Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/238

 him, no discussions, no anything. They knew Marley at last, and they liked him less than ever; but, also, they imbibed a very wholesome respect for the welfare of their own skins. A man with arms whose strength is the strength of derrick booms is to be approached with some degree of caution.

Marley himself said nothing. Carleton and Regan got him on the carpet and tried to get his version of the story, but for all they got out of him they might as well have saved their time.

A pathetic enough looking figure, in a way, he was, as he stood in the super's office the afternoon of the fight. The shoulders were drooping giving the arms an even longer appearance than usual, no color in his face, the violet eyes almost black, with a dead, hunted look in them. Sorrow, remorse, dread—neither Regan nor Carleton knew. They couldn't understand him—then. Marley offered no explanation, volunteered nothing. Boileau's story was right—that was all.

"You might have killed the man," said Carleton sternly, at the end of an unsatisfactory twenty minutes. "You can thank your Maker you haven't his blood on your hands—it's a miracle you haven't. Don't you know your own strength? We can't have that sort of thing around here."

Marley's face seemed to grow even whiter than before and he shivered a little, though the afternoon was dripping wet with the heat and the thermometer was sizzling well up in the nineties—he shivered but his lips were hard shut and he didn't say a word.

Carleton, for once in his life when it came to