Part 13 (2/2)

He reached uncertainly toward his hip pocket for his chewing--and then, with sudden emotion, the big-hearted, fat, little master mechanic bent over Sammy Durgan.

”G.o.d bless the man!” blurted out Regan. And then, to the doctor: ”Will he live?”

”Oh, yes; I think so,” the doctor answered. ”He's pretty badly smashed up, though.”

Sammy Durgan's lips were moving. Regan leaned close to catch the words.

”A steady job,” murmured Sammy Durgan. ”Never get a chance. But some day it'll come. I'll show 'em, Maria, and Regan, and the rest of 'em!”

”You have, Sammy,” said Regan, in a low, anxious voice. ”It's all right, Sammy. It's all right, old boy. Just pull around and you can have any blamed thing you want on the Hill Division.”

The doctor smiled sympathetically at Regan.

”He's delirious, you know,” he explained kindly. ”What he says doesn't mean anything.”

Regan looked up with a kind of a grim smile.

”Don't it?” inquired Regan softly. Then he cleared his throat, and tugged at his scraggly brown mustache--both ends of it. ”That's what I used to think myself,” said the fat little master mechanic, sort of as though he were apostrophizing the distant peaks across the canon, and not as though he were talking to the doctor at all. ”But I guess--I guess I know Sammy Durgan better than I did. H'm?”

IV

THE WRECKING BOSS

Opinions, right or wrong, on any subject are a matter of individuality--there have been different opinions about Flannagan on the Hill Division. But the story is straight enough--from car-tink to superintendent, there has never been any difference of opinion about that.

Flannagan was the wrecking boss.

Tommy Regan said the job fitted Flannagan, for it took a hard man for the job, and Flannagan, bar none, was the hardest man on the payroll; hardest at crooking elbows in MacGuire's Blazing Star Saloon, hardest with his fists, and hardest of all when it came to getting at the heart of some scalding, mangled horror of death and ruin that a man wouldn't be called a coward to turn from--sick.

Flannagan looked it. He stood six feet one in his stockings, and his chest and shoulders were like the front-end view you'd get looking at a st.u.r.dy, well-grown ox. He wasn't pretty. His face was scarred with cuts and burns enough to stall any German duelling student on a siding till the rails rusted, and the beard he grew to hide these mult.i.tudinous disfigurements just naturally came out in tussocks; he had black eyes that could go _coal_ black and lose their pupils, and a shock of black hair that fell into them half the time; also, he had a tongue that wasn't elegant. That was Flannagan--Flannagan, the wrecking boss.

There's no accounting for the way some things come about--and it's pretty hard to call the turn of the card when Dame Fortune deals the bank. It's a trite enough saying that it is the unexpected that happens in life, but the reason it's trite is because it's immeasurably true. Flannagan growled and swore and cursed one night, coming back from a bit of a spill up the line, because they stalled him and his wrecking outfit for an hour about half a mile west of Big Cloud--the reason being that, like the straw that broke the camel's back, a circus train in from the East, billed for a three days' lay-off at Big Cloud, had, seeking siding, temporarily choked the yards, already glutted with traffic, until the mix-up Gleeson, the yardmaster, had to wrestle with would have put a problem in differential calculus into the kindergarten cla.s.s.

Flannagan was very dirty, and withal very tired, and when, finally, they gave him the ”clear” and his flat and caboose and his staggering derrick rumbled sullenly down toward the roundhouse and shops, the sight of gilded cages, gaudily decorated cars, and converted Pullmans that were second-cla.s.s-tourist equipment painted white, did not a.s.suage his feelings; neither was there enchantment for him in the roars of multifarious beasts, nor in the hybrid smells that a.s.sailed his nostrils from the general direction of the menagerie. Flannagan, for an hour's loss of sleep, with heartiness and abandon, consigned that particular circus, also all others and everything thereunto pertaining, from fangless serpents to steam calliopes, to regions that are popularly credited with being somewhat warmer than the torrid zone on the hottest day in mid-summer. But then--Flannagan did not know.

Opinions differ. Flannagan was about the last man on earth that any one on the Hill Division would have picked out for a marrying man; and, equally true the other way round, about the last man they would have picked out as one a pretty girl would want to marry. With her, maybe, it was the strength of the man, since they say that comes first with women; with him, maybe, it was just the trim little brown-eyed, brown-haired figure that could ride with the grace of a fairy. Anyway, the only thing about it that didn't surprise any one was the fact that, when it came, it came as sudden and quick as a head-on smash around a ninety-degree curve. That was Flannagan's way, for Flannagan, if he was nothing else, was impulsive.

That night Flannagan cursed the circus; the next day he saw Daisy MacQueen riding in the street parade and--but this isn't the story of Flannagan's courts.h.i.+p, not but that the courts.h.i.+p of any man like Flannagan would be worth the telling--only there are other things.

At first, Big Cloud winked and chuckled slyly to itself; and then, when the circus left and Flannagan got a week off and left with it, it guffawed outright--but when, at the end of that week, Flannagan brought back Mrs. Flannagan, _nee_ Daisy MacQueen, Big Cloud stuck its tongue in its cheek, wagged its head and waited developments.

This is the story of the developments.

Maybe that same impulsiveness of Flannagan's, that could be blind and bullheaded, coupled with a pa.s.sion that was like a devil's when aroused, was to blame; maybe the women of Big Cloud, following the lead of Mrs. MacAloon, the engineer's wife and the leader of society circles, who shook her fiery red head and turned up her Celtic nose disdainfully at Daisy MacQueen, had something to do with it; maybe Daisy herself had a little pride--but what's the use of speculating?

It all goes back to the same beginning--opinions differ.

Tongues wagged; Flannagan listened--that's the gist of it. But, once for all, let it be said and understood that Daisy MacQueen was as straight as they make them. She hadn't been brought up the way Mrs.

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