MacVicar, a spare man, took the Limited out that night, and it was three days before Coogan reported again. Maybe it was the fit of the black store-clothes and perhaps the coat didn’t hang just right, but as he entered the roundhouse he didn’t look as straight as he used to look and there was a queer inward slope to his shoulders and he walked like a man who didn’t see anything. The springy swing through the gangway was gone. He climbed to the cab as an old man climbs--painfully. The boys hung back and didn’t say anything, just swore under their breaths with full hearts as men do. There wasn’t anything _to_ say--nothing that would do any good. Coogan took 505 and the Limited out that night, took it out the night after and the nights that followed, only he didn’t talk any more, and the slope of the shoulders got a little more pronounced, a little more noticeable, a little beyond the cut of any coat. And on the afternoons of the lay-overs at Big Cloud, Coogan walked out behind the town to where on the slope of the butte were two fresh mounds--one larger than the other. That was all. Regan, short, paunchy, big-hearted Regan, tackled Jim Dahleen, Coogan’s fireman. “What’s he say on the run, Jim, h’m?” “He ain’t talkative,” Dahleen answered shortly. “What the hell,” growled the master mechanic deep in his throat, to conceal his emotion. “‘Tain’t doing him any good going up there afternoons. God knows it’s natural enough, but ‘tain’t doing him any good, not a mite--nor them either, as far as I can see, h’m? You got to _make_ him talk, Jim. Wake him up.” “Why don’t _you_ talk to him?” demanded the fireman. “H’m, yes. So I will. I sure will,” Regan answered. And he meant to, meant to, honestly. But, somehow, Coogan’s eyes and Coogan’s face said “no” to him as they did to every other man, and as the days passed, almost a month of them, Regan shook his head, perplexed and troubled, for he was fond of Coogan. Then, one night, it happened. Regan and Carleton were alone over their pedro at headquarters, except for Spence, the dispatcher, in the next room. It was getting close on to eleven-thirty. The Imperial Limited, West-bound, with Coogan in the cab, had pulled out on time an hour and a half before. The game was lagging, and, as usual, the conversation had got around to the engineer, introduced, as it always was, by the master mechanic. “I sure don’t know what to do for the boy,” said he. “I’d like to do something. Talking don’t amount to anything, does it, h’m?--even if you _can_ talk. I can’t talk to him, what?” “A man’s got to work a thing like that out for himself, Tommy,” Carleton answered, “and it takes time. That’s the only thing that will ever help him--time. I know you’re pretty fond of Coogan, even more than the rest of us and that’s saying a good deal, but you’re thinking too much about it yourself.” Regan shook his head.