The Night Operator Part 29

Regan glared disdainfully.

"Have you been drinking, Maguire?" he inquired caustically.

Noodles' father did not answer. He brushed past the master mechanic, walked through the big engine doors, and halted just outside on the cinders.

"'Tis forsworn yez are, Regan," he said heavily. "Yez may make light av ut now, but the day'll come, Regan, fwhen yez'll find out 'tis no light matter. 'Tis the wrath av G.o.d, Regan, 'll pay yez for ut, yez can mark my words."

Regan stared after the old man, his eyes puckered, his face a little red; stared after the bent form in the old worn overalls as it picked its way across the tracks--and gave vent to his feelings by expectorating a goodly stream of blackstrap juice savagely into the engine pit at his side. This did not help very much, and for the rest of the morning, while he inwardly anathematized Noodles, Noodles'

father and the whole Noodles family collectively, he made things both uncomfortable and lively for those who were unfortunate enough to be within reach of his displeasure.

"The wrath of G.o.d!" communed Regan angrily. "I always said Noodles took after his father, both by disposition and looks! It'll be a long time before the old man gets another job--a long time."

And therein Regan was right. It _was_ a long time--quite a long time--measured by the elasticity of the boiler-washer's purse, which wasn't very elastic on the savings from a dollar-sixty a day.

Old Bill Maguire, perhaps, was the only one who hadn't got quite the proper angle on the "rights" he carried--which were worse than those of a mixed local when the rails were humming under a stress of through traffic and the despatchers were biting their nails to the quick trying to take care of it. Not, possibly, that it would have made any difference to the little worn-out hostler if he had; for, whether from principle, having deep-seated awe for the church and its tenets that forbade even a tacit endors.e.m.e.nt of what he considered Regan's sacrilege, or because of the public slight put upon his family--the roundhouse hadn't failed to hear his first conversation with Regan, and hadn't failed to let him know that they had--or maybe from a mixture of the two, Maguire was beyond question in deadly earnest. But if old Bill hadn't got his signals right, and was reading green and white when it should have been red, the rest of the Hill Division wasn't by any means color blind; it was pretty generally understood that for several years back all that stood between Maguire and the sc.r.a.p heap--was Regan. Not on account of any jolly business about G.o.dfather or G.o.dfathering, but because that was Regan's way--old Bill puttered around the roundhouse on suffrance, thanks to Regan, and didn't know it, though everybody else did, barring patient little Mrs. Maguire and Noodles, who didn't count anyhow.

Nor did the little hostler even now pa.s.s the color test.

Short-tongued, a hard, grimy lot, just what their rough and ready life made them, they might have been, those railroaders of the Rockies, but their hearts were always right. In the yards, in the trainmaster's office, in the roadmaster's office they pointed Maguire to the quiet times, to the extra crews laid off, to the spare men back to their old ratings, to the section gangs pared down to a minimum, and advised him to ask Regan for his job back again--they never told him he couldn't do a man's work any more.

"Ask Regan!" stuttered the old boiler-washer, and the gray billy-goat beard under his chin, as he threw his head up, stuck out straight like a belligerent _chevaux de frise_. "Niver! Mind thot, now!

Niver--till he takes back fwhat he said--not av I starrve for ut!"

Regan, during the first few days, the brunt of his temper worn off, experienced a certain relief, that was no little relief--he was rid, and well rid, of the Noodles combination. But at the end of about a week, the bluff, big-hearted master mechanic began to suck in his under lip at moments when he was alone, as the stories of old Bill's futile efforts after a job, and old Bill's rather pitiful defiance began to sift in to him. Regan began to have visions of the little three-room shack way up in the waste fields at the end of Main Street. A dollar-sixty a day wasn't much to come and go on, even when the dollar-sixty was coming regularly every pay day--and when it wasn't, the cost of food and rent didn't go down any.

Regan got to thinking a good deal about the faded little old drudge of a woman that was Mrs. Maguire, and the bare floors as he remembered them even in the palmy days of Noodles' birth when he had attended the celebration, bare, but scrubbed to a spotless white. She hadn't been very young then, and not any too strong, and that was twelve years ago.

And he got to thinking a good deal about old Bill himself--not much good any more, but good enough for a dollar-sixty a day from a company he'd served for many a long year--in the roundhouse. There had never been over much of what even an optimistic imagination could call luxury in the Maguire's home, and the realization got kind of deep under the worried master mechanic's skin that things were down now to pretty near a case of bread to fill their mouths.

And Regan was right. Even a week had been long enough for that--a man out of a job can't expect credit on the strength of the pay car coming along next month. Things were in pretty straitened circ.u.mstances up at the Maguires.

And the more Regan thought, the hotter he got under the collar--at Noodles. Where he had formerly disliked and submitted to Noodles'

existence in a pa.s.sive sort of way, he now hated Noodles in a most earnest and whole-hearted way--and with an unholy desire in his soul to murder Noodles on sight. For, even if Noodles was directly responsible and at the bottom of the pa.s.s things had come to, Regan's uncomfortable feeling grew stronger each day that indirectly he had his share in the distress and want that had moved into headquarters up at the top of Main Street. It wasn't a nice feeling or a nice position to be in, and Regan writhed under it--but primarily he cursed Noodles.

