“I know it is,” said Reddy. “But I can’t stay. Not with this news in my craw. I must tell the old woman and the boys. They ain’t a man on the division that won’t be glad.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II NEW DUTIES TWO days later, Allan West entered regularly upon his new duties as chief dispatcher of the Ohio Division of the P. & O. railway. Meantime, news of his promotion had got about, and it seemed as though every employee of the division, high or low, had made it a point to seek him out and congratulate him. For Allan, in the eight years he had been with the road, had endeared himself to everyone by kindness and considerateness, and even those engineers and conductors who had a standing grievance against all dispatchers had come to confess that he was the squarest one they had ever met. The chief dispatcher’s office is a large and pleasant room, looking down over the busy yards, and is shared by Mr. Plumfield, the train master. A great desk stands between the front windows, one side of which belongs to the train master and the other to the chief dispatcher. On it two sounders clicked, and from the open door of the dispatchers’ office, at Allan’s back, came the incessant clamouring of other instruments. To one unaccustomed to it, this ceaseless noise would have been perfectly distracting, but to the habitués of the offices it was scarcely noticeable. And yet, though they seemingly paid no heed to it, it had a meaning for them, and anything out of routine attracted their attention instantly. For telegraphers develop a sixth sense, which takes up and translates what the instruments are saying without interfering with any of the others. Perhaps you have seen an engineer sitting beside his engine, reading a paper while the complicated mechanism whirls smoothly along at its appointed task. Suddenly, without cause so far as you can see, he starts up, snatches up an oil can or a wrench, and squirts a jet of oil upon a bearing or tightens a nut somewhere. No sign of trouble has been audible to you, but his trained ear, even though his brain was otherwise engaged, had caught an unaccustomed burr or rattle and had called his attention to it. Such instances might be multiplied indefinitely. Everyone who works at a certain task, or goes through a certain set of motions, becomes, after a time, to some extent automatic. Physiologists call such motions “reflex,” and tell us that in time the brain passes on such volitions to the spinal cord and so frees itself for other work—one of the wise provisions of our bodily mechanism, whose wonder and perfection very few of us understand or appreciate.