Scarcely had the youth left the railroad company's headquarters, when a tall, spare man, with faultless dress and cleanly-shaven face, entered the apartment, going straight to the superintendent's desk, smiling and nodding to the clerks as he passed them. He was Donald Minturn, the assistant superintendent, who had a smile for every one, but as treacherous as the charm of the serpent. "Hilloa Minturn!" greeted his chief; "you are back sooner than I expected. By-the-way, you must have met a boy as you came in. He was after a situation, and I was careless enough not to ask him his name. Call him back if it is not too late. I think we might do worse than--" "What!" exclaimed Mr. Minturn, "has that fellow had the audacity to come here for another job? He has been discharged from his section this very week." "Then you know him, Minturn? Come to think of it, he told me so. How stupid I am to-day! What is his name?" "That he couldn't have told you himself, if you had asked him, general. He is a sort of waif of the switch-yard. Jack Ingleside--you knew Jack--he was engineer on the old Greyhound, afterwards took to drink and went to the bad--well, as I started to say, Jack found this boy in the caboose one morning as he was starting from Wood's Hollow. He wasn't more than three years old, and how he got there is yet a mystery. Jack took a fancy to him and gave him a home while he lived. I think the young scamp still lives with the widow at Runaway Tavern." "He seems like a more than commonly smart boy." "Oh, he can appear well enough when he is a mind to. But Mr. Gammon had to turn him off of his section for downright disobedience of orders. Why, only yesterday he and a man named Baxter jumped on to the hand-car in the very teeth of the northern-bound mail, and came very near wrecking the train, to say nothing of ending their own worthless lives." "Oh, well, if you know the boy, of course you are more competent to judge of him than I. But I must confess he impressed me very favorably. What news from Draco?" So the august officials of the great Pen Yan gave no employment to the poor boy who had come so far for a situation, whether he deserved a better fate or not. Meanwhile, the boy, unconscious that his fate had already been decided upon, hastened to the Fairfax Station, to take the homeward-bound train, which would be due in a few minutes. The Pen Yan railway system forms upon the map of that part of the country a stupendous letter Y. The Fairfax Fork running north-northwest makes one branch of the arm meeting at the Big Y, as the junction is called--the line of the upper arm, where the two tracks unite in one to reach across a mountainous, often sparsely-settled, country for over three hundred miles. At the time we write it was a single-track road from the Big Y to its terminus.