Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/74



's car was dropped off at Damascus by an east-bound passenger train that arrived toward the middle of the afternoon. Within a few minutes after the general superintendent's arrival the new company doctor had been installed in his office without ceremony.

This office was a dingy red freight car that had been lifted from its trucks and deposited on a bank of cinders near the main-line track, where it formerly had served as passenger depot and agent's office in the early days of Damascus. Later it had been occupied by the engineering crew which had surveyed the new roadbed now being graded west of town.

The side-doors of the car had been boarded up, a standard-size house door put in each end, four little windows cut high up in the sides near the eaves. A partition divided the car in two unequal portions, the larger of which was to be the doctor's office, the smaller his sleeping quarters, for it was one of the essentials of that position that the doctor be available at all hours of the day and night.

Pioneering in railroading is attended by many accidents, usually grave from the very nature of the weight and density of the materials and tools employed. There is nothing puny, or fashioned for grasping by delicate