Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/274

 back on a hand-car, and be here on the platform to meet him."

"You go to blazes!" retorted Haggerty, and scowled across the counter at an inoffensive looking little fellow who had taken the liberty of smiling at the dispatcher's words.

At Haggerty's look, the smile disappeared in a cup of coffee raised hastily to the lips. "Huh!" snorted Haggerty, by way of driving home to the other the audacity and temerity of his act, and likewise the inadvisability of repeating it. Haggerty was galled. Once before that morning he had been obliged to relegate this insignificant, squint, eye-glassed individual, who had persisted in riding on the platform, to a proper sense of submission. And the method employed had been no more delicate a one than that of jerking the man bodily into the car by the collar of his coat. "Huh!" he repeated, with rising inflexion.

"No, Haggerty," went on Spence pleasantly, "don't you worry. I won't fail you. When the super steps off the train, and the first words he says is, 'Where's Haggerty?' and you're not here to respond in kind I can plainly see there'll be doings. Oh, no, don't you fret, I'll not throw you down on anything like that—'twouldn't be wise for us, that's got to live with him, to rile him up at the outset! No, it certainly wouldn't, what?"

"You go bite on a brake-shoe, you're too sharp to be munchin' doughnuts," snarled Haggerty. And, swinging himself from his seat, he went back to his train.