"Talkin'! Who's talkin'?" he flared in sudden bravado. "Didn't I tell you I didn't read your damned letter? Didn't I, eh, didn't I? D'ye think I'd crawl to you or any man for a job? I'm out, am I? D'ye think I came down to ask you to take me back? I'd see you rot first! T'hell with the job--see!" Few men on the Hill Division ever saw Carleton lose his temper--it wasn't Carleton's way of doing things. He didn't lose it now, but his words were like trickling drops of ice water. "Sometimes, Flannagan," he said, "to make a man like you understand one has to use your language. You say you'd see me rot before you asked me for the job back again--very well. I'd rot before I gave it to you after this. Now, will you get out--or be thrown out?" For a moment it looked as though Flannagan was going to mix it there and then. His eyes went ugly, and his fists, horny and gnarled, doubled into knots, as he glared viciously at the super. Carleton, who was afraid of no man, or any aggregation of men, his face stern-set and hard, leaned back in his swivel chair and waited. A tense minute passed. Then Flannagan's better sense weighed down the balance, and, without so much as a word, he turned, went out of the room, and stamped heavily down the stairs. Goaded into it, or through unbridled, ill-advised impulse, men say rash things sometimes--afterward, both Flannagan and Carleton were to remember their own and the other's words--and the futility of them. Nor was it to be long afterward--without warning, without so much as a premonition, quick and sudden as doom, things happen in railroading. It was half past five when Flannagan went out of the super's office; it was but ten minutes later when, before he had decanted a drop from the bottle he had just lifted to fill his glass, he slapped the bottle back on the bar of the Blazing Star with a sudden jerk. From down the street in the direction of the yards boomed three long blasts from the shop whistle--the wrecking signal. It came again and again. Men around him began to move. Chairs from the little tables were pushed hurriedly back. The bell in the English chapel took up the alarm. It stirred the blood in Flannagan's veins, and whipped it to his cheeks in fierce excitement--it was the call to arms! He turned from the bar--and stopped like a man stunned. There had been times in the last six months when he had not responded to that call, because, deaf to everything, he had not _heard_ it. Then, it had been his call--the call for the wrecking crew, and, first of all, for the wrecking boss; now--there was a dazed look on his face, and his lips worked queerly. It was not for him, he was barred--_out_.