Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/187

 have held him until Coogan could talk, and then we'd have had him."

"Tommy"—Carleton laid his hand quietly on the master mechanic's shoulder—"we're too young out in this country for much law. I don't think Coogan knows or ever will know again what happened in the cab that night. The doctors don't seem quite able to call the turn on him themselves, so they've said to you and said to me. But whether he does or not, it doesn't make any difference as far as Dahleen goes. It would have been murder to keep him here. And if Coogan ever can talk he'll never put a mate in bad no matter what the consequences to himself. There's nothing against Dahleen except that he had liquor in his possession while on duty. That's what I fired him for—that's the only story that's gone out of this office. You and I and the rest are free to put the construction on it that suits us best, and there it ends. If I was wrong to let him go, I was wrong. I did what I thought was right—that's all I can ever do."

"Mabbe," growled Regan, "mabbe; but, damn him, he ought to be murdered. I'd like to have had 'em done it! It's that smash on the head put Coogan to the bad. You're right about one thing, I guess, he'll never be the same Coogan again."

And in a way this was so; in another it wasn't. It was not the wound that was to blame, the doctors were positive about that; but Coogan, it was pitifully evident, was not the same. Physically, at the end of a month, he left the hospital apparently as well as he had ever been in his life; but mentally, somewhere, a cog