Bill's futile
efforts after a job, and old Bill's rather pitiful defiance began to
sift in to him. Regan began to have visions of the little three-room
shack way up in the waste fields at the end of Main Street. A
dollar-sixty a day wasn't much to come and go on, even when the
dollar-sixty was coming regularly every pay day--and when it wasn't,
the cost of food and rent didn't go down any.

Regan got to thinking a good deal about the faded little old drudge of
a woman that was Mrs. Maguire, and the bare floors as he remembered
them even in the palmy days of Noodles' birth when he had attended the
celebration, bare, but scrubbed to a spotless white. She hadn't been
very young then, and not any too strong, and that was twelve years ago.
And he got to thinking a good deal about old Bill himself--not much
good any more, but good enough for a dollar-sixty a day from a company
he'd served for many a long year--in the roundhouse. There had never
been over much of what even an optimistic imagination could call luxury
in the Maguire's home, and the realization got kind of deep under the
worried master mechanic's skin that things were down now to pretty near
a case of bread to fill their mouths.

And Regan was right. Even a week had been long enough for that--a man
out of a job can't expect credit on the strength of the pay car coming
along next month. Things were in pretty straitened circumstances up at
the Maguires.

And the more Regan thought, the hotter he got under the collar--at
Noodles. Where he had formerly disliked and submitted to Noodles'
existence in a passive sort of way, he now hated Noodles in a most
earnest and whole-hearted way--and with an unholy desire in his soul to
murder Noodles on sight. For, even if Noodles was directly responsible
and at the bottom of the pass things had come to, Regan's uncomfortable
feeling grew stronger each day that indirectly he had his share in the
distress and want that had moved into headquarters up at the top of
Main Street. It wasn't a nice feeling or a nice position to be in, and
Regan writhed under it--but primarily he cursed Noodles.

There was nothing small about Regan--there never was. He wasn't small
enough not to do something. He couldn't very well ask the yardmaster
or the section boss to give Maguire a job when he wouldn't give the old
man one himself, so he sent word up to Maguire to come back to work--in
the roundhouse.

Maguire's answer differed in n