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To make the “twin” thing still more of a joke, they didn’t look much more alike than Little Lord Fauntleroy and Huck Finn. About the only feature they had in common was a rich stain of brown sunburn, acquired in a summer of railroad building in the Timanyoni Mountains of western Colorado. Dick Maxwell, son of the general manager of the Nevada Short Line, was possibly twenty pounds the lighter of the two, and he had the fine-lined face and easy manner of a fellow who has never had to think of how his clothes fitted, or what to do with his hands; while Larry Donovan—but Larry deserves a paragraph to himself.

He had the window seat in the Pullman section, and was staring out at the rather monotonous Middle-Western farmstead landscape hurtling past with that sort of half-shy look in his good, wide-set eyes which is the first symptom of homesickness. The big-framed, curly-headed fellow, who had been Dick’s partner on the summer job, was the son of an ex-locomotive engineer on the Short Line, and he owed his college chance partly to the good work he had done on the railroad-building job, and partly to the generosity of Dick’s father. In a grim, workmanlike way, he was determined to make the utmost of the chance; but that fact didn’t say anything whatever to the other fact that this was his first long-distance jump from the home circle.