Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/116

 to the ears of the uninitiated. A careless, spendthrift, hardy set of rovers, veterans of the army that pushed the rails across desert and mountains, not insensible of the romance of their past, or the sacrifice of their service to their kind.

They are gone, long ago. The last old jerry is dragging out his slow dim years in some Little Sisters' home, mumbling of the days that were worth a man's while to live, when he was lead spiker on the Pas-i-fic back in the times of Jay Gould. But there were plenty of them to man the handcars of the middle-western sections in the time when Tom Laylander came to serve on the section at McPacken.

They were single men, with old home ties broken long ago and forgotten, many of them illiterate, signing their pay checks with a mark, so accustomed to hardship that the word scarcely had any meaning to them. There was nothing they had that a man in distress could not have for the asking, and nothing they wanted when out of a job and "starvin' wit' th' hoonger" that somebody did not appear at length to supply. What came in by this hand went out through that, with never a thought for winter, when the gangs were cut, nothing put by for the evil day of old age. They always looked forward to the "Nittle Sisters", as they called them, to take care of them when they could no longer handle shovel, tamping-pick and bar.

Few of them ever rose to be bosses, or more than straw-bosses, at the best, owing to their illiteracy. They never learned any more about railroad building