Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/301

 ; "but I didn't figure it out for the purpose of"

"Mac," Noonan interrupted unctuously, tain't for you nor me to say the purpose it's to be put to. There's others besides us. But I do say, Mac, you're almighty smart."

McQueen shook his head. "I'm a company man," he said dubiously.

"Company man! Of course you are. We're all company men. But right's right and wrong's wrong before anything else. Well, ta ta, Mac, see you again. I'm off. There's Hake with the tissue. I'll tell the boys where you stand."

It was a somewhat dazed McQueen that in turn pulled himself up into his own cab. He stood in the gangway and squinted meditatively at the coal heaped high on the tender. To his conscientious self-communion, his triumphant vindication had somewhat the appearance of a boomerang. "I don't know," he reflected. "It is damn poor coal, and—and figures don't lie. We—we've been getting the worst of it, and—and a man should stand up for his rights."

And while McQueen, busy with new and momentous problems, was steaming west into the Rockies, Noonan, with his tongue in his cheek, was cutting along for Big Cloud with a wide-flung throttle.

That night, at Big Cloud, Noonan's cronies got the story. That is, they got what Noonan saw fit to tell them. And the burden of his tale was that McQueen was with the Brotherhood and against the company. That was sufficient. They looked with appreciative