Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/233

 charged it up to an acute sensitiveness of his grotesque and abnormal appearance. That isn't the way they put it, though.

"Looks like hell, an' he knows it," said they judicially. "Let the beggar alone."

It was good advice, whether their analysis was or wasn't—Pete Boileau, the baggage master, can vouch for that. As the time-worn saying has it, it came like a bolt from the blue, and—but just a minute, we're overrunning our targets and that means trouble.

Things had gone along, as far as Marley was concerned, without anything very startling or out of the way happening for quite a spell, and Regan, who had stood closer to Chick Coogan than any other man on the division before the young engineer died, had begun to look on Marley with a little more interest—as a sort of  for Mrs. Coogan. It seemed to afford the big-hearted master mechanic a good deal of relief. He got to talking about it to Carleton one morning about a month after Marley's advent to the Hill Division.

"No, of course, I don't know anything about him," he said. "Nobody does, I guess they don't. But he minds his own business and does what he has to do well enough, h'm? The old lady's been getting a little feeble lately—kind of wearing out, I guess she is. I was thinking Marley was worth a little more than a dollar ten a day, what?"

They were sitting in the super's office, and Carleton's glance, straying out through the window from where he sat at his desk, fastened on Marley's clumsy,