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When the war was over and he was mustered out, he went to work in the railroad shops in the same town where he had enlisted, in Armourdale. Then he was put on the pay roll as a fireman, and after that was promoted to be a locomotive engineer. He was an engineer on the railroad until he retired. Of course, when he began, it was not the Union Pacific; what was being built westward out of Kansas City then was called the Kansas Pacific Railway. The train his engine hauled in that time supplied the construction gang that laid the first rails across the state. Great herds of bison sometimes blocked the right of way and were stampeded off only when the bulbous stack of his wood-burning engine threatened them with dragon snorts of smoke and fire. There were swarms of Indians, too, and they killed some of the men he knew.

Sometimes, but rarely, he would get a permit that let me ride with him up in the cab, from Ellis all the way to Brookville. At Fort Hays, only thirteen miles from where we lived, I'd see the blue-clad soldiers of the garrison and then, farther on, at Victoria, right beside the railroad station, I could see some graves of men my father said he knew.