"Just about," agreed Jim. "But I know Tom Mickey, the head lineman, pretty well, and I believe that I can get him to let us string our wire on the company's poles. You see there's three or four empty places on the cross-bars." "Oh, if we can do that," said Allan, "it will be easy enough. Do you suppose he will let us?" "I'm sure he will," asserted Jim, with a good deal more positiveness than he really felt. "I'll see Mickey in the morning--I'll start early so I'll have time before the whistle blows." "It seems to me that you're doing it all, and that I'm not doing anything," said Allan. "You must let me furnish the wire, anyway." "We'll see about it," said Jim. "Won't you come in and see my mother?" he added, a little shyly. "It's pretty late," said Allan. "Do you think I'd better?" "Yes," Jim replied. "She--she asked me to bring you, the first chance I had." "What for?" asked Allan, looking at him in surprise. "No matter," said Jim. "Come on," and he opened the door and led him into the house. They crossed a hall, and beside a table in the room beyond, Allan saw a woman seated. She was bending over some sewing in her lap, but she looked up at the sound of their entrance, and as the beams of the lamp fell upon her face, Allan saw how it lighted with love and happiness. And his heart gave a sudden throb of misery, for it was with that selfsame light in her eyes that his mother had welcomed him in the old days. "Mother," Jim was saying, "this is Allan West." She rose with a little cry of pleasure, letting her sewing fall unheeded to the floor, and held out her hands to him. "So this is Allan West!" she said, in a voice soft and sweet and gentle. "This is the boy who saved my boy's life!" "It was nothing," stammered Allan, turning crimson. "You see, I just happened to be there--" "Nothing! I wonder if your mother would think it nothing if some one had saved you for her!" A sudden mist came before Allan's eyes; his lips trembled. And the woman before him, looking at him with loving, searching eyes, understood. "Dear boy!" she said, and Allan found himself clasped close against her heart. CHAPTER IV THE YOUNG OPERATORS Tom Mickey, chief lineman of the Ohio division of the P. & O., was, like most other human beings, subject to fluctuations of temper; only, with Tom, the extremes were much farther apart than usual. This was due, perhaps, to his mixed ancestry, for his father, a volatile Irishman, had married a phlegmatic German woman, proprietress of a railroad boarding-house, where Mickey found a safe and comfortable haven, with no more arduous work to do than to throw out occasionally some objectionable customer--and Mickey never considered that as work, but as recreation pure and simple. It was into this haven that Tom was born; there he grew up, alternating between the chronic high spirits of his father and the chronic low ones of his mother, and being, on the whole, healthy and well-fed and contented.