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 Windy Moore among them, marking each man well. As the days passed they became familiar figures, both on the road and in the streets of McPacken. He waited for them to try some of their funny business with him when they stood man to man on the ground.

This never happened. While the cow jerry was an object of great entertainment and ribald mockery to brakemen and firemen going by at thirty or fifty miles an hour, he was no funnier than any other man when met on the streets in town. Trainmen passed him there without a word or wink, as oblivious to his presence on earth, it appeared, as one of the myriad leaves on Mrs. Cowgill's cottonwood trees. If there was no spoken insult in this passing him over as if he did not exist, there was no aggression. Tom was satisfied to have it that way in town; he would have been happy and comfortable if they would have given him the same peace out on the road.

Let them have their joke, said Tom, even at his expense, though what there was so diverting and comical in the aspect of a man who had ridden the range all his life coming down to railroading, he could not see. For it was a come-down on his part; it would have been just as much of a come-down to Laylander shovelling coal into an engine, or trotting the tops of boxcars, as tamping ties on the section. Railroading was all railroading to him, one job as respectable as another, all of it far below the freedom and independence of the range.

It was a comfort to Tom that he was not to be a regular railroader, that he was using the job as a tem-