Martin Bradley--a game man--that's what they call him now. Mrs. MacQuigan was right--wasn't she? Not perhaps just in the way she thought she was--but right for all that. Call it luck or chance if you like, something more than that if it strikes you that way--but an accident in the yards one night, a month after Bradley had lost his engine, put one of the train crew of the Rat River Special out of commission with a torn hand, and sent a call boy streaking uptown for a substitute. Call it luck if you like, that the work train with a hybrid gang of a hundred-odd Polacks, Armenians, and Swedes, cooped up in a string of box cars converted into bunk houses, mess houses and commissariat, a window or two in them to take the curse off, and end doors connecting them for the sake of sociability, pulled out for the new Rat River trestle work with Reddy MacQuigan handling the shovel end of it for Bull Coussirat, who had been promoted in the cab--and Bradley as the substitute brakeman on the front end. Well, maybe it was luck--but that's not what they call it on the Hill Division. Perhaps no one quite understood Bradley, even at the end, except Mrs. MacQuigan; and possibly even she didn't get it all. Inconsistent, to put it mildly, that a man like Bradley would have let go at all? Well, it's an easy matter and a very human one, to judge another from the safe vantage ground of distance--isn't it? Some men take a thing one way, and some another; and in some the feelings take deeper root than in others--and find their expression in a different way. Ditched from the start, Bradley hadn't much to cling to, had he--only the baby girl he had dreamed about on the runs at night; only the little tot he had slaved for, who some day was to make a home for him? But about the Rat River Special---- It was midnight when they pulled out of Big Cloud; and Bradley, in the caboose, glanced at Heney's tissue, which, as a matter of form, the conductor gave him to read. The Special was to run twenty minutes behind No. 17, the westbound mail train, and make a meeting point with the through freight, No. 84, eastbound, at The Forks. The despatchers had seized the propitious moment to send the rolling camp through in the quiet hours of traffic, with an eye out to getting the foreigners promptly on the job in the morning for fear they might draw an extra hour or two of time--without working for it! The Special was due to make Rat River at four o'clock. Bradley handed back the order without comment, picked up his lantern, and started for the door. "No need of going forward to-night," said Heney, laying his arm on Bradley's arm. "We've only a short train, a dozen cars, and we can watch it well enough from the cupola. It's damn cold out there." "Oh, I guess it's all right, Heney," Bradley answered--and went out through the door.