There was nothing small about Regan--there never was. He wasn't small enough not to do something. He couldn't very well ask the yardmaster or the section boss to give Maguire a job when he wouldn't give the old man one himself, so he sent word up to Maguire to come back to work--in the roundhouse.

Maguire's answer differed in no whit from the answer he had made to Gleason, the yardmaster, and every one else to whom he had applied for a job--Maguire was in deadly earnest.

"Niver!" said he, to the messenger who bore the olive branch. "Mind thot, now! Niver--till he takes back fwhat he said--not av I starrve for ut!"

Regan swore--and here Regan stuck. _Noodles_! His gorge rose until he choked. Kill the brat? Yes--murder was in Regan's soul. But to proclaim Noodles as a G.o.dson--_Noodles as a G.o.dson_! He had done it once not knowing what he was doing, and to do it now with the years of enlightenment upon him--Regan choked, that was all, and grew apoplectically red in the face. It wasn't the grins and laughs of the Hill Division that he knew were waiting for him if he did--it was just _Noodles_.

When Regan had calmed down from this explosion, he inevitably, of course, got back to the old perspective--and for another week the Maguire family up Main Street occupied a reserved seat in his mind.

Carleton only spoke to him once about it, and that was along toward the end of the second week, as they were walking uptown together at the dinner hour.

"By the way, Tommy," said the super, "how's Maguire getting along?"

Regan's thoughts having been on the same subject at that moment, he came back a little crossly.

"Blamed if I know!" he growled.

Carleton smiled. Moved by the same motive perhaps, he had gone into the Cash Grocery Store on the corner the day before and found that Maguire's credit was re-established--thanks to Regan--though Timmons, the proprietor, had been sworn to secrecy.

"One of you two will have to capitulate before very long," he said, with a side glance at Regan. "And I don't think it will be Maguire."

"Don't you!" Regan flung out. "You think it will be me?"

"Yes," laughed Carleton.

"When I'm dead," said Regan shortly. "Had any word from those Westinghouse fittings yet? I'm waiting for them now."

"I'll see about them," said Carleton. "I'm going East this afternoon."

And there wasn't any more said about Maguire.

Meanwhile, if Regan's rancor against Noodles had reached a stage that was acute, Noodles had reached a stage of reciprocative hatred that was positively deadly. So far as elemental pa.s.sion and savagery had developed in twelve years, and Noodles was not a backward boy, just so far had he developed his malevolence against Regan. Things were in a pretty strained condition in the environment of the Maguire shack; Noodles was unhappy all the time, and hungry most of the time. He heard a good deal about Regan and the depths a man could sink to, and enough about the immutable inviolability of church tenets and ordinances to satisfy the most fanatic disciple of orthodoxy--to say nothing of the deep-seated conviction of the wrath of G.o.d that must inevitably fall upon one who had the sacrilegious temerity to profane those tenets.

Mostly, Noodles imbibed this at twilight over the spa.r.s.ely set table, and when the twilight faded and it grew dark--they weren't using kerosene any more at the Maguires--he could still sense the look on his mother's face that mingled anxiety and gentle reproof; and he edged back his chair out of reach of his father's cuffs, which he could dodge in the daylight and couldn't in the dark--for on one point Regan and the old hostler were in perfect accord.

"An' yez are the cause av ut!" old Bill would shout, swinging the flat of his hand in the direction of Noodles' ear every time his violent oratory reached a climacteric height where a period became a physical necessity.

Take it all round, what with the atmosphere of gloom, dodging his father's attentions, his mother's tears when he had caught her crying once or twice, and an unsatisfied stomach, black vengeance oozed from every pore of Noodles' body. His warty little fists clenched, and his unlovely face contorted into a scowl such as Noodles, and only Noodles, thanks to the background that nature had already furnished him to work upon, could scowl.

Noodles set his brains to work. What he must do to Regan must be something awful and bloodcurdling; and, realizing, perhaps, that, being but twelve, he would be handicapped in coping with the master mechanic single-handed, he sought the means of a.s.sistance that most logically presented itself to him. Noodles lay awake nights trying to dovetail himself and Regan into the situations of his nickel thrillers. There wasn't any money with which to buy new nickel thrillers, but by then Noodles had acc.u.mulated quite a stock, and he knew them all off pretty well by heart, the essentials of them, anyhow.

Noodles racked his brain for a week of nights--and was in despair. Not that the nickel thrillers did not offer situations harrowing enough to glut even his blood-thirsty little soul--they did--they were peaches--he could see Regan's blood all over the bank vault that the master mechanic had been trying to rob--he could see Regan walking the plank of a pirate s.h.i.+p, while the pirates cheered hoa.r.s.ely--and he fairly revelled in every one of them--until cold despair would clutch again at his raging heart. They were peaches all right, but somehow they wouldn't fit into Big Cloud--he couldn't figure out how to get Regan to rob a bank vault, and there weren't any pirates in the immediate vicinity that he had ever heard of.

