The driver waved him aside with his flaring torch, and up trotted the blue-and-gold conductor with his little silver white-light with a frosted flue.  “Why didn’t you stop at Pee-Wee Junction?” he hissed.

“Is Pee-Wee a stop station?”

“On signal.”

“I didn’t see no sign.”

“I pulled the bell.”

“Go on now, you ghost-dancer,” said the engineer.

“You idiot!” gasped the exasperated conductor.  “Don’t you know the old man’s on, that he wanted to stop at Pee-Wee to meet the G.M. this morning, that a whole engineering outfit will be idle there for half a day, and you’ll get the guillotine?”

“Whew, you have shore got ’em.”

“Isn’t your bell working?” asked a big man who had joined the group under the cab window.

“I think so, sir,” said the driver, as he recognized the superintendent.  “Johnny, try that cab bell,” he shouted, and the fire-boy sounded the big brass gong.

“Why didn’t you take it at Pee-Wee?” asked the old man, holding his temper beautifully.

The driver lifted his torch and stared almost rudely into the face of the official in front of him.  “Why, Mr. Skidum,” said he slowly, “I didn’t hear no signal.”

The superintendent was blocked.

As he turned and followed the conductor into the telegraph office, the driver, gloating in his high tower of a cab, watched him.

“He’s an old darling,” said he to the fire-boy, “and I’m ready to die for him any day; but I can’t stop for him in the face of bulletin 13.  Thirty days for the first offence, and then fire,” he quoted, as he opened the throttle and steamed away, four minutes late.

The old man drummed on the counter-top in the telegraph office, and then picked up a pad and wrote a wire to his assistant:—­

“Cancel general order No. 13.”

The night man slipped out in the dawn and called the day man who was the station master, explaining that the old man was at the station and evidently unhappy.

The agent came on unusually early and endeavored to arrange for a light engine to carry the superintendent back to the Junction.

At the end of three hours they had a freight engine that had left its train on a siding thirty miles away and rolled up to rescue the stranded superintendent.

Now, every railway man knows that when one thing goes wrong on a railroad, two more mishaps are sure to follow; so, when the rescuing crew heard over the wire that the train they had left on a siding, having been butted by another train heading in, had started back down grade, spilled over at the lower switch, and blocked the main line, they began to expect something to happen at home.

However, the driver had to go when the old man was in the cab and the G.M. with a whole army of engineers and workmen waiting for him at Pee-Wee; so he rattled over the switches and swung out on the main line like a man who was not afraid.