sort of cheerfulness on his leathery face that infected his guileless
blue eyes, while a mop of fiery red hair like a flaming halo kind of
guaranteed the effect to be genuine. One half of you felt like kicking
the man violently, and the other half was obsessed with an insane
desire to hobnob with him just as violently. Sammy Durgan, to say the
least of it, was a contradictory proposition. He had an ambition--he
wanted a steady job.

He mentioned the matter to Regan one day immediately following that
period in his career when, doing odd jobs over at the station, he had,
in filling up the fire buckets upstairs, inadvertently left the tap
running. The sink being small and the flooring none too good, a
cherished collection of Regan's blue-prints in the room below were
reduced to a woebegone mass of sticky pulp. Sammy Durgan mentioned his
ambition as a sort of corollary, as it were, to the bitter and concise
remarks in which the fat little master mechanic had just couched Sammy
Durgan's ubiquitous discharge.

Regan didn't stop breathing--he had dealt with Sammy Durgan before.
Regan smiled as though it hurt him.

"A _steady_ job, is it?" said Regan softly. "I've been thinking so
hard daytimes trying to place you in a railroad job and still keep
railroading safe out in this part of the world that I've got to
dreaming about it at nights. Last night I dreamt I was in a foundry
and there was an enormous vat of red, bubbling, liquid iron they'd just
drawn off the furnace, and you came down from the ceiling on a spider
web and hung over it. And then I woke up, and I was covered with cold
sweat--for fear the web wouldn't break."

"Regan," said Sammy Durgan, blinking fast, "you don't know a man when
you see one. You're where you are because you've had the chance to get
there. Mind that! I've never had a chance. But it'll come, Regan.
And the day'll come, Regan, when you'll be down on your knees begging
me to take what I'm asking for now, a steady job on your blessed
railroad."

"Mabbe," said Regan, chewing absently on his blackstrap; and then, as a
sort of afterthought: "What kind of a job?"

"A steady one," said Sammy Durgan doggedly. "I dunno just what,
but----"

"H'm!" said Regan solicitously. "Well, don't make up your mind in a
hurry, Durgan--I don't want to press you. When you've had a chance to
look around a little more, mabbe you'll be able to decide better--what?
Get out!"

Sammy Durgan backed to t