Page:Frank Packard - On the Iron at Big Cloud.djvu/90

 as much out of everybody's way, just as unobtrusive as he had before, but Spitzer was none the less changed.

It began the day after he got his raise. It was an indefinite, elusive, negative sort of a change, not the kind you could lay your hand on and describe in so many words. Regan tried to, and gave it up. The nearest he came to anything concrete was one day when he came around the tail-end of a tender and, unexpectedly, upon Spitzer. Spitzer was sweeping as usual, but Spitzer was also whistling—which was not usual. Regan, it is true, couldn't puzzle very much out of that, but then Regan had his limitations. Mindful of Carleton's words, Regan kept his eye in a mildly curious kind of a way on the little faded, blue-eyed drudge, and as he noticed the first change without being able to define it, he now, after a week or so, noticed a second, with the difference that this time the diagnosis was painfully obvious—Spitzer's return to Spitzer's normal self. Spitzer stopped whistling.

Regan began to catch Spitzer's eyes fixed on him with a hesitating, irresolute, anxious gaze about every time he entered the roundhouse. And though he didn't quite grasp it, something of the truth came to him. Spitzer was screwing up his courage to the sticking point preparatory to another step onward in his belated march toward emancipation.

It was a month to the day from the first interview when Spitzer tackled the master mechanic again, and as before, out by the turntable in front of the roundhouse, and, if anything, in a manner even more nervous