Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/227

 well enough satisfied with the result to duplicate it! Anyway, as far as any one ever knew, there wasn't but one Marley produced. Maybe nature, even, isn't infallible; maybe she made a mistake, maybe she didn't. You couldn't call him deformed—and yet you could! That's Marley exactly—when you get to describing him you get contradictory. It must have been his neck. That lopped off two or three inches from his stature because he hadn't any! But if that shortened him down to, say, five feet five, which isn't so short after all—there's the contradiction again, you see—the length of his arms at least was something to marvel at, they made up for the neck. Regan used to say Marley could stand on the floor of the roundhouse and clean out an engine pit without leaning over. The master mechanic was more or less gifted with imagination, but he wasn't so far out, not more than a couple of feet or so, at that. Marley's hair, more than anything else that comes handy by way of comparison, was like the stuff, in color and texture, the fellows on the stage light and put in their mouths so as to blow out smoke like a belching stack under forced draft—tow, they call it. Eyes—no woman ever had any like them—big and round and wide, with a peculiar violet tinge to them, and lids that had a trick of closing down with a little hesitating flutter like a girl trying to flirt with you.

But what's the use! Marley, piecemeal, would never look like the short-stepping, springy-walked, foreshortened, arms-flopping Marley with the greasy black peaked cap pulled over his forehead, the greasy jumper