Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/306

 As the flood follows the fracture in the dam, so the breaking of the tension filled the room with pandemonium. Cheers, yells, hisses, curses, shouts—the Brotherhood was divided against itself. But ten minutes later, the majority of them were clustered behind McQueen in the super's office.

Carleton and his staff were sleeping at headquarters those days, and they gathered in a group around the green-shaded lamp on the dispatcher's table to face the delegation.

"Mr. Carleton," McQueen began, "we"

That was all. He never got any further. From the platform outside came hoots and cat-calls, and above the chorus Noonan's voice:

"Soak the scab! Kill him! If he's so fond of it, let him have it! Now!"

The window pane was shivered with a crash, and McQueen, struck full in the head by a huge hunk of coal, sank without so much as a moan to the floor.

They cured him of brain fever in the course of time all right, but they never cured him of coal. Up and down from one end of the division to the other, when he got around again, he talked coal harder than ever—it was his business. McQueen was doing the buying for the road.

"There wasn't anything wrong with what I said about coal," he asserts with a smile, when the boys put it up to him. "Not for a minute! Good coal makes better steam, better everything, and pays the company. They saw that all right. That's why I'm