“Up in Ontario. I was despatcher, and station-agent, and ticket-seller, and snow-shoveller, and lamp-cleaner, and everything else, for the Grand Trunk at Komoka, where the Tunnel trains cut off from the main line west for Chicago,—and where they still keep their heel on the Union, and work their men like dogs. They paid me forty-two dollars a month—which was small enough!—but out of that salary they deducted any bad money taken in through the ticket-window, when my returns were made up. I was two weeks behind in my board bill when a Port Huron drummer bought a ticket through to Hamilton with a twenty-dollar counterfeit. It came back to me, with my next month’s twenty-two dollars, with ‘Counterfeit’ stencilled out in big letters across the face of it. The loss of that money kind of got on my nerves. I fumed and worried over it until I spoilt my ‘send,’ and couldn’t sleep, and in some way or other threw an Oddfellows’ excursion train into a string of gravel empties! My God, what I went through that night! I knew it, I foresaw it, twenty minutes before they touched. I pounded the brass between the Junction and Sarnia until they thought I was crazy, but we had no way of getting at them, any more than we could get at two comets rushing together. I wired in my resign. I didn’t even wait to get my clothes. I struck out and walked across country to St. Thomas, and boarded a Michigan Central for the Bridge!” The older man watched the nervous hands go up to the moist forehead and wipe away the sweat, but the gesture left him unmoved. “Then how’d you come to leave the Postal-Union?” he asked. A look of momentary resentment leaped into Durkin’s eyes. “They blacklisted me!” he confessed. “And just for playing their own game!” The other held up a warning finger. “Not so loud,” he interrupted. “But go on!” “Of course, when I first came down to New York I went into the P. U. ‘carrying a fly.’ So I was treated fairly enough, in a way. But I had telegrapher’s paralysis coming on, and I knew I was losing time on my amplifier, and I _had_ to have money for my new transmitter experiments. I tried to make it up doing over-time, and used to shoot weird codes along Continental Press Association’s leased wires until I got so neurasthenic that the hay-tossers up state would break and ask me to fill in, and then I used to lose my temper and wonder why I didn’t stab myself with a flimsy-hook. I knew I had to give it up, but I _did_ want enough money to carry along my work with!” He hesitated for a moment, still gazing down at his plate, until his companion looked at his watch with a brusque “Go on!”