out of a job can't expect credit on the strength of the pay car coming
along next month. Things were in pretty straitened circumstances 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 passive 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 pass 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 godson--_Noodles as a godson_! 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 passion 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 God that must
inevitably fall upon one who had the sacrilegious temerity to profane
those tenets.
Mostly, Noodles imbibed this at twilight over the sparsely 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 assistance 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 accumulated 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 ship, while the pirates cheered hoarsely--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 grass 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
passed 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
circumspection, 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_.
Hands dug disconsolately in his pockets, playing mechanically with a
bit of cord that was about their sole contents, Noodles sat there--and
his faith in nickel thrillers was shaken to the core. Noodles'
thoughts were too complex for coherency--that is, for coherency in any
but one of his thoughts--he hated Regan worse than ever, for he
couldn't altogether expurgate the nickel thrillers from his mind on
such a short notice, and he could hear Regan gloat and hiss "Foiled!"
in his ear.
Noodles' hands came out of his pocket--with the cord. He wound one end
around the bannisters, and began to see-saw it back and forth aimlessly
in the darkness. There wasn't any good of shadowing Regan any
more--but he wasn't through with Regan. Noodles had a soul above
discouragement. Only what was he to do? If the nickel thrillers had
failed him in his hour of need, he would have to depend on
himself--only what was he to do? Noodles stopped see-sawing the cord
suddenly--and stared at it through the darkness, though he couldn't see
it. Then he edged down another step, turned around on his knees, and
knotted one end of the cord--it was a good stout one--to one side of
the bannisters, about six inches from the level of the hall floor.
There was a bannister railing on each side, and he stretched the cord
tightly across to the other bannister, and knotted it there. That
would do for a beginning! It didn't promise as gory a denouement as he
thirsted for, and he was a little ashamed of the colorlessness of his
expedient compared with those he'd read about, but there wasn't anybody
else likely to use those stairs before Regan did, and it would do for a
beginning--Regan would get a jolt or two before he reached the bottom!
Noodles retreated down the stairs and retired to the rain barrel.
Waits had been long there before, but to-night the time dragged
hopelessly--he didn't expect to see very much, but he would be able to
hear Regan coming down the stairs, so he waited, curbing his impatience
by biting anxiously on the ends of his finger nails.
Suddenly Noodles leaned head and shoulders far out from behind the rain
barrel to miss no single detail of this, the initial act of his
revenge, that he could drink in, his eyes fastened on the station
door--the light in the window above had gone out. Very grim was
Noodles' face, and his teeth were hard set together--there was no
foolishness about this. The super's door upstairs opened and
shut--Noodles leaned a little farther forward out from the rain barrel.
Meanwhile, Regan, upstairs, was not in a good humor. Regan, when
alone, played a complicated and somewhat intricate species of
solitaire, a matter of some pride to the master mechanic, and that
evening he had had no luck--his combinations wouldn't work out. So,
after something like fifteen abortive attempts that consumed the better
part of an hour and a half, and victory still remaining an elusive
thing, Regan chucked the cards back into Carleton's drawer in disgust,
knocked the ashes out of his pipe, refilled the pipe for company
homeward, and, growling a little to himself, blew out the super's lamp.
He walked across to the door, opened and shut it, and stepped out into
the hall. Here, he halted and produced a match, both because his pipe
was as yet unlighted, and because the stairs were dark. He struck the
match, applied it to the tamped tobacco, puffed once--and his eyes,
from the bowl of his pipe, focused suddenly downward on the head of the
stairs. Regan's round, fat little face went a color that put the
glowing end of the match, still held mechanically over the pipe bowl,
to shame, and the fist that wasn't occupied with the match clenched
with the wrath that engulfed him--_Noodles_!
For a moment, breathing heavily with rage, Regan glared at the
cord--then the match, burning his fingers, did not soothe him any, and
he dropped it hastily, swearing earnestly to himself. Then he bent
down, cut away the cord with his knife, and in grim, laborious
silence--Regan was a heavy man, and the stairs had a tendency to creak
that was hard to suppress--descended step by step. Regan was consumed
with but one desire for the present or the hereafter--to get his hands
on Noodles.
Where Noodles had been stealthy, Regan was now positively devilish in
his caution and cunning. Step by step he went down, testing each
foothold much after the fashion of a cat that stretches out its paw,
and, finding something not quite to its liking, draws it back, and,
shaking it vigorously, tries again more warily--and the while a fire
unquenchable burned within him.
He reached the door at the bottom, found the knob, waited an
instant--then suddenly flung the door wide open and sprang out on the
platform. Noodles' form, projecting eagerly far out from the rain
barrel not five yards away, was the first thing his eyes lighted upon.
Regan had no time to waste in words. He made a dash for the rain
barrel--and Noodles, with a sort of surprised squeak of terror, turned
and ran.
A fat man, ordinarily, cannot run very fast, and neither can a
twelve-year-old boy; but, with vengeance supplying wings to the one,
and terror imparting haste to the other, the time they made from the
rain barrel along the platform past the baggage room and freight shed,
off the platform to the ground, and up the track to the construction
department's storehouse, a matter of a hundred and fifty yards, stands
good to-day as a record in Big Cloud.
