Now a man like Maje wouldn't be likely to have very much of a run nor very much of an engine. He had the 264; an old pop bottle with a stack like a tepee turned upside down. For a run he had always trains Number Twenty-nine and Thirty, the local freights, with an accommodation coach east of Anderson. There were times of stress frequently on the West End, times when everybody ran first in first out, except Maje Sampson; he always ran Twenty-nine and Thirty west to Silver River and back. A pettifogging, cheap, jerk-water run with no rights to speak of, not even against respectable hand-cars. The only things Maje Sampson did not have to dodge were tramps, blanket Indians and telegraph poles; everything else side-tracked Twenty-nine and Thirty and Maje Sampson. Almost everybody on through trains must at some time have seen Maje Sampson puffing on a siding as Moore or Mullen shot by on Number One or Number Two. Maje was so big and his cab so little that when he got his head through the window you couldn't see very much of the cab for shoulders and whiskers and things. From the cab window he looked like a fourteen-year-old boy springing out of a ten-year-old jacket. Three things only, made Maje tolerable. First, the number of benevolent orders he belonged to; second, Delaroo; third, Martie.
Maje Sampson was a joiner and a sitter up. He would join anything on the West End that had a ritual, a grip and a password, and he would sit up night after night with anybody that had a broken leg or a fever: and if nothing better offered, Maje, rather than go to bed, would tackle a man with the stomachache. This kind of took the cuss off; but he was that peculiar he would sit up all night with a sick man and next day make everybody sick talking the money question--at least everybody but Delaroo. If Delaroo was bored he never showed it. As long as Maje would talk Delaroo would listen. That single word was in fact the key to Delaroo: Delaroo was a listener; for that reason nobody knew much about him.
He wasn't a railroad man by birth, but by adoption. Delaroo came from the mountains: he was just a plain mountain man. Some said his father was a trapper; if so, it explained everything--the quiet, the head bent inquiringly forward, the modest unobtrusiveness of a man deaf. Of a size and shape nothing remarkable, Delaroo--but a great listener, for though he looked like a deaf man he heard like a despatcher, and saw marvellously from out the ends of his silent eyes. Delaroo for all the world was a trapper.