han those of
a mixed local when the rails were humming under a stress of through
traffic and the despatchers were biting their nails to the quick trying
to take care of it. Not, possibly, that it would have made any
difference to the little worn-out hostler if he had; for, whether from
principle, having deep-seated awe for the church and its tenets that
forbade even a tacit endorsement of what he considered Regan's
sacrilege, or because of the public slight put upon his family--the
roundhouse hadn't failed to hear his first conversation with Regan, and
hadn't failed to let him know that they had--or maybe from a mixture of
the two, Maguire was beyond question in deadly earnest. But if old
Bill hadn't got his signals right, and was reading green and white when
it should have been red, the rest of the Hill Division wasn't by any
means color blind; it was pretty generally understood that for several
years back all that stood between Maguire and the scrap heap--was
Regan. Not on account of any jolly business about godfather or
godfathering, but because that was Regan's way--old Bill puttered
around the roundhouse on suffrance, thanks to Regan, and didn't know
it, though everybody else did, barring patient little Mrs. Maguire and
Noodles, who didn't count anyhow.

Nor did the little hostler even now pass the color test.
Short-tongued, a hard, grimy lot, just what their rough and ready life
made them, they might have been, those railroaders of the Rockies, but
their hearts were always right. In the yards, in the trainmaster's
office, in the roadmaster's office they pointed Maguire to the quiet
times, to the extra crews laid off, to the spare men back to their old
ratings, to the section gangs pared down to a minimum, and advised him
to ask Regan for his job back again--they never told him he couldn't do
a man's work any more.

"Ask Regan!" stuttered the old boiler-washer, and the gray billy-goat
beard under his chin, as he threw his head up, stuck out straight like
a belligerent _chevaux de frise_. "Niver! Mind thot, now!
Niver--till he takes back fwhat he said--not av I starrve for ut!"

Regan, during the first few days, the brunt of his temper worn off,
experienced a certain relief, that was no little relief--he was rid,
and well rid, of the Noodles combination. But at the end of about a
week, the bluff, big-hearted master mechanic began to suck in his under
lip at moments when he was alone, as the stories of old