It was pretty near a dead heat. Noodles had five yards' start when he
left the rain barrel; and when he reached the end of the storehouse he
had five yards' lead--no more. A premonition of disaster began to
twine itself around Noodles' heart in a sickly, dispiriting way. He
dashed along beside the wall of the building--and after him lunged
Regan, grunting like a grampus, a threat in every grunt.
It was a long, low, windowless building, and halfway up its length was
the door--Noodles had known the door to be unlocked at nights for the
purpose of loading rush material for the bridge gangs in the mountains
to go out by the early morning freight west at 4.10--and his hope lay
in the door being open now. The place was full to the ceiling with
boxes, bales, casks, barrels and kegs, and amongst them in the
darkness, being of small dimensions himself, he could soon lose Regan.
He reached the door, snatched at the latch--the door was unlocked--and
with an uplift immeasurable upon his young soul, that gave vent to
itself in a hoot of derision, Noodles flung himself inside.
Regan, still panting earnestly, the beads on his brow now embryonic
fountain-heads that sent trickling streams down his face, lurched,
pretty well winded, through the door five yards behind Noodles--and
then Regan stopped--and the thought of Noodles was swept from Regan's
mind in a flash.
The smell of smoke was in his nostrils, and like a white, misty cloud
in the darkness it hung around him--and through it, up toward the far
end of the shed, a fire showed yellow and ugly, that with a curious,
hissing, sibilant sound flared suddenly bright, then died to yellow
ugliness again.
Grim-faced now, his jaws clamped hard, Regan sprang forward toward the
upper end of the shed. What was afire, he did not know, nor what had
caused it--though the latter, probably, by a match dropped maybe hours
ago by a careless Polack, that had caught and set something smoldering,
and that was now breaking into flame. All Regan knew, all Regan
thought of then, was the--_powder_. There were fifty kegs of giant
blasting powder massed together there somewhere ahead, and just beyond
where the fire was flinging out its challenge to him--enough to wreck
not only the shed, but half the railroad property in Big Cloud as well.
Up the little handcar tracks between the high-piled stores Regan
ran--and halted where a spurt of flame, ending in a vicious puff of
smoke, shot out beside him, low down on the ground. It was light
enough now, and in a glance the master mechanic caught the black grains
of powder strewing the floor where a broken keg had been rolled along.
A little alleyway had been left here running to the wall, and the fire
itself was bursting from a case in the rear and bottom tier of stores
on one side of this; on the other side were piled the powder kegs--and
the space between, the width of the alleyway, was no more than a bare
five or six feet.
There was no time to wait for help, the powder grains crunched under
his feet, and ran little zigzag, fizzy lines of fire like a miniature
inferno as the sparks caught them; at any moment it might reach the
kegs, and then--Regan flung himself along the alleyway to the rear tier
of cases, they were small ones here, though piled twice the height of
his head--if he could wrench them away, he could get at the burning
case below! Regan bent, strained at the cases--they were light and
moved--he heaved again to topple them over--and then, as a rasping,
ripping sound reached him from above, he let go his hold to jump
back--too late. A heavy casting, that had been placed on top of the
cases, evidently for economy of space, came hurtling downward, struck
Regan on the head, glanced to his shoulder and arm, slid with a thump
to the ground--and Regan dropped like a log.
A minute, perhaps two, it had all taken--no more. Noodles, crouched
down against a case just inside the door, had seen the master mechanic
rush by him; and Noodles, too, had seen the flame and smelt the smoke.
Noodles' first impulse was to make his escape, his next to see if he
could not turn this unexpected intervention of fate to his own account
anent the master mechanic. Noodles heard Regan moving about, and he
stole silently in that direction; then Noodles heard the heavy thump of
iron, the softer thud of Regan's fall, and something inside him seemed
to stop suddenly, and his face went very white.
"Mr. Regan! Mr. Regan!" he stammered out.
There was no answer--no sound--save an ominous crackle of burning wood.
Noodles stole further forward--and then, as he reached the spot where
Regan lay, he stood stock-still for a second, petrified with fear--but
the next instant, screaming at the top of his voice for help, he threw
himself upon Regan, pounding frantically with the flat of his hands at
the master mechanic's shoulder, where the other's coat was beginning to
blaze. Somehow, Noodles got this out, and then, still screaming for
help, began to drag Regan away from the side of the blazing case.
But Regan was a heavy man--almost too much for Noodles. Noodles,
choking with the smoke, his eyes fascinated with horror as they fixed,
now on the powder kegs--whose unloading, in company with a dozen other
awe-struck boys, he had watched a few days before--now on the
sparkling, fizzing grains of powder upon the floor, tugged, and
wriggled, and pulled at the master mechanic.
Inch by inch, Noodles won Regan to safety--and then, on his hands and
knees, he went back to sweep the grains away from the edge of the kegs.
They burnt his hands as he brushed them along the floor, and he moaned
with the pain between his screams for aid. It was hot in the narrow
place, so narrow that the breath of flame swept his face from the
case--but there was still some powder on the floor to brush back out of
the way, little heaps of it. Weak, and swaying on his knees, Noodles
brushed at it desperately. It seemed to spurt into his face, and he
couldn't breathe any more, and he couldn't see, and his head was
swirling around queerly. He staggered to his feet as there came a rush
of men, and Clarihue, the turner, with the night crew of the roundhouse
came racing up the shed.
"Good God, what's this!" cried Clarihue.
"It's--it's a fire," said Noodles, with a sob--and fell into Clarihue's
arms.