to the tamped tobacco, puffed once--and his eyes,
from the bowl of his pipe, focused suddenly downward on the head of the
stairs. Regan's round, fat little face went a color that put the
glowing end of the match, still held mechanically over the pipe bowl,
to shame, and the fist that wasn't occupied with the match clenched
with the wrath that engulfed him--_Noodles_!

For a moment, breathing heavily with rage, Regan glared at the
cord--then the match, burning his fingers, did not soothe him any, and
he dropped it hastily, swearing earnestly to himself. Then he bent
down, cut away the cord with his knife, and in grim, laborious
silence--Regan was a heavy man, and the stairs had a tendency to creak
that was hard to suppress--descended step by step. Regan was consumed
with but one desire for the present or the hereafter--to get his hands
on Noodles.

Where Noodles had been stealthy, Regan was now positively devilish in
his caution and cunning. Step by step he went down, testing each
foothold much after the fashion of a cat that stretches out its paw,
and, finding something not quite to its liking, draws it back, and,
shaking it vigorously, tries again more warily--and the while a fire
unquenchable burned within him.

He reached the door at the bottom, found the knob, waited an
instant--then suddenly flung the door wide open and sprang out on the
platform. Noodles' form, projecting eagerly far out from the rain
barrel not five yards away, was the first thing his eyes lighted upon.
Regan had no time to waste in words. He made a dash for the rain
barrel--and Noodles, with a sort of surprised squeak of terror, turned
and ran.

A fat man, ordinarily, cannot run very fast, and neither can a
twelve-year-old boy; but, with vengeance supplying wings to the one,
and terror imparting haste to the other, the time they made from the
rain barrel along the platform past the baggage room and freight shed,
off the platform to the ground, and up the track to the construction
department's storehouse, a matter of a hundred and fifty yards, stands
good to-day as a record in Big Cloud.

It was pretty near a dead heat. Noodles had five yards' start when he
left the rain barrel; and when he reached the end of the storehouse he
had five yards' lead--no more. A premonition of disaster began to
twine itself around Noodles' heart in a sickly, dispiriting way. He
dashed along beside the wall of the building--and after him lunged
Regan,