“Next. Work here at the Station at fifteen cents per hour. See too much of the place now. I want a change of view for my holiday.
“Last. Trucking in the transfer shed at twenty cents. That looks to me like the best shot. Outside work, plenty of exercise, a chance to work extra if you want to, and we can both work together. How does that strike you?”
Between the character of the jobs, so different from what he had imagined, and the marvel of wondering how Greenleaf ever got in touch with so many different lines of work, Scott was too astonished to give an immediate answer.
“Not much variety in the winter time,” Greenleaf apologized. “Oh, here’s another one. Driving an extra delivery wagon for the Kings’ Palace. Two-fifty, but that’s probably gone by this time. Mean job, anyway, especially in the winter, and too long hours. No, I’ll go down and telephone the transfer shed to hold two jobs. Are you game?”
“Sure,” Scott answered faintly, and Greenleaf popped out on his errand. While he was gone Scott spent his time in wondering what kind of a job he had gotten into, for he had never heard anything about a transfer shed, and had no idea what Greenleaf had meant. Before he had been able to figure out any satisfactory solution Greenleaf returned.
“It’s all right,” he cried; “they said they’d save us two trucks, and said we could come down Friday morning at 7 A. M. I tell you we’ll get some lively work there.”
Scott, who was ashamed to confess his ignorance, kept a discreet silence except to confirm any of Greenleaf’s statements which seemed to need confirmation. He turned the matter over continually in his own mind, but having nothing to work on never came to any conclusion.
At last the vacation began and the two boys presented themselves, or rather Greenleaf presented them both to the foreman at the shed. They were assigned to a westbound gang and directed to study the signs on the platform till it was time to begin work.
The transfer shed was located in an enormous freight yard amidst a network of forty or fifty tracks. The shed itself consisted of a large warehouse with offices on the second floor and, extending from either end of it, a covered platform some twenty feet wide and about a hundred yards long. Its floor was of heavy planking, the splintered condition of which seemed to indicate heavy traffic of some kind. It was on a level with the floors of the box cars which were standing four rows deep on either side of it. Iron skids were laid from the platform to the car-sills, forming a gang plank.
Stuck in the posts nearest the gang planks on one side of the platform were four tin signs bearing the names of the cities in the West, or such mystic signs as “1st Div. Way,” “Valley Way,” “East Local,” etc. Scott noticed that all the cars on that side were empty, while those on the opposite side of the platform seemed to be loaded to the roof with every conceivable kind of freight. He had not yet figured out the significance of all this but he studied hard and soon had a pretty good idea of their general location on the platform. He had also mastered the fact that when he found there were four signs connected with each skid, that the top sign referred to the car on the first track, the lowest one to the fourth, etc.