THERE is a mutton-chop David, one George J. Kindel, whose very name is a terror to the big railroad systems. For twenty years Kindel has been fighting-generally singlehanded-for more equable freight rates west of the Missouri River. He has appeared before low courts and high, and he has had lengthy sparring bouts with that august railroad tribunal, the InterState Commerce Commission. He has battled with one great railroad system after another to the very Supreme Court of the United States, and he has made more than one acknowledge defeat.

"There's a lot of buncombe about this freight making business, asserts Kindel. "Rates are made just because they are made- that's all. Some railroad authority has put such and such a rate in effect, and there it sticks and nobody dares try to change it. I've never had anybody tell me that it's right to charge more for throwing at thing off at Grand Junction, Colorado, than it is to carry the same thing through Grand Junction to California. and back again.

can get plenty of the unofficial kind, but it takes courage for a business man to testify against a big railroad.

"If there's anything worse than freight rates it's express rates. There is a big express company that does most of the business in Mexico. Its rates in the United States are adjusted, like the rates of the other companies, so the small shipper pays the heaviest charges. The variations in the charges for packages ranging from one to ten pounds in this country are very large, but when one gets to the larger packages, shipped by the wholesaler and manufacturer, the variations are smaller, thus giving the big man the best of it. But as soon as this express company crosses the Mexican line its rates are so adjusted that the charges are greater on the large packages than on the small ones."

"I was led into this subject twenty years ago when I got to examining the question of freight rates and was struck by the many incongruities on the tariff sheets. I am a comparatively uneducated man, and I haven't carried on the fight in high-brow fashion. All my questions have been plain enough, which perhaps is the reason why the experts find them so hard to answer. In arguing before the Inter-State Commerce Commission I am often handicapped by lack of evidence. I

Occasionally Mr. Kindel jumps into politics and when he does he makes a big splash. He has held various offices in Denver, and a year

or two ago concluded to run for Congress. It was at the eleventh hour, and there was no ticket he could get on but the Prohibition, which usually polls a scant 4,000 votes. Kindel got 17,000 votes and came so near getting in that the bosses didn't get over their scare for weeks.

"Some day I'll go to Congress from Colorado," says Kindel, "and I'll bring this freight and express fight before the nation in proper style. Meanwhile I'm finding that the man whose cause is just can do a lot singlehanded."

THE HE government Printing Office at Washington, with its thirty-five hundred employes-a large proportion of them women-under one roof, is one of the biggest factories in the world, its output being books and all manner of documents published under the direction. of Congress.

Within the last few years it has become a sanitary model, under the direction of a medical superintendent, Dr. William F. Manning, who is a man of original ideas. He has carried them even into such details as contrivances of his own invention for cleaning the thousands of cuspidors daily with live steam. There is no chance for infectious disease of any kind to get a start in the huge establishment, where the very latest and most up-to-date hy

gienic methods are rigidly enforced. But almost every day it happens that a few out of the army of work people are taken sick or suffer some injury, and they are immediately brought to the emergency hospital which, on a small scale, is maintained on an upper floor.

The little hospital is equipped with every imaginable kind of apparatus for relieving sufferers, no matter what the trouble may be. There are even oxygen tanks, for use in cases of threatened heart-failure; and for rheumatic or other pains Dr. Manning has a special contrivance which concentrates the rays of a powerful electric lamp upon the part affected-this being found highly efficacious. But the most interesting of his inventions is a cooling device, for use in

JOHN F. STEVENS, WHO LED THE HILL FORCES IN THE RAILROAD WAR AGAINST HARRIMAN FOR THE CONTROL OF CENTRAL OREGON.

A few nights later a rival camp of aliens, on the opposite side of the canyon, was thrown into a panic by the discovery of a "plant" of dynamite close to their sleeping quarters.

For a year-unnoticed and unknown to the world outside a war went on in this remote wilderness which for bitterness and ferocity has rarely been equalled. On either side were bold and resourceful men, backed by towering ambition and the sheer weight of millions

of dollars. Time after time bands of Greeks and Italians were hurled against each other in a country where a misstep meant death on the rocks below or drowning in the foaming rapids of the mountain river. Automobiles, loaded with sheriffs and other rival law-officers, went spinning along mountain trails, unvisited before by anybody but wandering prospectors. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in buying up old railroad charters and rights of way. Hundreds of laborers, pouring out of box cars at the nearest railroad terminals, went marching on foot across miles of desolate and uninhabited country. Great trains of four- and six-horse wagons toiled over the high, unmarked plateaus. Processions of burros, laden with high explosives, crept over the mountains, following a bell-mare, unattended by men because a slip or a misstep would have blown them all into eternity. Daring young engineers let themselves down