The men had their view-point. Marley didn’t talk much, didn’t draw out the way a new hand was expected to in order to establish his footing with the fraternity. Least of all did he make any overtures tending to anything like an intimate relationship with any of his new associates. Marley was never one of the group behind the storekeeper’s office that had stolen out from the shops for a drag at their pipes and a breath of air; never on the platform to exchange a word of banter with the crews of the incoming trains; never amongst the wipers and hostlers in the roundhouse who lounged in idle moments in the lee of a ten-wheeler with an eye out across the yards against the possible intrusion of Regan or some other embodiment of authority. He was civil enough and quick enough to answer when he was spoken to, but his words were few--no more than a simple negative or affirmative if he could help it. And when he himself was in question there was not even that--Marley became dumb. All this did not help him any--he wasn’t what you’d call exactly popular! So, if he had little to say for himself, the men had plenty, and the general opinion was that he was a surly brute that by no possible chance was any credit to the Hill Division and by no manner of means an acquisition to Big Cloud. A few, very few, took a more charitable view, basing it on the shy, slow flutter of Marley’s eyelids--they charged it up to an acute sensitiveness of his grotesque and abnormal appearance. That isn’t the way they put it, though. “Looks like hell, an’ he knows it,” said they judicially. “Let the beggar alone.” It was good advice, whether their analysis was or wasn’t--Pete Boileau, the baggage master, can vouch for that. As the time-worn saying has it, it came like a bolt from the blue, and--but just a minute, we’re overrunning our targets and that means trouble. Things had gone along, as far as Marley was concerned, without anything very startling or out of the way happening for quite a spell, and Regan, who had stood closer to Chick Coogan than any other man on the division before the young engineer died, had begun to look on Marley with a little more interest--as a sort of _deus ex machina_ for Mrs. Coogan. It seemed to afford the big-hearted master mechanic a good deal of relief. He got to talking about it to Carleton one morning about a month after Marley’s advent to the Hill Division. “No, of course, I don’t know anything about him,” he said. “Nobody does, I guess they don’t. But he minds his own business and does what he has to do well enough, h’m? The old lady’s been getting a little feeble lately--kind of wearing out, I guess she is. I was thinking Marley was worth a little more than a dollar ten a day, what?”