A great many of the officials were away, and the service was generally demoralized during the holidays, so that the appropriation for which the Englishman was working at M. had for the moment been forgotten; the shops were completed, the machinery was in, but there was no boiler to boil water to make steam.

That night, when the people of M. were watching the old year out and the new year in, the young Englishman with a force of men was wrecking the pump-house down by the station.  The little upright boiler was torn out and placed in the machine shops, and with it a little engine was driven that turned the long line-shaft.

At dawn they ran a long pipe through the roof, screwed a locomotive whistle on the top of it, and at six o’clock on New Year’s morning the new whistle on the new shops at M. in Iowa, blew in the new year.  Incidentally, it blew the town in for $47,000.

This would be a good place to end this story, but the temptation is great to tell the rest.

When the shops were opened, the young Englishman was foreman.  This was only about twenty-five years ago.  In a little while they promoted him.

In 1887 he went to the Wisconsin Central.  In 1890 he was made Superintendent of machinery of the Santa Fe route,—­one of the longest roads on earth.  It begins at Chicago, strong like a man’s wrist, with a finger each on Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, and El Paso, and a thumb touching the Gulf at Galveston.

The mileage of the system, at that time, was equal to one-half that of Great Britain; and upon the companies’ payrolls were ten thousand more men than were then in the army of the United States.  Fifteen hundred men and boys walk into the main shops at Topeka every morning.  They work four hours, eat luncheon, listen to a lecture or short sermon in the meeting-place above the shops, work another four hours, and walk out three thousand dollars better off than they would have been if they had not worked.

These shops make a little city of themselves.  There is a perfect water system, fire-brigade with fire stations where the firemen sleep, police, and a dog-catcher.

Here they build anything of wood, iron, brass, or steel that the company needs, from a ninety-ton locomotive to a single-barrelled mouse-trap, all under the eye of the Englishman who came to America with a good wife and three babies, a good head and two hands.  This man’s name is John Player.  He is the inventor of the Player truck, the Player hand-car, the Player frog, and many other useful appliances.

This simple story of an unpretentious man came out in broken sections as the special sped along the smooth track, while the General Manager talked with the resident director and the General Superintendent talked with his assistant, who, not long ago, was the conductor of a work-train upon which the G.S. was employed as brakeman.  I was two days stealing this story, between the blushes of the mechanical Superintendent.