Then there was each individual annoyance.  Let me barely mention two or three.  Of my room-mates, “Mitch” had sat at a locomotive throttle fourteen years in the States and Mexico, besides the four years he had been hauling dirt out of the “cut.”  Youthful ambition “Mitch” had left behind, for though he could still look forward to forty, railroad rules had so changed in the States during his absence that he would have had to learn his trade over again to be able to “run” there.  Moreover four years on the Zone does not make a man look forward with pleasure to a States winter.  So “Mitch,” like many another “Zoner,” was planning to buy with the savings of his $210 a month “when the job is done” a chunk of land on some sunny slope of a southern state and settle down for an easy descent through old age.  There was nothing objectionable about “Mitch”—­except perhaps his preference for late-hour poker.  But he had a way of stopping with one leg out of his trousers when at last all the house had calmed down and cots were ceasing to creak, to make some such wholly irrelevant remark as; “By——­, that——­ dispatcher give me 609 to-day and she wouldn’t pull a greased string out of a knot-hole”—­and thereby always hung a tale that was sure to range over half the track mileage of the States and wander off somewhere into the sandy cactus wilderness of Chihuahua at least before “Mitch” succeeded in getting out of the other trouser leg.

The cot directly across from my own groaned—­occasionally—­under the coarse-grained bulk of Tom.  Tom was a “rough-neck” par excellence, so much so that even in a houseful of them he was known as “Tom the Rough-neck,” which to Tom was high tribute.  Some preferred to call him “Tom the Noisy.”  He was built like a steam caisson, or an oil-barrel, though without fat, with a neck that reminded you of a Miura bull with his head down just before the estoque; and when he neglected to button his undershirt—­a not infrequent oversight—­he displayed the hairy chest of a mammoth gorilla.

Tom’s philosophy of getting through life was exactly the same as his philosophy of getting through a rocky hillside with his steam-shovel.  When it came to argument Tom was invariably right; not that he was over-supplied with logic, but because he possessed a voice and the bellows to work it that could rise to the roar of his own steam-shovel on those weeks when he chose to enter the shovel competition, and would have utterly overthrown, drowned out, and annihilated James Stewart Mill himself.

Tom always should have had money, for your “rough-neck” on the Zone has decidedly the advantage over the white-collared college graduate when the pay-car comes around.  But of course being a genuine “rough-neck” Tom was always deep in debt, except on the three days after pay-day, when he was rolling in wealth.