The Lady and the Gandydancer

Book excerpt: Sean O'Sullivan, once a roaring twenties playboy, has been forced by his railroad president father to work as a Gandydancer, unskilled workers who use shovel and pick to keep the rail lines straight, a job that begins to have a positive effect, when one night he finds himself rescuing Anne Miller, a spoiled coed abandoned on a mean street in Baltimore by her feckless date when she resists his amorous advances. Sean lets her believe he is a common laborer, and she is charmed by his gentlemanly ways, but unsure that he could ever fit into her upper class life. When Sean meets the saddened sister of one of his fellow workers whose fiancé was lost in the Great War, he, too, is torn, unable to choose between two women who both believe he is merely a Gandydancer.