"A blind man could see it," said Regan heavily, "but--Sammy Durgan!" He reached uncertainly toward his hip pocket for his chewing--and then, with sudden emotion, the big-hearted, fat, little master mechanic bent over Sammy Durgan. "God bless the man!" blurted out Regan. And then, to the doctor: "Will he live?" "Oh, yes; I think so," the doctor answered. "He's pretty badly smashed up, though." Sammy Durgan's lips were moving. Regan leaned close to catch the words. "A steady job," murmured Sammy Durgan. "Never get a chance. But some day it'll come. I'll show 'em, Maria, and Regan, and the rest of 'em!" "You have, Sammy," said Regan, in a low, anxious voice. "It's all right, Sammy. It's all right, old boy. Just pull around and you can have any blamed thing you want on the Hill Division." The doctor smiled sympathetically at Regan. "He's delirious, you know," he explained kindly. "What he says doesn't mean anything." Regan looked up with a kind of a grim smile. "Don't it?" inquired Regan softly. Then he cleared his throat, and tugged at his scraggly brown mustache--both ends of it. "That's what I used to think myself," said the fat little master mechanic, sort of as though he were apostrophizing the distant peaks across the cañon, and not as though he were talking to the doctor at all. "But I guess--I guess I know Sammy Durgan better than I did. H'm?" IV THE WRECKING BOSS Opinions, right or wrong, on any subject are a matter of individuality--there have been different opinions about Flannagan on the Hill Division. But the story is straight enough--from car-tink to superintendent, there has never been any difference of opinion about that. Flannagan was the wrecking boss. Tommy Regan said the job fitted Flannagan, for it took a hard man for the job, and Flannagan, bar none, was the hardest man on the payroll; hardest at crooking elbows in MacGuire's Blazing Star Saloon, hardest with his fists, and hardest of all when it came to getting at the heart of some scalding, mangled horror of death and ruin that a man wouldn't be called a coward to turn from--sick. Flannagan looked it. He stood six feet one in his stockings, and his chest and shoulders were like the front-end view you'd get looking at a sturdy, well-grown ox. He wasn't pretty. His face was scarred with cuts and burns enough to stall any German duelling student on a siding till the rails rusted, and the beard he grew to hide these multitudinous disfigurements just naturally came out in tussocks; he had black eyes that could go _coal_ black and lose their pupils, and a shock of black hair that fell into them half the time; also, he had a tongue that wasn't elegant. That was Flannagan--Flannagan, the wrecking boss.