“There, Johnny, that’s a good boy, run along and fetch me a bucket of steam,” Noonan scoffed. With a snort of unutterable contempt, McQueen turned to swing himself into his cab. “Hold on a minute, Mac,” Noonan cried, afraid that he had overstepped himself. “Don’t get whiffy. I swear, I believe you’re right. Let’s see how you figure it.” And McQueen, mollified, figured it. Figured it with the stub of a pencil in greasy, scrawling characters on the back of a time order. As to the process by which the conclusion was arrived at, that was something of which Noonan was in profound and utter ignorance. Whether it was right or wrong, he did not know. He never knew--and cared less! Certainly the result was there. McQueen completed the last figure of his calculation with a flourish. “There!” he cried exultingly. “How about it now, eh?” Noonan took the paper, wrinkled his brows, pursed his lips, and stared at it with the air of a connoisseur of calculus. “H’m,” said he slowly, “are you dead sure it’s right, Mac?” “Right!” McQueen fairly yelled, touched in another tender spot. “Right! Confound you, it’s there in black and white, ain’t it? Figures don’t lie, do they? Well, what in thunder’s wrong with you, then?” “I wanted to be sure, Mac, that’s all. Holy fishplates, I knew it was bad, rotten bad, but I didn’t think they were handing it to us like this.” “You bet it’s bad. It’s the worst ever. There’s more kinds of coal than there are spikes in the right of way from here to Big Cloud and back again, but the coal we get is the last on the list. Bad! It’s what I’ve always said, ain’t it?” “It’s fierce!” continued Noonan with rising emphasis. “And when the boys hear this, it’ll be the last straw. They’ll fix ‘em!” “Fix who?” inquired McQueen, blankly. “Why, ain’t I telling you! The company.” “I--I was talking about the coal,” said McQueen a little uneasily. “Sure you were,” Noonan agreed heartily. “Sure you were, and how the company is robbing every engineer on the division of a dollar a day, to say nothing of the firemen and the train crews. It’s enough to make a man mad. Well, I should say yes!” “I--I didn’t say the company was robbing us,” protested McQueen. “What’s that!” cried Noonan sharply; then in apparent disgust: “So your crazy old figures are just gas-bag filling like the rest of your coal talk, eh? They _did_ look pretty scaly, and that’s a fact. I had my suspicions. That’s why I asked you if you were sure they were right. But I might have known they weren’t without asking.” “Oh, you might, might you?” exploded McQueen, goaded once more into angry outburst. “You and your suspicions! Who are you! I tell you they are right, and that’s the end of it!” “Well, if they’re right, why don’t you stand by them, then? We’re being robbed every day we work, ain’t we?” “Ye-e-es, I suppose we are,” McQueen admitted reluctantly; “but I didn’t figure it out for the purpose of----”