Then inspiration came to Noodles one night--and he sat bolt upright in bed. He would _shadow_ Regan! A fierce, unhallowed joy took hold of Noodles. Noodles had grasped the constructive technique of the thriller! Every hero in every nickel thriller shadowed every villain to his doom. Regan's doom at the end was sure to take care of itself once he had found Regan out--but the shadowing came first.

Noodles slept feverishly for the rest of the night, and the following evening he snooped down Main Street and took up his position in a doorway on the opposite side of the street from Regan's boarding house.

In just what dire deed of criminal rascality he expected to trap the master mechanic he did not know, but that Regan was capable of anything, and that he would catch him in something, Noodles now had no doubt--that was what the shadowing was for--he grimly determined that he would be unmoved by appeals for mercy--and his heart beat high with optimistic excitement.

Regan came out of the boarding house; and, bare-footed in lieu of gum-shoes, and hugging the shadows a block behind--Noodles had refreshed his memory on the most improved methods--Noodles trailed the master mechanic down the street. Two blocks down, Regan halted on the corner and began to peer around him. Noodles' lips thinned suddenly--it began to look promising already--what was Regan up to? A man came down the cross street, joined Regan, and the two started on again toward the station. A little disappointed, Noodles, still hugging the shadows, resumed the chase--it was only Carleton, the superintendent.

From the platform, Noodles watched the two men disappear through the far door of the station. Free from observation now, he hurried along the platform past the station, and was in time to see a lamp lighted upstairs in the side window of the super's office. Noodles waited a moment, then he tiptoed back along the platform, and cautiously pushed open the door through which the others had disappeared. The door of the super's room on the upper story opened on the head of the stairs and, still on tiptoe, Noodles reached the top. Here, on his knees, his eyes glued to the keyhole, he peered into the room--Regan and the super were engaged in their nightly game of cards. There was nothing to raise Noodles' hopes in that, so he descended the stairs and took up his position behind the rain barrel at the corner of the building, where he could watch both the window and the entrance.

At half past ten the light went out, Regan and Carleton came down the stairs and headed uptown. Noodles, not forgetting the shadows, trailed them. At the corner where Carleton had joined Regan, Carleton left Regan, and Regan went on two blocks further and disappeared inside his boarding house. Noodles, being a philosopher of a sort, told himself that none of the heroes ever succeeded the first night--and went home.

The next night, and the three following night, Noodles shadowed Regan with the same results. By the fifth night, with no single differing detail to enliven this somewhat monotonous and unproductive programme, it had become dispiriting; and though Noodles' thirst for vengeance had not weakened, his faith in the nickel thrillers had.

But on the sixth night--at the end of the second week since Noodles and Noodles' father had turned their backs upon the roundhouse--things were a little different. Noodles, in common with every one else in Big Cloud, was quite well aware that the super's private car had been coupled on No. 12 that afternoon, and that Carleton had gone East.

Regan came out of his boarding house at the same hour as usual, and Noodles dodged along after him down the street--Noodles by this time, for finesse, could have put a combination of Nick Carter and Old Sleuth on the siding until the gra.s.s sprouted between the ties. Noodles dodged along--in the shadows. Regan didn't stop at the corner this time, but he kept right along heading down for the station. Regan pa.s.sed two or three people going in the opposite direction up the street of the sleepy little mountain town, but this did not confuse Noodles--Noodles kept right along after Regan. There was no Carleton to-night, and Regan's criminal propensities would have full scope--Noodles' hopes ran high.

Regan reached the station, went down the platform, and disappeared as usual through the same door. A little perplexed, Noodles followed along the platform; but, a moment later, from his coign of vantage behind the rain barrel, he saw the light flash out from the super's window--and his heart almost stood still. What was Regan doing in the super's office--_alone_! Noodles' face grew very white--_Carleton had a safe there_--he had got Regan at last! It had taken a lot of time, but none of the heroes ever got the villain until after pages and pages of trying to get him. He had got Regan at last!

Noodles crept from the shelter of the rain barrel stealthily as a cat, and, with far more caution than he had ever exercised before, pushed the outside door open and went up the stairs. There wasn't any hurry; he would give Regan time to drill through the safe, and perhaps even let the master mechanic get the money before giving the alarm--Noodles bitterly bemoaned the fact that he would have to give the alarm at all and let anybody else in on it, but, owing to the fact that he had been unable to finance a revolver with which to hold up the master mechanic red-handed and cover himself with glory at the same time, there appeared to be nothing else to do.

It was just a step from the head of the stairs to the door of the super's room across the hall. Noodles negotiated it with infinite circ.u.mspection, and, on his knees as usual, his heart pounding like a trip hammer, got his eye to the keyhole. He held it there a very long time, until he couldn't see any more through hot, scalding, impotent tears; then he edged back across the hall, and sat down on the top step--_Regan was playing solitaire_.