Reddy's voice sort of trailed off. They were bringing lamps into the room now, holding them up high to get a comprehensive view of things--and the light fell on the farther wall. Reddy was staring at it, his eyes slowly dilating, his jaw beginning to hang weakly. Bradley glanced over his shoulder. Old John, as though he had slid down the wall, as though his feet had slipped out from under him, sat on the floor, legs straight out in front of him, shoulders against the wall and sagged a little to one side, a sort of ironic jeer on the blotched features, a little red stream trickling down from his right temple--dead. Not a pretty sight? No--perhaps not. But old John never was a pretty sight. He'd gone out the way he'd lived--that's all. It was Martin Bradley who reached him first, and the crowd hung back while he bent over the other, hung back and made way for Reddy, who came unsteadily across the room--not from drink now, the boy's gait--the drink was out of him--he was weak. There was horror in the young wiper's eyes, and a white, awful misery in his face. A silence fell. Not a man spoke. They looked from father to son. The room was filling up now--but they came on tiptoe. Gamblers, most of them, and pretty rough, pretty hard cases, and life held light--but in that room that night they only looked from father to son, the oaths gone from their lips, sobered, their faces sort of gray and stunned. Bradley, from bending over the dead man, straightened up. Reddy MacQuigan, with little jabs of his tongue, wet his lips. "The old man's gone, ain't he?" he said in a queer, lifeless way. "Yes," said Bradley simply. MacQuigan looked around the circle sort of mechanically, sort of unseeingly--then at the form on the floor. Then he spoke again, almost as though he were talking to himself. "Might just as well have been me that fired the shot," he whispered, nodding his head. "I'm to blame--ain't I? An' I guess--I guess I've finished the old lady, too." He looked around the circle again, then his hands kind of wriggled up to his temples--and before Bradley could spring to catch him, he went down in a heap on the floor. MacQuigan wasn't much more than a boy, not much more than that--but old enough in another way. What he went through that night and in the days that followed was between MacQuigan and his God. Life makes strange meeting points sometimes, and sometimes the running orders are hard to understand, and sometimes it looks like disaster quick and absolute, with everything in the ditch, and the right of way a tangled ruin--and yet when morning breaks there is no call for the wrecking crew, and it comes to you deep down inside somewhere that it's the Great Despatcher who's been sitting in on the night trick. Reddy MacQuigan went back to the roundhouse a different MacQuigan than he had left it--sort of older, quieter, more serious--and the days went by, a month or two of them.