He blocked the doorway with his bulky frame as the foreman and his charge passed through, admitting a moment later a switchman with a can of water, and two of the older engineers at his heels.
Then he closed the door, and looked around for Ralph. The latter had sunk to a bench, still pale and faint-looking. The lame helper was ransacking his locker. Coming thence with some clean waste and a bottle of liniment, he snatched up a pail, went outside, got some warm water from a locomotive, and approached Ralph.
Ralph regarded him in some wonder, but made no demur as the strange, silent fellow began to wash and dress his injured arm with a touch soft and careful as that of a woman.
Big Denny continued to stand on guard at the closed door of the foreman's little office.
The crowd from the outside was exchanging information with the roundhouse throng, trying to patch mutual disclosures together into some coherency.
Ike Slump's look of malevolent gratification had faded away. He began to surmise that Ralph had a purpose in so summarily deserting his post, and that the anticipated "turning of the tables" was not destined to materialize.
"What's the rights of things, Denny?" asked one of the engineers. "That was little Nora Forgan, wasn't it!"
"Sure--and you know what she is to gruff old Tim, apple of his eye. If anything happened to her, I believe he'd go mad."
"He's pretty near there now, with his tantrums!" volunteered a voice from the crowd.
"I think this will cure him a bit," said Denny. "The little one has been bringing him his dinner lately, you know. A child like that has no business along the tracks, but he usually had her come back of the roundhouse, where there wasn't so much risk. This time, I suppose she feared she'd be late, and crossed over the busiest switches. My heart stood still, lads, when, ten minutes since, five hundred feet away from her, I saw her trip, fall, strike her head on the rails, and lay there stunned, squarely in the way of a dead-end freight, coming."