Regan got to thinking a good deal about the faded little old drudge of a woman that was Mrs. Maguire, and the bare floors as he remembered them even in the palmy days of Noodles' birth when he had attended the celebration, bare, but scrubbed to a spotless white. She hadn't been very young then, and not any too strong, and that was twelve years ago. And he got to thinking a good deal about old Bill himself--not much good any more, but good enough for a dollar-sixty a day from a company he'd served for many a long year--in the roundhouse. There had never been over much of what even an optimistic imagination could call luxury in the Maguire's home, and the realization got kind of deep under the worried master mechanic's skin that things were down now to pretty near a case of bread to fill their mouths. And Regan was right. Even a week had been long enough for that--a man out of a job can't expect credit on the strength of the pay car coming along next month. Things were in pretty straitened circumstances up at the Maguires. And the more Regan thought, the hotter he got under the collar--at Noodles. Where he had formerly disliked and submitted to Noodles' existence in a passive sort of way, he now hated Noodles in a most earnest and whole-hearted way--and with an unholy desire in his soul to murder Noodles on sight. For, even if Noodles was directly responsible and at the bottom of the pass things had come to, Regan's uncomfortable feeling grew stronger each day that indirectly he had his share in the distress and want that had moved into headquarters up at the top of Main Street. It wasn't a nice feeling or a nice position to be in, and Regan writhed under it--but primarily he cursed Noodles. There was nothing small about Regan--there never was. He wasn't small enough not to do something. He couldn't very well ask the yardmaster or the section boss to give Maguire a job when he wouldn't give the old man one himself, so he sent word up to Maguire to come back to work--in the roundhouse. Maguire's answer differed in no whit from the answer he had made to Gleason, the yardmaster, and every one else to whom he had applied for a job--Maguire was in deadly earnest. "Niver!" said he, to the messenger who bore the olive branch. "Mind thot, now! Niver--till he takes back fwhat he said--not av I starrve for ut!" Regan swore--and here Regan stuck. _Noodles_! His gorge rose until he choked. Kill the brat? Yes--murder was in Regan's soul. But to proclaim Noodles as a godson--_Noodles as a godson_! He had done it once not knowing what he was doing, and to do it now with the years of enlightenment upon him--Regan choked, that was all, and grew apoplectically red in the face. It wasn't the grins and laughs of the Hill Division that he knew were waiting for him if he did--it was just _Noodles_.