through to Chicago--one of the road's best trains. The superintendent saw in an instant that his main line stood in imminent danger of being blocked. He caught Middleport, the station ahead of the struggling local, and ordered it side-tracked there for a moment. "I want to get that midnight with her big engine ahead from there," he explained to his despatcher. But the towerman at Middleport said that he could not move the siding-switch there; it was packed in with ice and snow. "Tell him to get a pick-axe and shovel and get in at it," said the superintendent. "He says that it's 20° below up there; they've swiped his shovel, and he hasn't anything but a broom," the despatcher returned. "A broom! Tell him a broom's a God-send. He can sweep with the one end and pick with the other." Eight times that towerman tried there in the midst of the storm to open that switch and eight times he reported failure. Eight times the superintendent kept at him with his kind persistence, and the ninth time they reported that the midnight express with the best type of motor power on the division was ahead of the weak engine on the local. And while the superintendent struggled at the far end of a telegraph wire with that towerman, there were a dozen other Middleports, each with its own different and equally difficult problem. Each required quick, intelligent solution. He solved each. The line stayed open. The superintendent stayed at his desk.