Marley’s arrival and introduction to Big Cloud was, like Marley himself, decidedly out of the ordinary and by no manner of means commonplace. Marley arrived “‘boing it” in a refrigerator car. They ice the cars at Big Cloud and, luckily for Marley, the particular one he had, in some unexplained way, managed to appropriate required a little something more than icing. They pulled him out in about as flabby a condition as a sack of flour. He didn’t say anything for himself mainly because he was pretty nearly past ever saying anything for himself or anybody else. The boys who found him cursed fluently because he wasn’t a pleasant sight, and then carried him up Main Street on the door of a box-car with the hazy notion that MacGuire’s Blazing Star Saloon was the most fitting Mecca available. Marley continued to play in luck. Mrs. Coogan, the mother of Chick Coogan, that is, who went out in the Fall blizzard on the Devil’s Slide some years before, spotted the procession as it passed her little shack, halted it, made a hasty, but none the less comprehensive, examination, amplified it by a few scathing remarks on discovering the proposed destination, peremptorily ordered them into her bit of a cottage and installed Marley therein. He was pretty far gone, pretty far--and he hung on the ragged edge for weeks. Nobody knows what Mrs. Coogan did for him except Marley himself; but it was generally conceded that she did more than she could afford for anybody, let alone doing it for a stray hobo. Marley got well in time, of course, for, than old, motherly Mrs. Coogan there was no better nurse, even if she had few comforts and dainties and less money to buy them with; and then Marley got a job--or rather Mrs. Coogan got one for him. There wasn’t anything Mrs. Coogan could have asked for and not got that was within their power to give her--she was Chick’s mother, and with Carleton or Regan or any of the rest of them that was enough. But Mrs. Coogan never asked anything for herself--she had the Coogan pride. “The good Lord be praised,” she would say--Mrs. Coogan was sincerely devout. “I’m able to worrk, so I am, an’ fwhy should I?” Why should she? They smiled at her as men smile when something touches them under the vest, and they want to say the proper thing--and can’t. They smiled--and gave her their washing. Mrs. Coogan tackled Regan on Marley’s behalf. The master mechanic scratched his head in perplexity, but his reply was prompt and hearty enough. “Sure. Sure thing, Mrs. Coogan,” he said. “Send him down to me. I’ll find him something to do.” To Marley he talked a little differently. “I ain’t quite sure I like the looks of you,” he flung out bluntly enough, taking in the new man from head to toe. “There’s no job for you, but I’ll give you a chance.” Marley’s eyes came down in a flutter. “Thanks, sir,” he mumbled nervously.