ven a pretty baby. Tommy Regan, who was roped in to
line up at the baptismal font and act as godfather because old Bill was
a boiler-washer in the roundhouse, which was reason enough for the
big-hearted master mechanic, said that Noodles was the ugliest and most
forbidding looking specimen of progeny he had ever seen outside a
zoological garden. Of course, be it understood, Regan wasn't a family
man, and god-fathering wasn't a job in Regan's line, so when he got
outside the church and the perspiration had stopped trickling nervously
down the small of his back and he'd got a piece of blackstrap clamped
firmly home between his teeth, he told old Bill, by way of a grim sort
of revenge for the unhappy position his good nature had led him into,
that the offspring was the dead spit of its father--and he
congratulated Noodles.

The irony, of course, was lost. The boiler-washer walked on air for a
week. He told the roundhouse what Regan had said--and the roundhouse
laughed. Bill thought the roundhouse thought he was lying, but that
didn't dampen his spirits any. It wasn't everybody could get the
master mechanic of the division to stand up with _their_ kids!
Everybody was happy--except Noodles. Noodles, just about then,
developed colic.

Noodles got over the colic, got over the measles, the mumps, the
whooping cough, and the scarlet fever--that may not have been the order
of their coming or their going, but he got over them all. And when he
was twelve he got over the smallpox; but he never got over his
ugliness--the smallpox kind of put a stop-order on any lurking tendency
there might have been in that direction. Also, when he was twelve, he
got over all the schooling the boiler-washer's limited means would
span, which wasn't a university course; and he started in railroading
as a call boy.

There was nothing organically bad about Noodles, except his
exterior--which wasn't his fault. One can't be blamed for hair of a
motley red, ubiquitous freckles wherever the smallpox had left room for
them, no particular colored eyes, a little round knob of uptilted nose,
and a mouth that made even the calloused Dutchy at the lunch counter
feel a little mean inwardly when he compared it with the mathematically
cut slab of contract pie, eight slabs to the pie plate, and so much so
that he went to the extent of--no, he never gave Noodles an extra
piece--but he went to the extent of surreptitiously pocketing Noodles'
nickel as thou