Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/115

 occasions, and get himself one that would not represent such a big investment, or be so subject to damage from contact with black oil and the hard knocks of a trackman's life.

Tom was respectful toward Mike Quinn and his advice, as he was toward all suggestions, serious and jocose, offered by his fellow toilers. This readiness to listen, his polite bearing and soft speech, quickly made a way for Tom where a flippant smart fellow would have found it hard going. The gang adopted him, very much in the way that a household adopts a strange animal, and took a vast pride in the distinction of having the only cowboy jerry that ever was known.

The jerries were proud of Tom's refined and deferential manners, at least refined in comparison with any manners they came in daily contact with; proud of the pistol that he wore to and from work and hung on the lever of the handcar; proud of his big sombrero, which he retained against all argument to get him out of it at first. After a week they would have felt hurt and affronted if Tom had appeared in any other hat.

Section gangs in those times were made up mainly of old-timers who had followed the steel from the Lackawanna to the Santa Fé, grizzled men with thick arms and mighty chests, "good dhrinkin' men" as they described themselves with pride. Nearly all of them were Irish, who had come to America young and stepped from the ship to the ties. They were a craft to themselves, as distinctive as sailors, with a speech full of terms applying to their trade, mystifying and foreign