As far back as anybody could remember they remembered Sammy Durgan. Somewhere on the division you were bound to bump up against him--but rarely twice in the same place. There wasn't any one in authority, even so mild an authority as a section boss, who hadn't fired Sammy Durgan so often that it had grown on them like a habit. Not that it made much difference, however; for, ejected from the roundhouse, Sammy Durgan's name would be found decorating the pay roll next month in the capacity of baggage master, possibly, at some obscure spot up the line; and here, for example, a slight mix-up of checks in the baggage of a tourist family, that divided the family against itself and its baggage as far as the East is from the West--and Sammy Durgan moved on again. What the Hill Division said about him would have been complimentary if it hadn't been for the grin; they said he was an _all-round_ railroad man. Shops, roundhouse, train crews, station work and construction gangs, Sammy Durgan knew them all; and they knew Sammy Durgan. Eternally and everlastingly in trouble--that was Sammy Durgan. Nothing much else the matter with him--just trouble. Brains all right; only, as far as the Hill Division could make out, the last thing Sammy Durgan ever thought of doing was to give his brains a little exercise to keep them in condition. But, if appalling in his irresponsibility, Sammy Durgan nevertheless had a saving grace--no cork ever bobbed more buoyantly on troubled waters than Sammy Durgan did on his sea of adversity. Sammy Durgan always came up smiling. He had a perennial sort of cheerfulness on his leathery face that infected his guileless blue eyes, while a mop of fiery red hair like a flaming halo kind of guaranteed the effect to be genuine. One half of you felt like kicking the man violently, and the other half was obsessed with an insane desire to hobnob with him just as violently. Sammy Durgan, to say the least of it, was a contradictory proposition. He had an ambition--he wanted a steady job. He mentioned the matter to Regan one day immediately following that period in his career when, doing odd jobs over at the station, he had, in filling up the fire buckets upstairs, inadvertently left the tap running. The sink being small and the flooring none too good, a cherished collection of Regan's blue-prints in the room below were reduced to a woebegone mass of sticky pulp. Sammy Durgan mentioned his ambition as a sort of corollary, as it were, to the bitter and concise remarks in which the fat little master mechanic had just couched Sammy Durgan's ubiquitous discharge. Regan didn't stop breathing--he had dealt with Sammy Durgan before. Regan smiled as though it hurt him.