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When you see a retriever frisking in the ecstasy that comes when you get out your gun, you will know just how I felt when I went back to work. That fright did me a lot of good. From that time on I really settled down to learn, because I knew then just how much I loved mechanics. And now, in 1936, out in Kansas City, on our pay roll, there is the name of a gentleman, a friend of mine, now quite old—the name is Neubert.

One night the man that I was helping underneath a locomotive stopped his work to look around us cautiously. Where others like ourselves were working on locomotives laid up for repairs, the darkness of the shop was torn by the orange flames of coal-oil flares. Upon the gaunt stone walls and cobwebbed trusses of the ceiling gigantic engine shadows alternately swelled and shrank.

"I'm going uptown." His voice was low and meant for just my ear. I was his apprentice helper, and devoted to old Arthur Darling.

"You'd better not," I warned him, scared on his account. "They'll fire you sure if you get caught." Sometime before, Darling had come into Ellis and got a job in the shops. He had worked in many places, but last of all in the Santa Fe shops. In our Union Pacific shops what was regarded as his best skill was in setting engine valves. He surely was an expert, and Mr. Neubert had put me with him as his helper, so that I could learn to do a valve job too. Men who could were hard to get. The pulling power of a locomotive depends upon the proper setting of its valves. Why, even now I can lie in bed at night and tell, from the sound of a distant locomotive as it labors with a heavy train, whether its valves are rightly set; when they are, there is a smooth even cadence to the puff, puff, puff, puff as the engine works. For that knowledge, and unnumbered other things I know about machines and metal and men, I owe a great debt to that grease-blackened old mechanic, Darling. Really, I owe him more than I can measure. The way of teaching in that time, whereby the good craftsman passed on his knowledge to an apprentice in the most practical way of all—while he worked—to my way of thinking was a most effective system. Certainly after the lapse of many years I feel impelled to say that no apprentice ever had a better teacher than Arthur Darling was to me.