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Mr. Esterbrook won my father over. So I began my four-year term as a machine-shop apprentice. My pay at first was five cents an hour. Who could ask a better chance?

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A talisman that belonged to my father for more than half a century became a treasured memento in my office; it was his steam gauge. To a locomotive engineer, a steam gauge is as vital as his watch. On this cherished disk of silver-gleaming metal, with a glass cover on its dial that my two hands will barely hide, my father's life depended; oh, and many other lives. So he had it tested often and guarded it throughout his days. After he died my sister Irene, out West, found it among some things he left, and sent it on to me. This old steam gauge was my father's dearest implement, but now for me it has become a sort of crystal ball.

Gazing upon its face, obliged no longer now to register demonic pressures, it sometimes seems to me as if I can hear my father's engine whistle blowing faintly to me on the wind from far out of Ellis on the Kansas prairie horizon. What I hear, of course, is just a shrillness in the traffic noises rising from the street; yet it works a miracle! I can almost see the bustling at the little Ellis station platform at the moment his engine pulled the night train from Junction City into Ellis. It was his engine; his in a way that a trooper's horse is his, an extension of his power and intelligence, to defend, to brag about and love. Sometimes the vision takes another> form and the engine, venting cautious chuff, chuff, chuffs, is nosing through a roundhouse door and I am down below the level of its wheels, working in a roundhouse pit with a sooty face and my arms grease-blackened, all my muscles hard and lean and young. Many times I have wished I really could hear again my father's engine whistle as I used to hear it just before it reached the Big Creek bridge. Well, music works a trick for my memory, too; a band marching up Fifth Avenue may send a bit of melody, just a bar or two, that touches things within my mind. It sets me thinking of a time when I was a machine-trade apprentice in the railroad shops, when I played a tuba in the band, played second base on the baseball team and walked, on Sunday afternoons, with Della Forker to the Big Creek bridge.