an armful of cotton
waste on the vise bench.

Dan laid Larry on the bench. He straightened his own great body for a
moment, then sat down on the floor and cried.

Neville, pretending not to see Dan's distress, brought more waste. As he
placed it beneath his head Larry groaned. Dan, still on the floor, wrung
his hands, calling on the saints and the Virgin to lighten the pain of
this man it had been his joy to torture.

Neville turned to him.

"Get up from there!" he cried sharply. "Go see what you can find to help
him."

Dan left the room, rubbing his red-flanneled arm across his eyes. He
returned quickly with a can of cylinder oil, and poured it slowly over
the horribly burned limbs.

"There ain't no bandages, sir; only this." He held out a shirt belonging
to the engineer; his eyes pleaded his question. Neville nodded, and Dan
tore the shirt in strips. When he finished the task, strange to his
clumsy hands, Larry had regained consciousness and lay trying pitifully
to stifle his moans.

"Does it make you feel aisier, Mouse?" Dan leaned close to the quivering
lips to catch the answer.

"It helps fine," Larry answered, and fainted again.

"You'll be leavin' me stay wid him, sir?" Dan begged. "'T was for me
he's come to this."

Neville gave consent and left the two men together.

* * *

Between four and five in the morning, when Neville's watch had lived
through thirty-three unbroken hours of the fearful grind, a shout that
ended in a screaming laugh ran through the fire-room. High above the
toil-crazed men a door had opened and closed. A form, seen dimly through
the smoke and steam, was moving backward down the ladder. Again the door
opened; another man came through. Every shovel in the room fell to the
steel floor; every man in the room shouted or laughed or cried.

The engine-room door, too, had opened, admitting the chief and his
assistant. Not until he had examined each mechanical tragedy below did
the chief give time to the human one above.

"Where's that man that's hurt?" he asked as he came, slowly, from an
inspection of the burned-out bearings down the shaft alley.

Neville went with him to the store-room. Dan, sagging under fatigue,
clung to the bench where Larry lay moaning.

"You can go now, Sullivan," Neville told him.

Dan raised his head, remorse, entreaty, stubbornness in his look.

"Let me be! I'll not leave him!"

The chief turned to Neville.

"What's come over that drunk?" he as