“Aw, chuck it!” he derided. “Whadda you want to tie yourself up for when there’s plenty of——”
“Say, that’ll do,” Connolly broke in, with a frown of cleanly disgust, taking Bolton’s meaning at last. Then he changed the subject abruptly. “Mr. Maxwell’s got him a new chum: seen him?”
Bolton nodded.
“Sure, I have; couldn’t help seein’ him if you happened to look his way. What is he?—champion All-America heavy-weight?”
The despatcher shook his head. “College professor, somebody said; one of Mr. Maxwell’s classmates. Specializes in something or other; I didn’t hear what.”
Again the tag-wire operator’s laugh crackled like a snapping of dry twigs. He had risen from his chair and was half-sitting, half-leaning, upon his table-desk, his hands resting palms down, with the fingers curled under the table edge—his characteristic loafing attitude.
“He might specialize in any old thing,” he jeered, with a small man’s bickering hostility for a big one in his tone. “All he’s got to do is to reach out and take it; nobody but a fellow in the Joe Gans class’d have the nerve to tell him not to. I saw him sittin’ on the Topaz porch with the super as I came over. He’s so big it made me sick at my stomach to look at him.”
Connolly’s pipe had gone out, burned out, and he was feeling in his pockets for the tobacco sack. While he was doing it the corridor door opened and Calmaine, the superintendent’s chief clerk, came in, let himself briskly through the gate in the counter railing, and leaned over Connolly’s shoulder to glance at the train-sheet.
“Everything moving along all right, Dan?” he asked.
“Is now,” said the despatcher, still feeling absently for the missing tobacco sack. “Twenty-one and Twenty-eight got balled up on their orders over on the other side of the range, but I guess I’ve got ’em straightened out, after so long a time.... Now what the dickens did I do with that tobacco of mine, I wonder?”