Old Bill Maguire, perhaps, was the only one who hadn't got quite the proper angle on the "rights" he carried--which were worse than those of a mixed local when the rails were humming under a stress of through traffic and the despatchers were biting their nails to the quick trying to take care of it. Not, possibly, that it would have made any difference to the little worn-out hostler if he had; for, whether from principle, having deep-seated awe for the church and its tenets that forbade even a tacit endorsement of what he considered Regan's sacrilege, or because of the public slight put upon his family--the roundhouse hadn't failed to hear his first conversation with Regan, and hadn't failed to let him know that they had--or maybe from a mixture of the two, Maguire was beyond question in deadly earnest. But if old Bill hadn't got his signals right, and was reading green and white when it should have been red, the rest of the Hill Division wasn't by any means color blind; it was pretty generally understood that for several years back all that stood between Maguire and the scrap heap--was Regan. Not on account of any jolly business about godfather or godfathering, but because that was Regan's way--old Bill puttered around the roundhouse on suffrance, thanks to Regan, and didn't know it, though everybody else did, barring patient little Mrs. Maguire and Noodles, who didn't count anyhow. Nor did the little hostler even now pass the color test. Short-tongued, a hard, grimy lot, just what their rough and ready life made them, they might have been, those railroaders of the Rockies, but their hearts were always right. In the yards, in the trainmaster's office, in the roadmaster's office they pointed Maguire to the quiet times, to the extra crews laid off, to the spare men back to their old ratings, to the section gangs pared down to a minimum, and advised him to ask Regan for his job back again--they never told him he couldn't do a man's work any more. "Ask Regan!" stuttered the old boiler-washer, and the gray billy-goat beard under his chin, as he threw his head up, stuck out straight like a belligerent _chevaux de frise_. "Niver! Mind thot, now! Niver--till he takes back fwhat he said--not av I starrve for ut!" Regan, during the first few days, the brunt of his temper worn off, experienced a certain relief, that was no little relief--he was rid, and well rid, of the Noodles combination. But at the end of about a week, the bluff, big-hearted master mechanic began to suck in his under lip at moments when he was alone, as the stories of old Bill's futile efforts after a job, and old Bill's rather pitiful defiance began to sift in to him. Regan began to have visions of the little three-room shack way up in the waste fields at the end of Main Street. A dollar-sixty a day wasn't much to come and go on, even when the dollar-sixty was coming regularly every pay day--and when it wasn't, the cost of food and rent didn't go down any.