“You mean they’ve gone along to help?”
The chief of construction smiled.
“Not exactly as helpers. Those two boys have been doing fine work up here all summer, Mr. Maxwell, as you know. Being boys, they’ve had time to think up a number of schemes that have helped us out wonderfully in this race against time; and this notion of the way in which the O. C. blockade could be broken this morning rather capped the climax. When I asked the boys what sort of a reward they’d like to have, they both begged for the same thing: to be put in charge of a small gang to do something on their own initiative.”
“Humph! So you’ve made them bosses, have you? You’re not spoiling them, are you? They’re only children, as you might say, both of them, as yet.”
“I know; in some ways they are just boys; fine, straightforward, American boys, equally ready for a fight or a frolic. But in other ways they have matured wonderfully in this summer of hard work. And this bit of bossing ambition is perfectly natural. They both know that if they are to grow, they must learn how to handle workmen. I thought you wouldn’t care if I should give them a little chance along that line. They’ve earned it.”
“All right,” said the general manager crisply; “but don’t push them too fast for their own good; that’s all. Dick is a bit rattle-brained; but I don’t know so much about young Donovan.”
“Donovan is making good,” said the chief engineer warmly; “all kinds of good. The only fault I can find with him at all is the fact that he has brought over a good lump of class consciousness with him from his shop experience. But there is some hope that he may outgrow that.”
But just how much Larry had improved the chance given him at the beginning of the summer by the stocky little gentleman sitting in the ill-lighted caboose with his chief engineer no one was to know until a day two weeks later—
But of that, again, more in its proper place.