The young man sat and thought it over, and concluded he would see the master-mechanic.  On the following morning he found that official at his desk and told his story.  He had just arrived from England with a wife and three children and a few dollars.  “That’s all right,” said the master-mechanic; “I’ll give you a job on Monday morning.”

This was Saturday, and during the day the first foreman with whom the Englishman had talked wired that if he would return to E. he could find work.  The young man showed this wire to the master-mechanic.  “I should like to work for you,” said he; “you have been very kind to give me employment after the foreman had refused, but my family is near this place.  They are two hundred miles or more from here.”

“I understand,” said the kind-hearted official, “and you’d better go back to E.”

The Englishman rubbed his chin and looked out of the window.  The train standing at the station and about to pull out would carry him back to the junction, but he made no effort to catch it, and the master-mechanic, seeing this, caught the drift of the young man’s mind.  “Have you transportation?” he asked.  The stranger, smiling, shook his head.  Turning to his desk, the master-mechanic wrote a pass to the junction and a telegram requesting transportation over the Iowa Central from the junction to the town of E.

That Sunday the young man told his young wife that the new country was “all right.”  Everybody trusted everybody else.  An official would give a stranger free transportation; a station agent could give you a pass, and even an engine-driver could carry a man without asking permission.

He didn’t know that all these men save the master-mechanic had violated the rules of the road and endangered their own positions and the chance of promotion by helping him; but he felt he was among good, kind people, and thanked them just the same.

On Monday morning he went to work in the little shop.  In a little while he was one of the trustworthy men employed in the place.  “How do you square a locomotive?” he asked the foreman.  “Here,” said the foreman; “from this point to that.”

That was all the Englishman asked.  He stretched a line between the given points and went to work.

Two years from this the town of M. offered to donate to the railroad company $47,000 if the new machine shop could be located there, steam up and machinery running, on the first day of January of the following year.

The general master-mechanic entrusted the work of putting in the machinery, after the walls had been built and the place roofed over, to the division master-mechanic, who looked to the local foreman to finish the job in time to win the subsidy.

The best months of the year went by before work was begun.  Frost came, and the few men tinkering about were chilled by the autumn winds that were wailing through the shutterless doors and glassless windows.  Finally the foreman sent the Englishman to M. to help put up the machinery.  He was a new man, and therefore was expected to take signals from the oldest man on the job,—­a sort of straw-boss.