Regan reached into his back pocket for his chewing, wriggled his head till his teeth met in the plug, and tucked the tobacco back into his pocket again. "Beezer," said he slowly, spitting out an undesirable piece of stalk, "did it ever strike you that there's a whole lot of blamed good horse doctors that'd make damn poor jockeys--h'm?" Beezer scowled deeply, and kicked at a piece of waste with the toe of his boot. "All I want is a chance," he growled shortly. "Give me a chance, and I'll show you." "You can have your chance," said Regan. "I've told you that." "Yes," said Beezer bitterly. "It's a hell of a chance, ain't it? A dollar-ten a day--_wiping_! I'd be willing to go on firing for a spell." "Wiping," said Regan with finality, as he turned away and started toward the shops; "but you'd better chew it over again, Beezer, and have a talk with your wife before you make up your mind." Somebody chuckled behind Beezer--and Beezer whirled like a shot. The only man in sight was Pudgy MacAllister. Pudgy's back was turned, and he was leaning over the main-rod poking assiduously into the internals of the 1016 with a long-spouted oil can; but Beezer caught the suspicious rise and fall of the overall straps over the shoulders of the fat man's jumper. Beezer was only human. It got Beezer on the raw--which was already pretty sore. The red flared into his face hard enough to make every individual hair in his beard incandescent; he walked over to Pudgy, yanked Pudgy out into the open, and shoved his face into the engineer's. "What in the double-blanked, blankety-blanked blazes are you grinning at?" he inquired earnestly. "H'm?" said Pudgy. "Yes--_h'm_!" said Beezer eloquently. "That's what I'm asking you." Whether Pudgy MacAllister was just plain lion-hearted, or a rotten bad judge of human nature isn't down on the minutes--all that shows is that he was one or the other. With some labor and exaggerated patience, he tugged a paper-covered pamphlet out of his pocket from under his jumper. It was the book of rules Beezer had "borrowed" some time before. "Mrs. Beezer," said Pudgy blandly, "was over visiting the missus this morning, and she brought this back. From what she said I dunno as it would do any good, but I thought, perhaps, if you were going to take Regan's advice about talking to your wife, you and Mrs. Beezer might like to look it over again together before you----" That was as far as Pudgy MacAllister got. Generally speaking, the more steam there is to the square inch buckled down under the valve, the shriller the whistle is when it breaks loose. Beezer let a noise out of him that sounded like a green parrot complaining of indigestion, and went at MacAllister head-on.